The opening keynote session was a reminder of where Sun has been over the past ten years. On the stage at various times were Jonathan Schwartz, Scott McNealy, James Gosling, John Gage, and many others. This is a good time for these veterans to bask in a little bit of glory because of the problems Sun has had from the bad times, losses, layoffs, and bad technology decisions. Two years ago I asked Jonathan why Sun continued to pour money into NetBeans when they were laying-off long time employees.

Sun kicked things off this morning by talking about goals for the Java platform: 1) faster, faster, faster, 2) Make Java more relevant in deploying applications that people want to use, and 3) expand the tent to let other developers onto the platform. Rich announced efforts to streamline the JRE code base, make the JRE downloads smaller, and make Java more modular to increase deployment flexibility and reduce deployment size. Sun also discussed the JavaFX consumer focused family of Java technologies to provide scalable rich interfaces.

Read the complete report: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=45311

-Frank