The 12^th annual JavaOne love-in continues. Queues everywhere, I mean for everything. The firm has really placed a consumer focus on this event rather than last year’s enterprise-dominated conference, spearheaded by the JavaFX announcements on Tuesday. Which is fine for us in a way, because for one thing consumers are also enterprise workers, and the barriers between consumer and corporate IT diminish daily. Plus, in the B2C space there will surely be no shortage of device manufacturers, content owners and service operators queuing up to exploit the new JavaFX open source platform. There are still some reservations that the plans lack enough concrete detail and tools are yet to be announced which would actually enable developers to get cracking on this stuff…but Sun certainly has high hopes the technology will boost its standing in the increasingly important Rich Internet Application (RIA) space.

This is actually one of the least corporate corporate shows I’ve been to; I mean, yes there’s a certain amount of razzamatazz, but Sun is more of a facilitator, a benevolent uncle looking after its flock of Java geeks, than the main attraction. And that kind of attitude comes from the top down, from the thoroughly pleasant bunch of execs who bicker and banter with each other like old friends. I don’t know if this is a new leaf the computing giant has turned over since its open source mission began or not, but it makes a refreshing change all the same.