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As cool as many of the people on the Java team are, though, I am dubious that Java is going to live up to the hype.

Same here. If someone writes a secure electronic-wallet type system with Java, then I'll be impressed. Until then, all I've seen implemented is kEWL text graphics.

There was an official announcement at their Professional Developers Conference a few weeks back. In short, full support in the browsers (and apparently MS is now the keeper of the reference implementation on Win32) and also a full blown Java development environment code-named 'Jakarta'.

Didn't MS ditch their proprietary Java-like language? Interesting, if so...