James Gosling, the "father of Java", is the hero, the star, the god of many Java conferences such as JavaOne. I have seen the adoration and worship, as recently as four months ago at JavaOne 2009. Yesterday I witnessed a performance by James Gosling in a very different setting. At Oracle Open World (at least three times the size of JavaOne) he is seen by many as ‘just an interesting looking gray haired fellow in a T-Shirt and jeans’.

They are somewhat surprised that Ted Farrell, chief architect of Oracle middleware development technology, makes way for this old geezer. And some even leave the room – how interesting can his story be. After the session, I run into James on the escalators, wearing his jeans, T-Shirt and bagpack with laptop – just like 1000s of other attendants on this conference. Of course he is still recognized by many, but he is slightly out of the universe that revolves around him in a setting that has yet to get to know him and appreciate him. I can imagine that must be tough. Or a nice challenge, see how to win this audience over too. One way of doing that is of course by throwing gadgets into the audience – a favorite stunt of his – and he donated a few dozen Dukes this time.

Anyway, he did a good job of explaining to this developer audience what Sun was doing, what the scale is of Java activity around the world and across technology platforms. He fondly plugged NetBeans – standing next to guy who is responsible for Oracle JDeveloper as well as the extensive range of Oracle tooling for Eclipse – indicating how it has specializations in many different areas, JEE and also the other languages that run on the JVM. He stated that magic of Java is not in the programming language as such, but is in he JVM. In saying so he seemed to warmly embrace languages such as Ruby/Rails, Groovy/Grails, Scala, Pyhton, PHP and others that can run on the JVM- and integrate together in the JVM. Gosling at this point also plugged Kenai – a cloud based developer environment, a much advanced version of SourceForge.

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