Javaone is upon us once again.

I am most looking forward to the social aspect of JavaOne: connecting with folks I have met over the years from around the US and the world who manage to make it there every year (or every other year or so). I am also really curious to see what will be different this year, now that Oracle has taken over Sun. For one thing the date for JavaOne has changed from May/June, to September. I will see what else is different once I attend the show.

I am still programming in Java and learning some new features that are coming up. What is on my radar screen as far as new stuff to learn about this year? Here's my list:

1. Last year I attended a JavaFX workshop. It was really cool and had lots of people attending it. We did hands-on coding and made a few apps. Last year was the second year that I was delving into JavaFX. However, since then I have come across no request to do any work in JavaFX projects. I have just been learning about it here and there on my own.

I am not really sure how scripting languages come up the ladder, but I think Java/Sun needs to put out a "few good applications" in JavaFX and advertise it as that so people can get their teeth into it and get excited about it.

2. I also would like to see if there is any new Java (or otherwise) performance tool out there and chat with a few companies that I talked with last year.

3. What's new in terms of J2EE-compliant PHP tools and features. PHP is popular and I use it very often to build web sites for my clients.

4. Last but not least, I'd love to learn more about the Executor and ScheduledExecutorService from java.util.concurrent, which were introduced in Java 5. These two interfaces have not been on my radar very ofen. Last year, however, I came across two projects that are using these features for asynchronous data collection purposes. So this year I am highly motivated to learn more about features of java.util.concurrent package by either signing up for a workshops or attending relevant multi-threading talks. If you have any Java product, or any Java topic you would like to find out more about, well, post it down here and I'll ask around for it on the JavaOne floor next week.