Terrence Barr, technical evangelist for the Java mobile and embedded community at Sun,believes Apple’s plans to release an SDK for iPhone in early-2008 may result in the open-source phoneME version of Java ME winding up on iPhone.

Really? It seems like there are many barriers here:

• Will the iPhone SDK be rich enough to allow you to embed Java
• What are the licensing issues around embedding a mobile Java onto the iPhone
• If this is done by the community, how will it actually bootstrap onto the device itself? Would we see apps that require you to download 20 MB of Java first?
• I don’t think people want Java ME on the iPhone. They may want to be able to build rich iPhone applications using Java, but they would want full APIs to the iPhone device itself. Could you imagine NOT supporting touch gestures etc?

So, although I think someone in the community may go ahead and do this, I don’t know if it will become a way for people to developer the killer iPhone apps unless Apple gets behind it. What do you think?