Simon Phipps, Sun’s chief technology evangelist, likens Java to a baby duck. “When Java technology was born, it looked around, saw a Web browser and thought it was an applet,” he jokes. His point: ...

I wrote a pair of apps, one a server and one a client, and they were free-standing java programs. They work seamlessly, only now we want to run the client from behind a firewall, and it's not working.

At JavaOne, Oracle announced a big initiative to revitalize Java on the desktop, the Web, and mobile devices. Can it follow through? Java has long been a hit with enterprise developers, with Java EE ...