Personally I love the language, and with good dev tools like Netbeans and Eclipse emerging, its just getting better. As the second most popular language after C, it cant be going too wrong, and before dotNet Microsoft tried to steal it, for those that remember. The real issue is just that, one guy owns the platform, another a cool language, the guy with the platform (like Microsoft) makes a cool video system but licenses it so the platform above Java cant use it... and so the language has a Multimedia deficiency. Its the business end that is "where its really at", and keeping your eye on what these warring platforms get up to. This is how I use Java... and it scares the hell out of all the big platform boys. http://ecoamigo.herobo.com/POJO/ so I think its safe to say that Java is still very much in the game. If you consider that big players like Android/Google/IBM/Sun/Oracle are also very much in the Java game, I think its safe to say that the dotNet Java battle is far from over. Also look at things like the Apache Project... I fell in love with Java when Microsoft brought it out, yes!... and the love affair hasn't stopped.