Android will Java native. How about the others? Following hot on the heels of Apple’s iPhone SDK announcements, Sun has jumped into the fray and announced that they’ll be making sure that Java plays nice with Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch. The company famous for championing the standardized Java Runtime made the announcement after taking a look at the iPhone SDK. Upon investigating the possibility of porting the Java Virtual Machine for use on the iPhone, Sun found that they could indeed make it work - contrary to Steve Jobs’ statements about Java being a burden.

iphone-java Sun’s Java marketing VP, Eric Klein announced the decision to bring Sun’s Java to the iPhone as a variant of the Java Micro Edition - a platform that is used on mobile phones.  The iPhone SDK could be used to make the Sun Java Virtual Machine (JVM) run as an application. And, Sun said that there’s a likely possibility that Sun will optimize the Java Micro JVM to work with the iPhone’s more advanced features.

“We’re going to work to make sure that the [virtual machine] offers the Java applications as much access to the native functionality of the iPhone as possible,” Klein said. Furthermore, Klein leaves open the possibility of bringing a variant of the desktop-level Java Standard Edition to the iPhone (which might indicate that Sun will try to make use of the Jazelle technology that’s lying dormant in the iPhone’s CPU). And, Sun doesn’t exclude the possibility of bringing their Flash-replacement JavaFX (!) to the iPhone.