Sun, the company that loves Java so much they made it their stock symbol, has announced that they’ve looked at the new Apple SDK and believe they can use it to bring Java VM (virtual machine) ME (micro addition) to the iPhone:

“We’re going to make sure that the JVM offers the Java applications as much access to the native functionality of the iPhone as possible,” said Java VP, Eric Klein.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, having previously lavished Java with such praise as (paraphrased) “a ball and chain OS that nobody uses and isn’t worth supporting on the iPhone”, is no doubt in deep mediation over the news.

Java, the technology that enables everything from game-lets on other mobile phones to Blu-Ray’s interactivity layer, while not widely adored in the techsphere, is widely available and offers some cross-platform portability advantages for programers (who want to use their code on multiple OS’s).

Klein also mentioned the possibility of not only JavaFX (which supports Flash-like animation), but the full desktop Java implementation in the future.

Though Sun says they will deploy JVM via the AppStore coming with iPhone firmware 2.0, how exactly they will create what could be a competitive development environment is unclear.

Related news that may or may not provide some hints, however, comes from Apple itself:

..the iPhone SDK beta [...] includes a beta version of llvm-gcc 4.2 as part of the included Xcode 3.1 beta.

LLVM (low level virtual machine), may allow for this functionality, and will also help with (according to Ars Technica’s Siracusa), “Faster compiled code, faster code compilation, more metadata for the IDE, better portability, easier to improve all of the above.”