I'm sad to announce that a first JavaPolis 2006 casualty has arrived... Project Semplice: Visual Basic on the JVM. Both John Kline and Herbert Czymontek have left Sun Microsystems.
I'll let you do the speculation... maybe an opportunity for the folks at Apache ?
On a more positive note, Alex Russell (the founder of the Dojo framework) was willing to do an extra talk during the Conference on Cometd, the next stage of AJAX
Some more info by Tor Norbye
on Project Semplice...