Richard Monson-Haefel, ex EJB author, current mobile analyst, thinks that Microsoft should love Android.

His reasoning is basically: Android will fragment the Java world.

I disagree. Java on the phone is already fragmented. J2ME isn’t ONE thing, it is broken. As he himself says, Sun is moving on to Java SE on the phone, which makes sense as we have the computing power now. The current batch of top phones are computers, so let’s utilize that power.

Android is hopefully going to open up the entire mobile market. I don’t know if this will help Windows Mobile. In some ways it should (open networks etc). I don’t think that Android is going to cause Java developers to jump over to Microsoft though. They now have a great platform that is going to push Mobile Java forward.

I wouldn’t be too happy Microsoft. Ed Burnette feels the same way too, and put out a rebuttal:

If Mr. Monson-Haefel had done a little research first before making blanket statements like this, he would know that Microsoft .NET Compact Framework is not the same as regular .NET. Compared to the desktop version, the Compact Framework has some things trimmed out and some other things added in that are specific to mobile devices. Sound familiar? Android takes the exact same approach.

There is still one overall “Java platform”, regardless of what the language on top is (Java, JRuby, Groovy, etc.) or the particular flavors of the API (ME, SE, EE, GWT, Android), how the code is compiled and run (JIT, AOT), or even what the bytecodes look like. The Java platform is much bigger than any one hardware platform or vendor.

Android represents an incredibly positive new injection of resources and excitement into the Java, Linux, and open source communities. It’s unfortunate that a respected analyst like Mr. Monson-Haefel fails to recognize this fact.