There's been much debate in the last year on the future of the Java language, many doom mongers have stated that Java as a language and as a platform is in decline and will no longer be relevant in the all too near future. This talk debunks those naysayers and covers the exciting new world of a modern Java developer and how she can utilise the language and platform extensions to deliver awesome solutions. Our major themes:

• We have a VM which is arguably the most capable on the planet - and it's GPL.
• We have a wealth of new JVM languages which both complement and challenge the Java language.
• We have a set of "software craftsmanship" tools which are increasingly mature - and they're open source.
• This is a great time to be a developer working on this platform!

This will be a technical talk, but not closely tied to an specific F/OSS coding project. Some of the topics we will prepare are:

• invokeDynamic & Method Handles - and how closures might evolve
• How open source Java tool stacks won the war
• Dynamic Languages on the platform (eg Clojure, Groovy)
• How Concurrency is thriving in many (often very different) implementations on the JVM
• Future Directions (eg fixnums, mandated tail-calls, type annotations)

The format will then be highly audience-led, to allow discussion of 2-3 topics during the talk, based on demand. This is a speaking style we've previously used and find it highly effective and popular with audiences.

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