A few thoughts on Java from a former Java developer
I've been doing some following of the Java community even though I haven't been using Java much at work lately. Old habit's die hard. :)
Java in the Cloud
It seems that Java is gaining a lot of cloud momentum. Heroku's annoucement of support for Java puts them in company with Google App Engine, Cloud Foundry (from VMWare and SpringSource), AWS's Elastic Beanstalk, and OpenShift (Redhat). Four platforms for deploying java webapps (and by extension, just about any JVM language) to the cloud. That's pretty stinking good.
All of these are doing similar things. You build a java webapp, deploy it to the cloud, and much of the rest is managed for you. Herkou and OpenShift modify this model a bit. With both of these products, you push your source to the cloud as opposed to a deployable artifact of some kind. Additionally on heroku you follow their Procfile pattern, which means you would embedd jetty, or some other http server, instead of deploying a war that they drop into an existing servlet container. With OpenShift, you have access to a full blow JBoss AS 7, as opposed to just the Servlet API
Changes in the JCP
I have been following a little bit of the changes the JCP, and the main change I see here is that many of the members are pushing to make sure that the TCKs needed to certify implemention of JSRs being published under opensource friendly licenses. Movement in this direction will go along way in unencumbering the Java ecosystem from the baggage of the past.
