While I thought that there were some important announcements made during today's keynote at Sun's JavaOne conference, the crowd really didn't seem to find any of the things mentioned exciting at all.
When it comes to excite a crowd, keynote speaker Rich Green certainly is no Steve Jobs and attendees didn't line up hours before the keynote, in fact lots of people were still eating their breakfast while the keynote was well on it's way. Well, blame it on the Moscone Center's huge underground Hall, which makes you feel like sitting in a huge underground parking structure and don't provide much of an atmosphere. However, neither James Gosling nor Jonathan Schwartz, who all were on stage during the keynote, could really move the audience.

So what else happened today?

Sun announced to have completed the open-sourcing of Java, to have made the JavaOne conference carbon neutral, to have printed the conference material on 40% post consumer waste recycled paper, printed on with environmentally friendly soy ink, another scripting language dubbed JavaFX (an AJAX-Killer that will Radically Simplifies Content Authoring (TM), to work hard on Java Servlet's 3.0....

Servlets 3.0. Hm, now I'm sure we all have some ideas how to improve or add to the servlet spec. However, getting rid of the web.xml deployment descriptor and doing everything in code through annotations instead, wouldn't be on my list. Actually, I like to have the DD around, which gives the guys how actually have to deploy and run the web applications we write, the means to enable or disable certain servlets or add or remove some filters etc.

After a rough start, which saw almost every demo crash, (why Richard Blair trys to demo Java 6 stuff on a Mac is beyond me), there was plenty of beer and good food in the JavaOne Pavilion, spreading hope that everything will be good from here on out.