This is a “live” blog from day 1 at Devoxx 2011, we will be updating this blog post during the day. You can read all three blogs by following the links below

Day one
Day two
Day three

Day three

We made it for the last day of Devoxx! A bit tired after the Devoxx party at the NOXX, but luckily there were only two sessions and a keynote today. Like previous years the keynote on friday was a "technical" discussion panel with people from/representing Oracle, Google, Microsoft, JUG's, open source. Everybody could ask questions which unfortunately meant that the talk was less technical and more politics. With a lot of political questions which of course the panelists couldn't answer.

Evolution of Java

Joshua already gave a talk about the good and bad parts in one of the first versions of Java on wednesday. With this session he continued on this path with going through all the features that have been added to Java since version 1.2 and up. It was a very opinionated talk (like he said himself) and he did not propose on how to improve certain bad additions.

According to Joshua serialization is the worst feature ever added to Java. It sort of works, serialization and final fields don't mix and serialVersionUID is needless clutter. Generics were essential, but the design was wrong and it did significant harm to "The feel of Java".

Ceylon

The guys from JBoss thought it would be a good plan to create another language for the JVM. Too bad they already named it Ceylon (pronounced as Se-lon, with a french accent), else they could have called it YAJVML (Yet Another JVM Language).

Like most new languages on the JVM, the reason behind this language is to address the shortcomings of Java. Influenced by Java and a bunch of other languages, they added;

• Declarative syntax for treelike structures
• Principal typing, union types, and intersection types
• Mixin inheritance
• Typesafe null and safer type narrowing
• Modularity
• And more...

Is this the new language you should be using? We don't know, give it a try and decide for yourself.

http://ceylon-lang.org/

It's not over yet!

Couldn't go to Devoxx this year? Want to see a session again or want to see the talks you missed? Check out parleys.com, all Devoxx talks from this year (and previous years) are uploaded there! Hopefully we will see you next year at Devoxx, but for now we are off to "het Bier Paradijs", for some well earned beers!