I caught Danny Coward’s section of the afternoon general session on “Java-centricity”. He highlighted three focus areas for Java 7 – modularity, language support, and rich client. The modularity stuff focused on JSR 294 and 277 of course. Looked like he was using the new updated syntax and approach Alex Buckley put out there. He also talked quite a bit about OSGi and had that on the big slide. Pretty awesome to see this stuff finally heading in the right direction.

In the language area Danny mentioned the JSR 223 scripting of course but spent more time on John Rose’s work with the DaVinci Machine and JSR 292 invokedynamic. Definitely one of my favorite areas. He mentioned that Charlie’s work on JRuby was the guinea pig for most of it. Duh.

In the rich client area he talked about the JavaKernel work which is already out in Java 6 and also showed off some stuff with being able to pull applets off a web app and run them from the desktop. This is all made possible by the completely new plugin architecture that runs the applets out of process instead of in the browser.

No language changes mentioned or really anything else. Gotta focus on something I guess.

After that there was an announcement about the new media codec integration from On2. Pretty cool stuff, glad we’re finally seeing that. I am not a media guy so I’m sure others will know more about the details – I know that’s where the devil is with codecs.