What happened to Java and Sun? The community surrounding them had some of my favorite tools and software to develop with. The Java platform anyway, still looked like it had some promise to it: Groovy and Grails. Why does all of this seem to be going the way of the dodo lately?
(Yes, I know their stock price is dropping badly.) Is it just the economy? Or did the lack of cohesion (i.e., not settling on a framework) among the community finally lead to its demise?
Java is the COBOL of this generation - it certainly has competition but its far from dead.
Come back and ask the same question in 10 years.
I don't know what you're talking about. Any way you look at it, Java is clearly still a very popular language.
One measure is the O'Reilly State of the Computer Book Market. This publisher reports book sales and breaks it down by subject, by language, etc. The popularity of books is as good an indicator of language popularity as any.
According to their March 2008 report, Java was still the top programming language in 2007 in terms of O'Reilly book sales, although the Java books lost a bit of market share to Javascript books since 2006.
A quick glance shows that Java is the third most popular topic on Stack Overflow, after C# and .Net. JavaOne is expecting ten thousand attenders this year.
Java isn't the dominating language for web development like Sun probably hoped, but ... well I wish my products were this dead!
Its sad that Sun isn't doing very well, but even if Sun dies, Java will just continue as an open source project.
Sun has been having problems for years.
I gave up Java in 1997, and haven't looked back since. It is great in concept, but I had a problem with the proprietary implementations. Of course, I ended up doing the same with Microsoft technologies, but it works for me.
Every few years, I look at Java again, as an alternative to Microsoft, from a career perspective...but I suppose you can't go back again.