Father of Java exits Google

THE MAN THEY CALL the father of Java, James Gosling has left Google to join the Liquid Robotics company.

According to the San Jose Mercury news, Gosling will become chief software architect for the Sunnyvale startup Liquid Robotics, a four-year-old company that places seven-foot-long robots resembling surfboards in the ocean to collect and transmit data for a variety of uses.

The devices, which are called Wave Gliders, are powered by wave energy. The company was founded by CTO and Wave Glider inventor Roger Hine in 2007, and Liquid Robotics CEO Bill Vass was a former colleague of Gosling's at Sun Microsystems.

Gosling described the company's goals as "wickedly cool stuff". He will now develop software that will allow Liquid Robotics employees to remotely control the devices as their numbers increase, as well as mine and deliver the reams of data the Wave Gliders transmit.

Gosling resigned from Oracle in April 2010, a few months after the company bought Sun, where he had worked for more than 25 years and led the effort to develop the programming language Java.

In March, he joined Google in an unspecified position, but now he's found a new home. µ