Standing still. We're at Antwerp-Metropolis, one of the largest movie theatre complexes in Europe, relabelled JavaPolis for the occasion, Wednesday 3rd. of December. The number of attendees waiting patiently in line for the registration process reminds me of the queuing at JavaOne.

Ahead of me lie two interesting days, dozens of parallel presentation tracks, many vendor booth visits, subjects ranging from product features to the latest evolution of J2EE standards and implementation detail to enterprise strategy. How do you put it all together allowing for participants to leave with a lot of extra knowledge and a solid list of specific topics to take a closer look at?

Managed to get in! Just in time for the first keynote speaker, no less than James Gosling in person is performing the opening speech. Many other high profile Java evangelists will follow his track. Clearly, supplying a better insight and a resulting action list is the aim of all keynote presentations at the second edition of Javapolis, the yearly conference organised by the Belgian Java User Group - BeJUG.

Judging from the quality of international speakers, gathered here all in one place, and the overall superb standard of the event, the BeJUG team, headed by its ever enthusiastic president Stephan Janssen, has come up with a great formula offering a valid alternative filling the gap of the lacking European version of JavaOne.

Attending technology sessions makes me realize that in order to succesfully embark on programs of continuous reductions in time-to-market, enterprises will need to create new architectures to provide the framework for ways of developing software more efficiently and better supporting the ever shortening application lifecycle iterations which are key for doing business in today's online world.

The presence of companies like Nokia showcasing actual and future devices once more underlines the fact that manufacturers keep coming up with smarter and niftier wireless devices -mobile phones, PDAs, cameras, location finders, video recorders and combinations of any of the above - all benefiting from the flexibility of Java.

With such a proliferation of devices, enterprises wishing to exploit mobility for business are facing a huge challenge to achieve the "produce once - publish many times" paradigm. Several prominent speakers pointed out during JavaPolis that this is where Java proves to be at its best and offers unlimited capabilities.

The past two days were gone in a whisper, without a minute of lost time, well worth the one hour waiting line. Great things don't last long, my grandfather used to repeat endlessly. Well, on this occasion, the almost one thousand attendees all shared his opinion.

All who were there are now counting down to Javapolis 2004. Java lives and that's a fact.