It sure would be great for the life of an independent consultant and guru if Java were dead (or at least dying). The market opportunity of convincing a community that they are old school is huge. I'm half tempted just to jump on the bandwagon to try and cash in on it.
Unfortunately, it just isn't anywhere near the truth. If we were still in Java 1.4 land, I might be tempted to agree. At the time, I thought we'd done everything we could do in Java. The language seemed to be stagnating. 1.4 was a pitiful language update and the J2EE specs were going nowhere. There were some mildly interesting things going on: AOP, IoC, etc... but to anyone going through their tech mid-life crisis, it didn't seem there was much life left.
A funny thing happened on the way to the funeral. Instead of rolling over in typical Java "We're doing this our way" fashion, Java changed. The language changed in meaningful ways. Some people think the Java 5 changes are eye candy. They aren't. They are an attempt to find the weak or overly-complex things in Java and improve. It's the first time Java has truly looked outside itself to find where other technologies are doing better and embraced the needed changes.
Java 5 is a great step and Java EE 5 is incredible. The new technologies are giving birth to some incredibly exciting things in the Java. Looking out at the successor to simple dependency injection, the first steps towards truly simple tools, AJAX for free, etc... I'm feeling the future here in Java-lang is pretty bright. (and these are just a few the things in the spaces that I interact with on a day-to-day basis - breaking out of my narrow slice of Java, there's much more)
I don't see Java as dying yet. Java is still growing. Java seems to still be gaining momentum. While non-Java technology is getting hotter, it doesn't appear to be at the expense of Java in any area but mindshare among a narrow clique of gurus. I might have considered that to be a leading indicator of future changes, except the fact that it is used as a key selling point already. "None of the cool kids are doing Java anymore - don't you want to be cool like us?" When you set out to manufacture a sign like that, it just doesn't seem that impressive.
Things could change. Java has to keep aggressively pursuing language changes and we still need some massive overhauls in the specs. Java EE 5, for example, only gets us about 25% of the way to where we need to be now. But, for the first time, I confident enough in the people running the show to believe that Java is going to keep on improving and getting us where we need to be going.
If Java stops progressing, then we'll finally see the beginning of the slow death of Java. But, it hasn't started yet.
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