The most important first: yes, Larry Ellison appeared on stage. Everything else would have been a PR-disaster for the Java community. And Larry made a big commitment to Java in saying that Oracle is building its entire software stack (with the notable exception of its DB and SQL) on top of Java. He also mentioned Android and that Oracle/Sun might be looking into building devices for Java as well. Interesting enough, Jonathan Schwartz, who was the host for most of the keynote, handed over to Scott McNealy and only Scott invited Larry on stage.

Why did Jonathan Schwartz and Larry Ellision avoid to be seen together? Scott mentioned that Sun and Oracle talked about a merger for the first time about 20 years ago. I guess back then Sun would have bought Oracle and now it is the other way round. Larry Ellison also did quite some AJAX bashing and praised the virtues of JavaFX for building real applications.

What else is worthwhile to mention? The keynote appeard a little bit subdued to me. There were also less people than last year, which certainly can be attributed to the economic climate. And for the first time the JavaOne keynote was not hosted by John Gage. For most of the show Jonathan Schwartz acted as host and he did an excellent job, both entertaining and serious.

The focus of the keynote was clearly on consumer devices and JavaFX. Everything else was barely mentioned, such as Java 7 oder Java EE 6. For Java in the enterprise they had two interesting showcases, though. EBay was one of them. They are totally committed to Java and run an almost unbelieveable volume of transactions (60 billion a day, at peak times way more than 1 million transactions per second) on this platform. 

The big topic of the keynote was JavaFX. Version 1.2 is now available (see http://javafx.com/docs/articles/javafx1-2.jsp) and Sun is clearly betting the future of desktop Java  on it. But it will be a tough uphill battle against Flash/Flex, Silverlight and AJAX. They also demonstrated the new authoring tool which looked nice, at least from the outside.

In order to get JavaFX applications into the hands of end users Sun announced the JavaStore. What they told about the JavaStore was not very convincing, though. If you are a follower rather than a leader you have to come up with a very strong story but this was not the case. It seems to me that Sun is still having a hard time to figure out how to make money with software (Larry will certainly try to change this and he is the kind of person to get this done). It is also not easy for Sun to find the right combination of revenue, openness, control over content and non-competition with their partners and customers. Compare this to the Apple AppStore which is tightly controlled and offers both a decent user experience and an attractive business model for many developers.

The bottom line of the keynote: Java is alive and kicking, but the Java desktop story is still not convincing enough. Despite JavaFX, Sun has to work hard to lower the deployment hurdle on the desktop.