I had the great opportunity to meet the father of Java at Sun's location in Zurich, Switzerland. There were around 20 invited guests sitting in a small conference room and listening what James had to say. His speech was moderated by a Swiss Sun colleague.
The first topic was JavaOne which remained the main topic for the whole round table meeting. I didn't attend this years JavaOne, so James gave me a good insight of what has been going on there.
The real money is in games.He talked a lot about embedded systems and mobile phones. James mentioned the Java Store which is going to be kinda similar to the Apple Store but differs the most in licensing and deployment. He said that there will be the possibility of multiple licenses for one product. The deploy to anything feature is an obvious feature of the store for Java applications. There will be difficulties for the developers to make their applications deployable to anything, e.g. even the screen resolution of different systems can mess up the simplest user interface. In the end, James mentioned that they will drop Java ME soon and improve Java's modularity with jdk7. When he was asked what he thinks about all the additional languages for the jvm, he said having lots of languages is a good thing, to which I agree.
Scala is pretty high on my list.
