The free JVM would be made available via Apple's AppStore marketplace for third-party applications. The JVM is to be based on the Java Micro Edition (ME) version of Java, said Eric Klein, vice president of Java marketing at Sun, on Friday afternoon. Apple had not shown interest in enabling Java to run on the iPhone, but Sun plans to step in and do the job itself after having pondered Thursday's release of an SDK for the iPhone by Apple. Besides Java games, developers could bring over enterprise applications such as ERP or CRM to the iPhone, said Klein. Apple's iTouch, which features iPhone capabilities minus telephony, also will be supported by the JVM. Sun came to the conclusion it could make a JVM work on the iPhone after taking 24 hours to look at information on Apple's SDK. Sun saw nothing in the public statements preventing the JVM from being one of the applications enabled on the iPhone, said Klein. Apple released the SDK in conjunction with the beta release if its iPhone 2.0 software; the general release of iPhone 2.0 is scheduled for June.

Future plans could include extending more sophisticated Java Standard Edition (SE) and JavaFX technologies to the iPhone. Developers, Klein said, have built great applications, and until now they have been unable to get them running on the iPhone. However Apple chooses to keep mum about the whole deal.

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