Thursday’s JavaPolis keynote starts with Bruce Eckel doing basically a partner slot — a 45 minute promotion speech for Flex (what else). What’s this doing at a Java conference? How much did Adobe pay for….. — Oh. Okay. I just saw the first demo. I want to use this! Show me more! And it works in everything with a Flash player on it? Where can I sign up?

Stephan Janssen’s keynote on his side project, parleys.com, (no seriously, there’s some great stuff on there and the new (Flex) version looks very slick), gives me some time to recap the last two sessions I saw yesterday. As planned, I chose the EJB 3.1 session over yet another intro into JRuby on Rails. While EJB 3.1 promises some useful new features (WAR packaging, singleton beans, timer service etc), a whole hour is a lot of time to listen to the ins and outs of features and subfeatures.

Then came the moment we’d all been waiting for: a panel discussion with James Gosling, Joshua Bloch, Neal Gafter and Martin Odersky about the future of computing. Literally the future of computing, where most of us had expected or hoped to see a discussion about the future of Java. So what did I learn from this?

1. Interviewing is a real profession. A panel like this needs a good host who will ask the right questions, ask follow-through questions that are on everyone’s minds, and most of all, can keep the discussion going. Uncomfortable moments of silence at a table with guests like these, with about 2000 people watching, just shouldn’t happen.
2. “Closures are sexy.” Guess who said that, completely out of the blue? But more importantly, why didn’t the interviewer touch the subject that everyone expected to guarantee some fierceful debate?
3. a < b is not the same as a – b < 0. In C. I think that’s even a better t-shirt text than “There’s only 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary arithmatic and those who don’t.”

The Keynote Continues

Sun’s Tim Cramer is next on Thursday’s keynote. “Who’s programming Java ME?” he asks the audience. About five people raise their hands. “Who’s done it with NetBeans?” One hand remains in the air.

This shows my doubts about the ever-recurring Sun demos (usually during keynotes) with SunSpots, robots and phones. Fun stuff, but how many of us are actually using it? Most of us are developing web apps — which is not to say that there shouldn’t be attention for anything beyond that, but this is overdoing it.

One last observation: while I’m in deep concentration for writing this blog post, I suddenly hear Sun’s Java evangelista Angela Caicedo talk about “moving my guys around.” Huh? Oh, she’s talking about sprites.