After the formal presentations, I had a chance to chat with James Gosling. The Sun Fellow and Father of Java is now spending most of his time coordinating the development of the Java client(s) after several years focusing on the server side because of Microsoft locked on Windows. During our conversation we talked about Java, of course, Adobe Flash, the iPhone and Microsoft. You can find an edited version of the podcast here.
We first talked about why Sun had to create yet another scripting language, JavaFX script to develop Rich Internet Applications (RIA) instead of AJAX/Javascript for example.

"Javascript is not about building user interfaces. People use it for that... and what it's got in that is usable to write interfaces is the HTML DOM (Document Object Model). But if you try to use advanced graphics, interesting animations, transition effects... OpenGL doing all kind of cool stuff, there's nothing like that in Javascript. You can shoe horn it in... but it gets really really ugly!". Moreover JavaFX script seems to be "more culturally compatible with the mindset of most art folks".

Sun is on a collision course with Adobe

"Absolutely! It's not like we started the collision but we're not into backing down... Once you get outside of the [Flash] visual experience everything sucks! They've got the visual experience nailed everything else sucks! Whereas we have everything else work really quite well, and it's the visual piece that we need to nail".

The Apple guys are so isolationist!

"They don't have a security story! Therefore they do the application signing so if something is signed it can do anything, and if it's not signed it can't do nothing". Referring to Apple's unwillingness to open the iPhone to developers because of the iPhone's lack of a security model.

Microsoft ActiveX spurred the virus industry

"One of the things I find really ironic in the early Java days when we were talking about our security mechanism, the Microsoft guys whenever they were advertising ActiveX were saying: 'Oh, monsieur developer don't use Java, it has all these security policies that get in your way. We're open, we'll let you do anything! Which is exactly where the virus industry comes from!".

Java did not fulfill its promise of write once, run anywhere

"Write once, run anywhere actually works really well on the desktop, certainly between Linux and Windows. The Macintosh, they just didn't keep it up. They are really being sloppy. The cell phone world is where there's a real problem and that's what JavaFX mobile is about".

Some other interesting quotes:

"I find the whole mashup thing to be sort of bizarre. Because, it's like: Oh you guys, you've rediscovered object-oriented programming. Thank you very much!".

"AJAX... you've been able to do that for over a decade now. And suddendly people realise you can do this stuff".