Last year, I took a stab at predictions as to what Sun would announce at the 11th annual JavaOne. This year, for JavaOne 2007, I'll take a stab at what Sun and some of the other major vendors will announce. It will be fairly easy to predict the major themes from the vendors. Most of them will be spouting "Web 2.0" and talking about development and production assistance for mashups, etc.  In addition to new tools, some chatter about PHP, and a talk by Gary Horen, we're flexible enough such that I am sure we'll have some last minute excitement.

So, for JavaOne 2007, here are my predictions.

Oracle Announcements:

• Project X: Oracle will talk about its Uber-secret project which is either a rebranding of Fusion,  a duplicate project to Fusion, or something different. And I am not the only one who is confused. When you hear things like: Project X "is essentially an application integration framework designed to enable users to pull together the "best of" functionality from Oracle's various application stacks". This sounds like Fusion. Is this the old strategy from a-company-who-shall-not-be-named, of announcing things several times in hopes somebody picks it up? Even SAP has gotten into the act raising questions about Project X is really about.
• An EE5 release. They have some kind of EJB3 in their app server on 1.4, but are strangely late on a compatible app server. Not that EE5 is easy, but this probably makes sense.
• Expect boy-wonder Thomas Kurian to talk all sorts of APIs, and to discuss JSF, and ADF, and other topics he'll pick up from The Rickster, Rick Schultz, developer guy at Oracle.
• More Eclipse support, but will still hang on to JDeveloper.

IBM Announcements

• Probably not many
• As of early-April, they were not even a sponsor. They appear to be at gold level now and not platinum, which could show how important (or not) Java is to them.
• They EE5 server will not come out until 2008, some 2 YEARS after the spec.
• They might announce JPA support, which they are getting from the OpenJPA project which contains code BEA donated

SAP

• Who knows? With Shai Agassi and former JavaSoftie George Paolini gone, does this mean NetWeaver is dead?
• Their not ready-for-production app server will probably be announced as ready

Sun:

• Sun will probably have some noise around EE6 and the new specification
• They will once again conflate Java and NetBeans, there by offending everyone who uses some other IDE, like the 50-60% of us who use Eclipse or Eclipse derivatives.
• Continued open hostility between Sun and the Apache Foundation around Sun's tight-fisted grip on its Technology Compatibility Kits. The could also announce a truce, but an "open letter" usually means that direct face-to-face negotiations are not going well.
• They will make more of providing options for scripting on the Java platform, and have some announcement about supporting Ruby, PHP and a bunch of stuff, but no discernable means of monetizing it....as usual. (Interestingly the bloom seems to be off the rose for Ruby, but feel free to tell me if I am wrong.)
• Probably some JavaTV announcements, which is interesting some 13 years after Java was started, since Java was created to do work precisely in this area.

If you have your own predictions, feel free to add them.