A new article, now up on otn/java, titled “The 2012 JAX Innovation Awards” reports on  important Java developments celebrated by the Awards, which were announced in July of 2012. The Awards, given by S&S Media Group, aim to, "Reward those technologies, companies, organizations and individuals that make outstanding contributions to Java." The Awards fall into three categories: Most Innovative Java Technology, Most Innovative Java Company, and Top Java Ambassador. In addition, a finalist who did not win an award receives a Special Jury prize, "in acknowledgement of their unique contribution and positive impact on the Java ecosystem."

The winners were: JetBrains for Most Innovative Java Company; Adam Bien as Top Java Ambassador; Restructure 101, created by Headway Software, as Most Innovative Technology; and Charles Nutter, Special Jury award. Each winner received a $2,500 prize. The five finalists in each category were invited to attend the JAX Conference in San Francisco, California. This year's winners each received a $2,500 prize.

JetBrains Fellow, Ann Oreshnikova, listed her favorite JetBrains innovations:

* Nullability annotations and nullability checker
* CamelCase navigation and completion
* Continuous Integration in grid (on multiple agents), in TeamCity
* IntelliJ Platform and its language support framework
* MPS language workbench
* Kotlin programming language

When asked what currently excites him about Java, Adam Bien, winner of the Java Ambassador Award, expressed enthusiasm over the increasing interest of smaller companies and startups for Java EE. “This is a very good sign,” he said. “Only a few years ago J2EE was mostly used by larger companies -- now it becomes interesting even for one-person shows. Enterprise Java events are also extremely popular. On the Java SE side, I'm really excited about Project Nashorn.”

Special Jury Prize Winner, Charles Nutter of Red Hat, remarked that, “JRuby seems to have hit a tipping point this past year, moving from ‘just another Ruby implementation’ to ‘the best Ruby implementation for X,’ where X may be performance, scaling, big data, stability, reliability, security, and a number of other features important for today's applications.

Check out the complete article here.

With considerable enthusiasm I attended “The Road to Java EE 7: Is It All About the Cloud?” (23423) session, a panel of EE experts, late Wednesday morning at JavaOne 2011. I always find Java EE developers and architects to be among the smartest people around. Last year’s Java EE panel session, covered on otn/java and titled, “Where We Are and Where We’re Going” was fraught with more uncertainty about the future of Java EE. This year, it’s clear: Java EE is heading towards the Cloud. The session this year was packed even in a much larger room than last, with roughly three times the number of attendees as last year.

The panel consisted of the following people:
--Adam Bien, Consultant, Author, Java EE Expert
--David Blevins, Apache Software Foundation
--Emmanuel Bernard, JBoss Platform Architect, Red Hat
--Reza Rahman, Senior Software Engineer/Community Outreach Activist, Caucho Technology
--Linda DeMichiel, Java EE 7 Specification Lead, Oracle

The panel, moderated by Oracle’s Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, Java EE Developer Advocate, Oracle France, addressed many issues, including:
• The current state of Java EE 6 adoption
• The motivations for Java EE 7
• What the cloud really means for Java EE 7
• Modularity in Java EE.next
• Better streamlined component models
• Status of ongoing work in the JCP
* Services and resources provisioning.
* Virtualization intersection between virtualization and PaaS?
* Meta-data: are XML deployment descriptors good after all?

Look for a detailed blow-by-blow account of the discussion on otn/java in coming weeks.