This statement from Adam Messinger – the Vice President of Java Development at Oracle – was shocking to me (original podcast; transcript; emphasis mine):
Roger: One last question here. What's Oracle going to do to make Java successful on the desktop? Adam: …another way is this strategy we have around running Java inside of a JavaScript environment. So there the programming language is Java, but the platform is not a JVM platform. This is a little bit of a scary thing, honestly, for Oracle, because while the language is something we know and love, a lot of the value we have comes from the stack underneath the JVM, the library, and so on and so forth. But we think it's something that we need to do for the community so we can make Java available more places from tablet devices like the iPad where there is not an easy way to get Java there today, to desktops where, while there are applets, some people choose not to use applets, and we want a solution that works there.
Trying to pull meaning from a brief statement like this is a dangerous thing to do, but it sounds like Oracle is working on a way to use Javascript as a compilation target. It's anyone's guess whether this is Oracle's stab at something akin to GWT…or, perhaps their objective is more along the lines of Orto (an apparently defunct implementation of the JVM in Javascript, as reported by John Resig in 2008, which would allow one to cross-compile existing Java libraries to Javascript – a far more interesting prospect, IMO).
I try to stay on the ball when it comes to developments in the JVM space, but I've never heard of an Oracle effort along these lines, and I can't find anyone online about it otherwise. Am I just not looking in the right places, or is Mr. Messinger's comment really the first public mention on the topic?