You might think having been a senior analyst for 8 years that I'd have seen most things. Well, this has definitely been a week of firsts for me.

My first ever JavaOne conference; my first week in joining MWD as a principal analyst covering the application delivery and lifecycle management market (moving from 8 years at Ovum) and finally my first blog entry.

I accepted Sun's invitation to JavaOne this year because rumour has it that interest in the conference and support for Java is waning, and I wanted to see for myself just what was going on.

To be honest, I've never given much credence to such hyperbolic scaremongering, and what I've seen over the last couple of days merely backed that up. There's no doubt that Java's progress has been and continues to be marked with difficulties: controlling interests and agendas, delays, confusion, swerving focus and industry bickering. However, this is to be expected of a technology that has been successful and widely adopted.

Java is a mature technology that has many masters, spawned a number of lucrative revenue streams, opens many doors and is consumed in many different ways. The competitive alternative ? Microsoft's .NET environment, although just as formidable, is beset with similar issues and one or two harder challenges.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Sun's role and involvement from technology, market and management perspectives alike has been opaque at best. Sun has never been particularly clear about how it actually makes money from Java or indeed maximising the opportunities. This doesn't really look like changing in the future.
For all that, I have enjoyed these past few days at the conference and gained a good deal of valuable insight; some disturbing, some surprising, others anticipated. Rumours of the conference's lack of importance and influence are, in my view, premature, and I will share my thoughts with you in future postings.
Far from what I was expecting, there has been a general air of optimism at the conference.

In ending this blog post I find myself with two regrets:

Firstly, the sheer number of interesting and enticing presentations made it inevitable that I should miss more than I could attend. Those that I did get to which I found particularly compelling, and would certainly recommend anyone getting the presentation materials or podcasts / webcasts of the sessions, were: "Sun Mobility General Session ? Java wherever you are" (the information delivered was certainly interesting and a good insight into JavaFX mobile development - and it's clear that Sun is after the same market as Microsoft and Adobe in this space); and "Real World, Real Time, Instant Results: Make Information work for you" presented by Jeff Henry of IBM (very interesting, insightful and for the most part non-partisan). I was booked on, but missed, "Service-oriented Architecture and Java Technology: Level-setting standards, Architecture and code" delivered by Steve Jones and Duane Nickull. By all accounts this had some good insight and valuable information from guys with a lot of end user and real world interactions. The other sessions I wanted to attend but they clashed were "The many moons of Eclipse" and "Case Studies from the JavaFX technology world".

My second regret is not having attended JavaOne during the past eight years as a senior analyst, if only to have seen it in its heyday when Java was the exciting new kid on the technology block and firms were rushing and fighting to be part of the show.

Given the size of the big hall and the number of organisations exhibiting I would definitely say that whilst veterans of the show might argue that the volumes are not up with its peak years (early 2000s) the show still maintains enough of an influence to entice the great and the good in this market and plenty of start-ups and innovators.

JavaOne, in my opinion, is still an incredibly important and very necessary conference. My worry is that it becomes increasingly a mouthpiece for Sun rather than a standalone entity.

Over the coming weeks and months, I am going to be writing a lot more about the state of the development market and taking a closer look at the value of some of the underlying technologies and products. I welcome any comments and questions and look forward to readers getting in touch to further the debate.