Wouldn't that be great? Half-decent programmers. Wouldn't that be just amazing? They'd go someway to make up for the half-witted aspects of J2EE.

I'll bet that if you look at the percentage of people using each of these sections of API on a regular basis it will match up with the results of this poll fairly closely. J2ME obviously needs some serious work and evolves extremely slowly.

Java WebStart either needs an overhaul or rewrite. Ugly, hard to manage, pain in the rear. Give it to the JDIC team or something, since they seem to be doing the best desktop integration work these days, which is what WebStart is all about (take it/update it from the web but make it local). Beyond that, graphics performance and long-standing bugs need to be addressed. The gray rectangle is thankfully going away, but there's plenty more that needs to be done. All the web stuff in J2EE should be broken out into a J2WE version. They really shouldn't be tied together, and the web stuff (JSF, EL, WS, etc) needs to move so much faster than the enterprise part. I agree with an earlier comment, more frequent releases would be good.

1. Swing is more complex that it needs to be. 2. IO could use some convenience methods ala php 3. Same with net. 4. logging needs better design (and a better name) At the core effort should be taken to simplify Java for new and old developers alike. For a ten line code if I have to catch nine exceptions, without doing much about them, then there is something wrong. And it make programming a chore. Not all devices are resource constrained. Stream libraries are fine. We need some non-stream convenience api too.

The J2SE should move to a 6-months release cycle.

J2SE controls/components are very complex in comparission to .NET controls. Just take a look in JTable x DataTable case.