Java still a maybe for the iPhone? Will this ever end?

It is fairly well known that Apple has not been very enthused about having Java on the iPhone, most likely due to battery drainage. However, DigitalArts is now reporting that Sun is still trying to find a way for this to happen.

“We’ve expressed our intent to do this and our desire, really, to work with Apple to build a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) for the iPhone and we’re sort of moving forward with that,” said Eric Klein, Sun vice president of Java marketing, this week.

While this goes on, Sun has started working with Innaworks on a product named alcheMo. This is currently in beta release and would be used to convert the Java ME code that developers use into a code that would be allowed on the iPhone via the SDK. Right now, this is more targeted towards game developers and would contain an optimization translator. However, Sun still wants to get their actual platform on the machine via their JVM, and Klein says that they are currently “in discussions” with Apple.

What do you think, is it going to happen this time or is Apple still going to say no?