JavaOne 2025, celebrating the 30th birthday of the Java programming language, was held at the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California. This three-day event consisted of 80 sessions and hand-on labs, and two keynotes. Day One, scheduled on March 18th, 2025, included the opening keynote and presentations from various conference tracks.
Day One of JavaOne 2025, in conjunction with the release of JDK 24, was held on March 18th, 2025, at the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California. Key takeaways included: Scott McNealy providing a retrospective on how Java was created; Mark Reinhold discussing how Oracle stewards Java by balancing conservation with innovation; and an enumeration of 11 developer pain points and their respective solutions.
What follows is a summary of the keynote address and highlighted presentations.
Chad Arimura, Vice President, Java Developer Relations at Oracle, facilitated this keynote address entitled, Our World, Moved by Java. Arimura opened with the original quote from Sun Microsystems that characterized Java:
Java is simple, object-oriented, distributed, interpreted, robust, secure, architecture neutral, portable, high performance, multithreaded dynamic language.
After a short walk down memory lane dating back to the first JavaOne, Arimura maintained how Java is better and faster with every release. He then introduced: Georges Saab, Senior Vice President, Java Development at Oracle; Scott McNealy, Founder of Sun Microsystems, Co-Founder and Board Member at Curriki and Chairman Emeritus at LittleHorse; and Colt McNealy, Scott’s son, Managing Member of the LLC and Leader of Technical Staff at LittleHorse.
After stating that Java almost didn’t happen, Scott McNealy recalled how he convinced James Gosling to stay at Sun Microsystems after Gosling wanted to pursue other interests. McNealy enticed Gosling to remain at Sun by offering all the resources he needed to follow his passion. And, of course, the rest is history.
Scott McNealy provided an additional, sometimes humorous, retrospective on the state of software companies 30 years ago and how Sun interacted with them for licensing Java. He recalled how he got in trouble back then for characterizing Compaq and Hewlett Packard as a « collision of two garbage trucks. »
In the early days of Java, Scott McNealy was featured on the cover of the October 13, 1997 issue of Fortune.
To discuss the technical aspects of Java, Saab introduced Mark Reinhold, Senior Architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle. Reinhold stated that Java remains the one of the most popular programming platforms in the world and its success is based on a relentless focus on two main goals: developer productivity and program performance.
