java.sun.com has a roundup of the key messages from the Key Note presentations and the main action items for the community. Most of these revolve around rallying the troups to get involved with the Sun sponsored open source projects, for example Glassfish and Netbeans subprojects (Profile, Mobility, and Matisse).
OnJava.com also have an ‘Executive Summary’ on what was hot and not this year: What’t hot: AJAX, EE5.0 and EJB3.0, Mobile apps. What’s not: preregistration for session seats (personally I thought this was a neat idea, until I changed my mind a couple of times on what session I wanted to attend I found myself with the red ‘denied’ screen at the door, and was escorted to the overflow room where I was subjected to watching a streaming webcast of the session that kept cutting out every minute or so and you kept loosing 10 seconds of the presentation, so you never heard the presenter complete a sentence – now that was annoying), the Sun opensource annoucement, with no details of when, how and who is involved.
My own impressions this year (from only attending on Wednesday) – there was a noticable absence of Sun self-promoting technical sessions, which has been a major critisim from previous years (and I think one of the main reasons for the appearance of JavaOne alternative conferences, like No Fluff Just Stuff). The sessions I attended were all presented by individuals from other organizations and about technologies they were working with or on – I find this perspective more interesting than hearing self-promotion. My main critisim – the sessions I attended gave me a high level overview of some new feature, but I came away feeling I had to now go and do some reasearch on my own to get the real nitty-gritty inside info – the sessions didn’t go into details deep enough for me. Still, I did get to find out about some technologies (Groovy) I knew relatively little about, so I came away with some new skills and interest in new areas that I will be spending some time investigating further, so it was worthwhile for me.