Today it was JavaOne‘s kick off. It started with a keynote with Rich Green. It was concentrated in mobile devices (Amazon presented its Kindle eBook) and, of course, JavaFX took a big place. I‘m still a bit sceptical about JavaFX but Rich Green said that really soon it will be running everywhere, in all kind of mobile devices.

And then came Neil Young. He talked about wht he has archived with BlueRay discs… and of course Java. It was funny to see Neil Young talking to Rich Green and Jonathan Swartz.

I then went to some sessions (like EJB 3.1 of course), meeting lots of people and wandering in the huge Moscone Center.

Then I had to get ready for the JUG Leader‘s BOF. It was a panel of three JUG Leaders talking about the issues they face with Java in general. I wasn‘t suppose to talk but because Fabrizio Gianneschi was sick, I took his place. So here are my top 3 issues :

• Java is too complex and is slowly turning into a legacy language. Many other languages are now running on the JVM and it looks like the JVM is the only future of Java
• The JCP has to keep on opening up if they want to be seen as a community instead of an opaque ruling organization
• More exposure should be given to the JUGs. And what about having a booth at JavaOne ?

I shared the panel with Paul Webber (San Diego) and Frank Greco (New York JUG). They was many other questions from the JUG Leaders in the audience and then Sun answered. About the language first. Java is still number one language, but more and more companies are using multiple languages. Sun is aware of that and listening carefully about what should be done. For me, just fork the Java language (call it Java 2 if you want ;o) clean it, and tell people that this version is not backward compatible. Java today is suffering of backward compatibility. And for JUG exposure, Sun is also willing to help us as much as they can. So what about having a JUG booth at JavaOne ?

Again, thanks Aaron for the invitation.