JavaOne 2025: Talks, History, Community, and Scott McNealy
The JavaOne conference returned last month to Redwood Shores, California, to “celebrate 30 years of Java” and the release of Java 24.
But it was historic in more ways than one…
After holding the 2022 event in Las Vegas, Oracle‘s Java organization skipped the long-running conference altogether in 2023 and 2024, replacing it with Java sessions at Oracle’s CloudWorld conference.
And there’s also a double-edged symbolism in the choice of Redwood Shores, the home of the company for more than 30 years. In 2020 Oracle moved its corporate headquarters out of California, declaring that its new hometown would be Austin, Texas.
“But the software giant never actually left,” wrote San Jose’s Mercury News newspaper last April. “About 6,900 workers are assigned to California offices, nearly triple the 2,500 employees assigned to those in Texas, according to internal documents seen by Bloomberg…” — and about 23% of the company worked remotely.”
And then four years later Oracle announced it would be moving its corporate headquarters again, this time to Nashville. But while still retaining its large Silicon Valley offices in Redwood City, Santa Clara, and Pleasanton.
And so it was that on March 18, Redwood Shores also welcomed the Java faithful back to its triumphantly-returning conference… which even opened with a wide-ranging interview with Scott McNealy, the original co-founder and CEO of Java‘s first home, Sun Microsystems. Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, along with Java, in 2010.
Revival and Community
Ivar Grimstad, The Eclipse Foundation’s Sweden-based developer advocate for Jakarta EE, called it “an excellent revival of the conference” (though “significantly smaller than it used to be.”) Staffing the booth between Microsoft and application server platform Payara, Grimstad wrote that “The event team managed to create an extremely friendly feel-good vibe. Coffee was served all day, and Duke was there.”
And “On Wednesday morning at 6:30 AM, a surprisingly large group of attendees met for the JavaOne morning run.”
Long-time Java consultant Adam Bien described the conference as “better attended than expected” in a conference recap on his blog, applauding both the excellent presentations by core Java/Oracle engineers and the “great Italian speciality coffees were served by passionate San Francisco baristas.”
He also noted all the sessions were conveniently held in one building, leaving “enough time to walk between sessions, have a hallway conversation.” — and that conference attendees received JavaOne-branded seat cushion and coasters.
More than 70% of the audience for his presentation had never been to a JavaOne conference before…
Oracle’s JavaOne webpage announced that during the three-day event, it welcomed attendees from 45 different countries (and handed out 20,600 stickers).
But besides its keynotes and learning sessions, JavaOne’s conference also offered “parties, happy hours, unconferences,” and “access to the Java community,” according to the conference’s page at Java.dev.
In other words: community…
The Power of Java
The festivities started with a slick opening keynote titled “Our World, Moved by Java.” Pumped-up music underscored a colorful intro video stating that while the world runs on Java, Java runs on “a global community of developers/contributors/researchers/students.”
When Oracle’s developer relations VP Chad Arimura took the stage, he called the conference a celebration of “everyone whose lives have been moved by Java.” He called Java a cultural icon, noting that over the years, Java has appeared everywhere from the New York Times crossword puzzle to sitcoms like HBO’s Silicon Valley and The Big Bang Theory — and was even mentioned seven different times on Jeopardy.
In a nostalgic moment, Arimura put up photos from the first JavaOne in 1996…
But within five minutes, he introduced some special guests. Oracle’s senior VP of Java platform group, Georges Saab, took the stage with 70-year-old Sun Microsystems founder and CEO Scott McNealy and his son, Colt McNealy (who is founder/CEO of the open source workflow engine company LittleHorse Enterprises). McNealy wore a black leather jacket with the Java logo on its back — which he showed to the crowd while flexing his muscles — then smiled and fistbumped his son…
Standing in front of a Fortune magazine cover from 1997 that depicted him as Superman, McNealy told the crowd humbly that, “This almost didn’t happen.”
McNealy remembered how they’d hired programmer James Gosling — “We flew him out, he fell in love with Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and they did Vulcan mind melds and we hired him…” But a few years later McNealy had heard through the grapevine that James Gosling was leaving Sun. “I said, ‘No, you’re not… You’re not leaving!’ I said, ‘You go do whatever you want, with whomever you want, however much you want to spend… Go set up shop, and I will fund it until you’re done doing whatever you want to go do’…”
McNealy drew a laugh from the audience when he remembered Gosling’s response. “He looked at me like I was on drugs, and he walked out.”
Four times Gosling’s funding was cut from the budget, McNealy remembered — and four times he had to put it back in. (People were more interested in funding Sun’s slowly dying line of workstations, McNealy jokes.)
“And by the way — there’s about 50 people who claim they named it Java.”
Back to the ’90s
To set the stage McNealy read through a list of the other top languages from 1995 — C, C++, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, Basic, Perl, Assembly, SQL, Ada, C#.
But fast-forward to today, and one thing jumps out, McNealy pointed out. “You look at it — and Java is still in the top three in the world, 30 years later!”
And then he drew applause from the crowd when he added “And I think it’s #1 with people who are doing real work and doing enterprise stuff.”
McNealy went on to tell the story of how Java was soon bundled into Netscape’s early web browser. “And the internet was born.”
Later, he brought his long perspective to the story of Java, recalling its early days as an era when the world’s minicomputer companies were “just scrambling — not able to keep up,” while Apple was also “very proprietary.” However, he also offered some candid remembrances about Java’s own “unique” community process. “It was really kind of a fun game… We had a whole bunch of people helping with the desktop stuff — and then we licensed it back to everybody on the desktop! We had IBM and DEC and others helping to do J2EE… And then we would put our logo on it — the Java logo — and then license it back to them for a fee!”
He promised not to say anything bad about Microsoft’s .NET — while first mispronouncing it as “dot NOT” — and assured the audience that “I won’t ever say Ballmer and Butt-Head again, I promise.”
But after drawing a quick laugh, McNealy pivoted to some more gracious words. “Actually, I love Microsoft. It’s being run by a former Sun exec now. And they’ve opened up — they’ve gotten way less closed in their environment, and I think they’re good supporters now of Java.
“So I’m very, very excited to see Satya [Nadella] doing very good things with that company.”
Fixing an Unbelievable Mess?
McNealy apologized for whatever role he’d played in today’s problems with orchestrating, managing, and virtualizing billions of devices. “We created an unbelievable mess. And that’s the next thing that needs to be cleaned up.”
Which was his segue for introducing his son Colt McNealy, who remembered missing the easy traceability of threads and debugging when studying computer science as a Stanford undergraduate. “In the real world, your business processes span multiple services, computers, data centers, there’s people involved, you have to wait, processes take forever — and you can’t just put a debugger on that…”
“So I went to my dad and I said ‘Hey, why don’t we go start something!’ Let’s try to create a new programming paradigm which makes it really easy to program a cluster of services and computers, so that you can write business processes, and processes that run across that vastly distributed environment that you created at Sun — and be able to debug it and trace it as if it was running on one computer.”
The end result was the open source LittleHorse platform for event-driven workflows and integrations.
And, of course, they wrote its core runtime in Java, Colt said, while applauding modern Java’s faster garbage collection and more lightweight threads (and faster startup times).
But besides Java’s performance, “The crazy thing is how compatible it is,” Colt said. “And it’s so easy — when you write an application in Java, that code is just gonna work, forever. I’ve heard that inside Oracle they test Java 1.0 JAR files against the most modern JVM.”
Georges Saab joked this was a testament “to how one generation creates problems, and another generation solves them.”
And soon, Colt McNealy was fistbumping both Saab and his father — as they walked off the stage to applause…
