I think the renewed focus on the desktop is the most important news of the year. Maybe at the end we get faster start up of applets, capability of automatic updates of java installations, not just copy another virtual machine on the hard-disk and leave the old ones in place, maybe we get support for multimedia, like playing mp3 and the capabilities to display movies and, and, and... Even the proclamation of something like this is really the most important Java related news of the year.

…Got my write-in vote.

1. The zenith of Jee-based multi-tier architectures and the renaissance of space-based architecture built on the top of Jini technologies. 2. MVC as anti-pattern in conjunction with Swing-like Ajax frameworks. 3. Object-oriented databases written in Java as viable alternative to legacy relational database products.