During the Community Keynote next Thursday at JavaOne, I’ll be leading a panel on “The Role of Java in Innovation.”  The goal is to highlight just a few of the many segments where Java is front and center in Innovation.

What are some really hot technology segments right now, areas where anyone can easily see lots of innovation?  Big Data, Cloud, Social Apps, Mobile, Hardware Tinkering come to mind.  Then consider the many developer communities where lots of innovation is happening, and has been happening for a long time, like Apache, Eclipse and relatively new on the scene github.  Java is front and center in pretty much every one of these segments and communities.

It’s not by accident, it’s because Java has a number of attributes that make it a great vehicle for innovation.  My colleague Cecilia took a stab at trying to annotate  how it all fits together, and I think this nails it:

In a nutshell, the culture of Java, it’s breadth and depth has led to a lot of diversity (in every sense of the word).  Java (in conjunction with OS licenses) has promoted sharing and remixing.  Java (thanks to it’s strong tooling ecosystem) has enabled rapid prototyping on a grand scale.  

All these things help make innovation happen.

I’ll follow up later in the week with more information about the panel, and include a call for questions.

– Don