I've been meaning to blog about this for some time now, but work tends to get in the way.

I'll make this quick: the main message here is that the Desktop Track is looking better than ever this year. Besides the fact that we've got the usual array of interesting stuff to talk about and the neatest demos on the block, there's an additional twist this year that I'm pretty happy about; way more participation from the community.

This year, we went out of our way to recruit known Desktop Java developers to submit good, deep technical talks. The responses we got were fantastic, and the result was that most of the Desktop sessions this year are from outside Sun. Even better, most of those sessions are from people whose work you probably know and people that are known to be good speakers with lots of interesting stuff to talk about (and lots of interesting code to show off).

For example, here is a small sampling of the hot sessions from Desktop community people:

• Yahoo!'s Ethan Nicholas (one of last year's Top 20 speakers) will be talking about his JAXX framework for XML User Interfaces
• Swing consultant and Ajaxian.com's Ben Galbraith (another Top 20 speaker) will discuss Eight Ways to Be More Productive Developing Swing Applications"
• IBM's Joe Winchester (JDJ editor) will give the session "It's Not Over Till the Fat Client Sings"
• IBM's Steve Northover (SWT Lead) will give an in-depth intro to SWT
• ClientJava.com's Scott Delap will give a session on the Event Dispatch Thread
• JGoodies' Karsten Lentszch has multiple sessions: "Desktop Patterns and Data Binding" and "Do's and Dont's for Swing Applications"
• There will also be a BOF panel with Ben, Joe, Karsten, and Scott (above), as well as some Sun folks, on the future of Desktop Java; that should prove to be a lively interactive discussion that I encourage everyone to attend and participate in.

I subjectively think there are some great sessions from my group at Sun as well, such as:

• Scott Violet, Romain Guy, and Shannon Hickey (all Top 20 speakers from last year) will do another installment of their hit session from last year, "Extreme GUI Makeover: Lookin' Better"
• Scott Violet and Richard Bair will have in-depth sessions on databinding and data access strategies (after all, a GUI without data is just a prototype)
• Of course my personal favorite, maybe just because of the title, is the session I'll be giving with Romain Guy, Chris Campbell, and Ken Russell, "Filthy Rich Clients".

There are a lot of great Desktop sessions I haven't listed above; I encourage you to check them out. 

And of course there are great sessions in the other tracks as well.  Just make sure you don't miss your favorite Desktop sessions.  There will be no makeup test.

So check out the conference site and register today.