Java inventor, James Gosling, throwing off some t-shirts to the audience!

The theme for this year's JavaOne conference is "JAVA + You"... Actually, I would have replaced the "You" by Mobile. Mobile is just everywhere for JavaOne's 12th edition, in the opening keynote, the sessions and the show floor with booths from Motorola, Sony/Ericsson, RIM, Sprint, AT&T, etc. Aside from a sizeable Oracle booth, there's not much of an enterprise presence anymore. I also have the impression that this show is much smaller than last year's. [Sun folks are telling me that total attendance is at about 12,000 people]. Agree?

Anyway, Java in mobile phones has been going for years. According to Sun, Java is already running on 85% of the mobile phones and 91% of desktop computers, totalling more than 6 billion Java enabled devices worldwide. But, did Sun really keep up with Java's original promise of "Write Once, Run Everywhere"? To me, talking to developers, Java is more of a "Write Once, Debug Everywhere" world. As usual, I'll be asking the hard questions to Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and team when I see them later today :-)