In Matlab you can directly use java calls in the code to construct java objects, get and set fields and call static methods:
% static method call
logger = java.util.logging.Logger.getLogger('myLogger');
% object CTor
obj = java.lang.String('hello');

In octave I have to go through javaMethod, javaObject and java_set/get. This wouldn't be a problem except Matlab doesn't have these and thus I need to add a lot of if/else clauses to our code.

How hard would it be to enable support for this ? I realize this would create some disambiguation as the interpreter would need to try and execute the statement as either a 'Matlab' or 'java' call before it knows the class actually exists in either environment (VM).

As a sidenote, Matlab supports the import statement too:
import java.lang.*;
obj = String('hello');