I was musing earlier (somewhat incorrectly) about the weird state of Java versions, and it got me thinking about how odd the landscape looks in general lately, even as things are progressing splendidly. And, since not everyone follows a dozen Java-related Twitter feeds to keep up on all this stuff I figured it'd be useful to have a summary.

The other day, Paul Withers wrote a blog post about RunJava, which is a very-old and very-undocumented mechanism for running arbitrary Java tasks in a manner similar to a C-based addin. I had vaguely known this was there for a long time, but for some reason I had never looked into it.