Oracle’s roadmap for Javas 7 and 8 shows it recognizes the world is pulling away and leaving Java with last-century concepts and ideals. Java 7 is meant to set the foundation for a cloud-friendly platform, but the real cloud-ready features won’t make an appearance until Java 8 in 2013 at the earliest.

While Larry and company can’t be blamed for the years of stagnation suffered by both the platform and language under Sun Microsystems, the problem faced isn’t that Java lacks the technology to work nicely in the cloud: the problem is, as ever, one of perception.

Java is either not “enterprise” enough for cloud computing – apparently lacking the required widgets – or it’s too enterprisey and therefore not cool enough to join the likes of Ruby and Python.