Today's keynote was Scott McNealy and, as ever, he was on form. The session was packed and there seemed to be a massive amount of seating reserved for media and alumni. A few of us were fairly far forward (relatively speaking!) in the queue outside Moscone North and we had to sit about half way back.

It was interesting to hear about the whole Microsoft/Sun collaboration agreement and I like the fact that they're going to tackle the problem of interoperability between Java and .NET with regards to single sign-on. There's a push to get Java clients looking and behaving more natively (while still retaining portability) and it's nice to see this same theme being applied to the server.

Once again, there's a great deal of talk about "the community" and apparently there are around 4M Java developers worldwide. I have no idea how they actually know this but that's a lot of bytecode being generated on a daily basis! There's been a lot of talk recently about how Sun could be heading down, but Scott spent a few minutes explaining that they are in a great position at the moment, with their market share increasing each financial quarter. The announcement yesterday that Looking Glass is going to be open sourced was made true today and it's now been open sourced. They didn't waste any time! In other 3D news, the Java gaming stuff is coming along well and a few games were demoed that are built using Java. Very impressive.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 29 June 2004 22:50:13 BST #