Last year I wrote a piece when JavaOne 2007 ended, looking back some things did change, others stayed the same.

• OpenJDK, I can see the tumbleweeds rolling in the wind...
• JavaFX continued to make the news, but the tools are nowhere to be found (sorry Sun NetBeans alone is not going to cut it). I agree with Rick Hightower on this one, unless there is Eclipse support (and I mean good support) then it is not going to be picked by a critical mass of developers. Content authors on the other hand *may* be able to use Macromedia's tools and then export to JFX (I'm hoping Sun finally showcases such a exporter next week).
• Guillaume reported that Groovy sessions at Jaxx 08 were full, leaving some people outside of the room. Though I don't wish for people to miss out the opportunity to hear and learn about Groovy I do hope Groovy sessions to be packed (Dave Klein has posted the full list here)
• Sun giving public support to JRuby rather than Groovy continues to be the talk among some (remember the last big flame war @ JavaLobby?), but even if they do not directly endorse/support Groovy with money it is still somewhere on their roadmap, Glassfish v3 has great support for Grails and NetBeans' Groovy support has received a facelift.
• The organizers are expecting 15k attendees, I remember we were close to 17k on 2006...
• Will AJAX be a strong presence again? surely the recent ExtJs controversy will be present in the halls
• Swing and Desktop Java, they are not dead!

On my personal roadmap I did look at Ben's Clarity framework, which seemed very similar to a homegrown framework we used on a previous job (hey Neal was right, we always create our own Craptastic framework to tackle task xyz, right?) but as I continued moving towards SwingBuilder realized I needn't it that much (of course I also started playing with JMatter a couple of weeks before J1 2007). Grails' plugin mechanism continues to elude me, I have 2 or 3 ideas in store to get me going. Vladimir decided to release a Groovy-based JMX-related framework which follows on his J1 talk. What about the last item on the list? well of course it has become a reality: GraphicsBuilder (expect some surprises in the following months)

All in all I look forward to a great event, remember to keep in touch via Twitter