During a recent press briefing, Oracle executive vice president of product development Thomas Kurian (and others) laid out the company's plans for many of Sun Microsystems' offerings.

"Kurian's first priority was to emphasize that Oracle wants to improve the performance of the Java programming language for over nine million developers using it," writes InformationWeek's Charles Babcock. "Oracle wants to 'revitalize' the Java Community Process, the multivendor organization for ongoing Java development. Kurian would do that by 'making the JCP a more participatory process to people from a variety of organizations.' Java, he said, is one of the 'crown jewels' coming to Oracle as a result of its acquisition of Sun."

"Kurian said delivering a new Java runtime is a top priority," writes InfoWorld's Neil McAllister. "Java SE 7 will bring important improvements, he said, including greater modularity, better support for non-Java languages, and better performance, including garbage collection optimized for multicore processors. Many of these features will benefit Java EE, also — modularity in particular."

More here from eWeek ... more here from Channel Register ... and more here from Computerworld.

The European Union has finally approved Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

"The decision follows the company's promise in December to allow other companies to build on Sun's MySQL database, to invest more in R&D to develop MySQL and to set up a customer advisory board of MySQL users," writes Eric Savitz at Barron's.

"Now the fun begins," writes ZDNet's Larry Dignan. "Oracle first has to stop the bleeding at Sun. With the merger in limbo, IBM and HP grabbed server share and delivered body blows to Sun. Now Oracle has to stabilize Sun and then deliver more tightly integrated hardware/software packages along the lines of the Exadata machine."

More here from GigaOM ... and more here from CMSWire.

UBS analyst Brent Thill has predicted that Oracle will soon fire half of Sun Microsystems' 27,000 employees.

"He said Oracle was likely to make the drastic workforce cuts as the price for squeezing a profit out of Sun," writes The Register's Joe Fay.

"Internally, Sun has denied the report, telling employees it is 'absolutely untrue,'" writes InternetNews' Andy Patrizio. "But sources close to the merger have said that significant layoffs are all but a given once the deal closes."

More here from Barron's ... and more here from ITProPortal.

Texas-based BMC Software has purchased Phurnace Software, which makes management tools for Java application deployment.

"Phurnace Software was established in 2007, and its... application release management tools for Java applications got their start in a business incubator at the University of Texas campus," writes The Register's Timothy Prickett Morgan.

"The firm's flagship product is Phurnace Deliver, which assesses whether the configuration of a Java application and its application server are correct for optimal performance," explains InformationWeek's Charles Babcock.

"As companies' Java application footprints grow larger, so do the risks involved in making changes, such as an upgrade, new deployment, or migration to a different application server," writes PC World's Chris Kanaracus. "Phurnace's software automates these processes, and has support for WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, JBoss and WebSphere Portal."

More here from Enterprise Irregulars ... and more here from CNET News.

Shadowserver has recommended that users disable JavaScript in Adobe's Reader and Acrobat until mid-January, when Adobe is likely to release a key update.

"To disable JavaScript in Adobe Reader or Acrobat on Windows, users must select Preferences from the Edit menu, choose 'JavaScript,' then uncheck the 'Enable Acrobat JavaScript' option," writes Computerworld's Gregg Keizer. "(On the Mac, Preferences is under the 'Adobe Reader' or 'Adobe Acrobat' menus.)"

"Adobe is not saying when it will patch the issue, but its next set of Reader and Acrobat patches is due Jan. 12," writes PC World's Robert McMillan.

More here from MacNN ... and more here from The Register.