Day 3 started with a keynote. Stephan Janssen presented the new version of Parleys (which is in Beta right now). For those who spend 50 euros, they can see all the devoxx presentations during 6 months right after the conference. And, you can fully download them. So that’s great. No more worrying about skipping a session or making a difficult choice between two sessions.
Then it was Oracles turn and up on this very moment I have no clue what the hell they tried to tell us there. And if you were hoping the demos bring any light in the Oracle darkness, nope, they were even worse. Sun did a quick announcement of the J2EE 6 stuff followed by a very nice and sexy show of the Adobe guys. CatalystFX does a great job, but as any RAD tool, I have my doubts about the usefullness in the field. Who will want to work with the generated mxml files. At first sight, I won’t. But, we can learn from it. E.g. how to create a slider from some graphics..
Then I went to see what’s going to be in JDK 7. Closures !! And fork/join. But they finally admitted they wont get there in time. So they added a few more milestones. They hope to be feature complete around Q2 2010 and release it a few months later. We’ll see. I like this scenario better than releasing now the 7 and have to wait for the 8 with the real changes again for several years.
Then I went to see Architecting Robust applications in the cloud, which was a bit of a mistake (so I didn’t went to Gosling). Not because it was a bad session, not at all, but it was merely a short version of the session I saw from Chris Richardson on monday during the university days.
JavaFX. Where are they at the moment? Well, they made progress, the components are fast, but there are still missing a few important ones. Maybe the most important one: the table (or grid or whatever you want to name it). It looks quite good though. One day, they will definelity be in the game. Hopefully for them they are not too far behind at that moment.
And then back to the cloud again. Doug Tidwell tried to give us some reasons why we should go for standards in the cloud. He also presented some frameworks, but I must admit he lost me as I had a bit of a dip. Didn’t get much sleep lately 
The same counts for the last session of the day, the Lift (Scala) framework. I still remember it looked very cool and I want to try it out soon, but I can’t say anyting more than this about it. My brain got a bit overheated by then 
Day 4 looks promising again. Robert C. Martin is coming..