Ah, JavaOne, we hardly knew ye! There were any number of interesting and moderately wave-making announcements that came down the pike at Java’s big show. There’s a new code-generating tool from SpringSource, new and finer-grained flavors of Red Hat, enhancements to GlassFish (which everyone thinks Oracle is going to kill, but maybe not?), the release of SwingX 1.0, the promise of modularity in JDK 7, and a pledge from Microsoft on improved Java-.Net interoperability. There was even an initiative to paper over Java ME fragmentation (the third, by The Register’s count).Still, some were kind of melancholy. ZDNet blogger Tom Foremski hears whispers that the conferences days are numbered, that Sun’s been looking to shut down a money-losing event for a while and the merger will provide a fine excuse. One developer on the floor said “Traditionally, JavaOne has been used to communicate Sun’s vision for Java in the months ahead, and we’ve not seen much of this as yet.” Still, perhaps that laundry list above encapsulates the real theme of the conference: despite the no doubt monumental changes ahead, the technology will go on, and any number of initiatives — including some that were written off for dead when the Oracle-Sun merger was announced — are being invested in and moving forward. A not unhopeful message, even if all the conference attendees won’t be meeting in the same circumstances next year. Software Development