The JavaOne 2010 General Technical Session, held Tuesday afternoon, left little doubt that the Java platform is alive, kicking, and heading into new territory with plenty of energy and brain power. Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle, led with a talk, "Java SE: The Road Ahead."

Reinhold spoke about Java SE 7, 8, and even, potentially, 9 exploring several themes: productivity, performance, universality, modularity, integration, and serviceability. Where is Java SE 7 headed? Reinhold described the decision was made to ship what can be shipped in mid 2011 as Java SE 7, and ship Java SE 8 in mid 2012.

"It's a good, focused plan that will get the platform moving again, and that's good news," said Reinhold. "The clear intent is to have releases on a regular cadence every 8 to 24 months, possibly 36 months at the outside. A platform like Java, to stay alive, needs to keep moving. We are going to keep it moving."

Roberto Chinnici gave a summary of developments in Java EE 6, which includes much that is new. Java EE 6 has several APIs, and a defined a web profile for web application development. It includes some powerful extensibility APIs that will make it simpler to adopt third-party libraries and frameworks and integrate them into your applications without having to do manual configuration. It also includes standardized dependency injection. Finally, Java EE 6 made improvements to existing APIs and made them work together much better than before.

Greg Bollellaa spoke about Java ME and embedded devices. "For every laptop out there, there are a thousand embedded processors grinding away code that some people wrote. There is a lot of code, lot of processors, and lot of opportunity," he explained. He talked about Java ME.next and Project Verrazano, for testing JARs and reducing and removing unused code.

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