Spent last week at JavaOne, spending some time now to blog a couple quick thoughts about it.

• Overall, and as reported elsewhere, the energy level was quite a bit higher than in recent years. Attendance was quite good.
• I saw an inordinate number of 'Java couples' strolling about with matching orange backpacks. About 30 by my count. Was this just me? Male & female checking out the latest on NetBeans and Ajax hand-in-hand or in an otherwise not very we're-just-co-workers kind of way.
• Crowd control for the sessions sucked even worse than usual.
• I guess scripting language support is the next big thing. Seems useful, but only to a point. The only use case I buy is to make it easier to provide applications with end-user scriptability. But now they're talking about VB. They're talking about inline XML. I am a little afraid.
• Ajax was all the rage. This still just gets a big WTF from me.

If I were to hazard a guess as to W exactly that last F is, I would say this: Java is done. I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean that in the sense of all the big mountains having been climbed in J(2?)[S|E]E

They've finally cleaned up most all of the crap out of the language. They've cleaned the crap out of the persistence APIs. Actually, most all of the EE frameworks seem to be in pretty good shape now. We're finally starting to get mature development tools. Even Swing is becoming a viable way to write desktop applications.

The fact that a crock of hype like Ajax can be the hot thing at JavaOne speaks volumes to how far Java has come. The sense I get is that there just isn't that much to do to the Java platform. Maybe we don't need the JCP anymore, not because it's too slow, but because it's going to run out of useful work to do?