OnJava has an artilce by Elliotte Rusty Harold proposing to clean up the language.
Certrainly his proposals are worth to disscuss them, but i am not sure if its correct to call them refactorings as refactoring as i experienced it, is strictly bound to the sentence: "improve the design without alter the external behaviour"

But lets take a look at Harolds proposals:

the proposal i agree most, is to eliminate primitive data types. they break the object oriented paradigm and they behave strange:
- long and double are not atomic in sync issues
- byte + byte = int
- they are affected to floatpoint operation deviations, when a binary division produces periodic numbers
- they don't throw exceptions if they overflow.

but also, as a j2me developer i feel that performance and footprint are issues in danger by eliminating primitives. harold's idea to continue j2me on the java2 track is wrong. Code reuse is a major strategic issue and in the mobile arena also important for an other reason, you want the same strategy/ algo classes on the device and on the serverside.
Finally "if you don't like code reuse, why do you use OO technology", cited freely after E. Gamma

Many proposals don't work because compatibility IS an issue.

Others are quite applicable:
method names that have a distorting semantic distance to what they do, like DataInput's writeUTF() should depreciate

if you are curious to know what's wrong with java today this is an interesting article, although not necessary deeply funded.

last week during i was giving a java tutorial. during the tutorial i developped a rmi based chat-programm. right now i'm just doing some code clean-up. after this is done i will post the sources here.

i also work on a cddb client for win32 platform using jni. this will become an open source project. the interface to jni works fine so far. right now im implementing the freedb.org protocoll. due to the goals i have it will take some weeks to month until the release of version 1.0 :-) later i will post more information.

a really tricky idea:

public Object deepClone()
{
	try
	{
		ByteArrayOutputStream b = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
		ObjectOutputStream out = new ObjectOutputStream (b);
		out.writeObject (this);
		ByteArrayInputStream bin = new ByteArrayInputStream (b.toByteArray());
		ObjectInputStream oi = new ObjectInputStream (bin);
		return (oi.readObject());
	}
	catch (Exception e)
	{
		System.out.println ("Exception : " + e.getMessage());
		return null;
	}
}