While Sun's JavaOne conference seems to be presenting itself as San Francisco's next gold rush, and everything seems to be 'enterprise-something', XML is making a very strong showing, especially on the expo floor.

Though the schedule (unsurprisingly) includes more coverage of Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) than XML, the level of XML interest and understanding are definitely rising. At the Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session I held last year on XML and Objects, only about half the audience had even seen XML documents, while 80-90% of this year's BOF audience (on XML and Schemas) had worked with both XML and DTDs. (Few had worked with Schemas yet, however.)

On the Expo floor, it's hard to walk past more than a few booths without hearing 'XML' repeatedly. Some XML-focused vendors are here (Extensibility, Excelon, Inso, and more), and both Sun and IBM have prominent XML components in their presentation. Perhaps most encouraging are the large number of vendors using XML for communications, configuration, and information transfer, applying XML rather than creating XML-oriented toolkits.

The B2B and Enterprise focus on large-scale (perhaps "get-rich-quick") development are as much in evidence here as they have been at recent XML conferences, though presentations from Sun themselves have made the money-making aspect quite explicit, leaving more than a few journalists feeling cynical.

Update: For more on XML at JavaOne, see What's the buzz about XML?