February 18, '09; HYDERABAD: ANAND PARTHASARATHY On location: Every other member of india's community of software geeks ( numbering almost 800,000) is a Java programmer -- and the best and brightest of these were to be found in Hyderabad today, as Sun Tech Days, the annual developer event of Sun Microsystems, got underway. Over 5000 "Java guys" accorded star treatment to James Gosling, Sun Vice President and Fellow -- widely known as the Father of Java -- as he set out the company's Open roadmap to a future which promised 'Java in everything'... from cell phones to smart cards; large Hadron colliders to the largest web enterprises.

'The magic is in the Java Virtual Machine -- not in the coding", Gosling said, announcing extensions to JavaFX, the tool set for creating rich graphic Internet applications, which would enable it on mobile and wireless devices. This effectively opens up nearly 3 billion phones to graphic and animation content created by the Java community... clearly something the India developer end will seize as yet another opportunity.

Pointing to the 'incredible ubiquity' of Java today -- with 10 billion devices world wide, Java enabled -- Gosling said, the 6 million strong Java community would soon have the latest versions of the Java Application Server, Glassfish in the new 6.5 version of Net Beans, which he characterised as the 'best IDE ever".

Sun also used the Hyderabad conference to announce its plans for new cloud computing initiatives , come March 2009, when it would launch its own Public Cloud, followed by a 'hybrid" cloud and a 'private' cloud.... aimed at creating web based resources that might challenge current offerings like Amazon's Web Services.

More about this tomorrow after Matt Thompson, Sr Director Cloud Services delivers his keynote.