While this was by no means my first Java One conference, I had not attended in the last four years. Just as the market has changed, so has Java One. Two observations struck me about the conference: it's more diverse than ever and secondly, there's a lot more emphasis on freedom. In terms of diversity, Java One has now become much more interesting to programmers using a wider variety of languages. In the past, Su While this was by no means my first Java One conference, I had not attended in the last four years. Just as the market has changed, so has Java One. Two observations struck me about the conference: it’s more diverse than ever and secondly, there’s a lot more emphasis on freedom.In terms of diversity, Java One has now become much more interesting to programmers using a wider variety of languages. In the past, Sun had been critical of scripting languages, missing out on much of the growth of web application development. That’s changed with the broad availability of languages now supported by the JVM. There are now more than 200 different languages implemented on the JVM, including the likes of JRuby, Jython, Groovy, Scala and about 195 others. (Ok, clearly grad students have too much time on their hands.) Most importantly, Sun is taking seriously that there are different ways to skin a cat. The diversity is also seen in the fact that there are different areas of focus for Java, ranging from Java Enterprise Edition for backend servers to Java ME (Micro Edition) for mobile devices, Java FX for user-interface development, and so on. (I had to laugh when one of the developers came on stage to demo something called LWUIT. Who comes up with these names?) Sun also put a lot of empahsis on freedom this year. This is no surprise since CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been talking about the freedom open source provides, a key tenet of Sun’s overall strategy. Rich Green made a good point in his keynote talking about the importance making sure that your data doesn’t become locked into proprietary systems. In fact, you could argue that going forward the data becomes more valuable. If you weren’t at the conference you can view the keynotes online at Sun’s site. And I’ve posted some photos on PicasaWeb from Community One and Java One. I’ve also embedded a link to an excerpt from the keynote featuring Rich Green, Jonathan Schwartz and legendary rocker Neil Young, talking about using Java to develop his 5 volume Blu-ray DVD archive collection. Heck, Neil’s a pretty good example of both diversity and freedom! Things are definitely rockin’ in the free world. (The video is quite long, so feel free to skip ahead to around 4:40 if you want to see Neil Young.) Open Source