Over the course of the past few months, the fine folks at Sun have been sifting through a myriad of proposed talks submitted by many fine technologists.  Deciding which talks make the cut is no easy task, but I was surprised to find out that there will be no Grails talks.

As Graeme Rocher twittered this morning:  "All of my Grails talk propsals turned down for JavaOne."

That's a shame.  Grails is one of the gems of the JVM and is steadily gaining momentum and mindshare.  Why would Sun say no to Grails talks?

Here's some possibilities:

Didn't Fit Into a Track

The most common reason I hear for talks being rejected is they didn't fit into a "track".  the tracks for the 2009 Java One are:  

1. Rich Media Applications and Interactive Content
2. Mobility
3. Services
4. Core Technologies.

It's possible none of Graeme's submitted talks fit into any of these tracks but, in my opinion, Grails seems to fit nicely into three out of the four:  Rich Media Applications, Services, or Core Technologies. 

Lack of Detail

Another common reason for rejecting talks is that the submitted talk may lack detail.  Perhaps Graeme submitted a one word sentence saying he's going to talk about Grails, but I doubt that.  With the countless number of Grails presentations he's done over the past few years, I'm sure his submitted talk was heavy in content.

Grails May Distract from JavaFX

Sun is going to take another year to pimp JavaFX at Java One, and they prefer to minimize distractions.    Officially, Sun would never admit to silencing outside vendors that may distract from their in house technologies, but that is the conspiracy theory at play here.  It looks like once again we're going to be spending Java One hearing about the virtues of JavaFX.  That's great, but I'd like to learn a bit more about some of the other strong technologies at play within the diverse Java ecosystem.

Sun develops a lot of great technologies, and I'm a big supporter, but I fear that their myopic focus on JavaFX may begin to undermine the true strength of Java.  The real strength of Java is the JVM and the ecosystem developed around it.

What are your thoughts?