Last weekend I attended DevJam. See these two links:
http://java.debian.net/index.php/DevJam
http://www.skolelinux.de/wiki/FreeJava/Meeting050923

Here follows some of my thoughts. Not everything here but will write
more later for example.

Classpath:
Core things are there but many libraries still need a lot of work or
just have stub implementations. But people are working on it and it
improves all the time.

Vm:
There seem to be quite a few of these. Many interesting things going on
and I learned about a new one called CACAO. Of course it was nice to
meet Dalibor Topic in real life.

To native:
Fedora compiles everything to native and the big applications work for
them. Of course you need a patched 4. something to get the best results
so this is not something that will go mainstream Gentoo any time soon.
Andrew Haley, the upstream gcj maintainer from RedHat, said that libgcj
can be released separately in the future after they get the interface
defined. At the moment the interface is still in too big of a flux for
the stuff to be separated. I have unmasked the newest gcc release in
portage and play with it to see how it works. I think we can get a nice
speed boost with it while still using the non-free core libraries to
have all the needed implementations. Of course Classpath should become
our number one core library in the future.

My presentation:
People seemed to find it useful and interesting.
You can find the slides here:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~betelgeuse/show.pdf

Other:
There were representations about how Debian packages stuff. I think our
system is better. At least the Debian thing did seem more compicated.
And I met a lot of nice people. I will certainly attend these things
more often if at all possible. Dalibor Topic told a lot about the way
the java world runs (JCP) and that was very interesting to listen to. Of
course it was in general very nice to meet other developers.

Regards,
Petteri Räty (Betelgeuse)