JavaWorld have a great article on their site by Max Goff, outlining what he considers are 10 key points of Java during it’s 10 years in existance.
There’s probably a few other points that I would have included in this list. Having used Java since 1996, and started using it as my main development language since 1998, I can remember quite a few changes over the past few years. I think one of the most interesting was the fanfare arrival of the EJB1.0 spec and it’s evolution since. Over time as people realized the Entity Bean part of the spec is just plain broken and poor conceived, it has been very interesting recently to work with new ORM tools in the same space, such as Hibernate, and then see Gavin King’s involvement with the EJB3.0 spec, and how it has evolved to something ‘Hibernate-like’: the way it should have been from day one. Makes you wonder what things would have been like today if the content of EJB3.0 was initially released as the initial EJB1.0…