Whereas a decade ago the big news from the show was geared at developers using or considering the upstart programming language, these days the big news tends to have an enterprise and service-oriented architecture focus.

I suppose it's indicative of a technology that's grown up. Yet maturity also gets you closer to obsolescence in the IT world. Sun Microsystems took a bold step at the 2006 JavaOne conference to announce that it plans to open source Java. Much of this year's conference will revolve around how well that initiative, along with Sun's plans to open source its integration middleware, is going.

Of course a lot has happened since last year. Java EE 5 was released. Almost immediately analysts began to question whether the enterprise platform had become too bloated to survive in an agile SOA world. Vendors, not surprisingly, insisted the Java enterprise platform would endure, though they acknowledged it will be in for some radical evolution.