The first general session started with some exiting news. JDK 7, JEE 6 and JavaFX 1.2 are available now. Surprising, because half of the JEE 6 specs are not final yet and JDK 7 is far from finished. Later on the day the announcement doesn't quite stand. JEE 6 will be released september, and JDK 7 somewhere next year. Besides the usual "we are big companies and like each other" content there were two real announcements. First of all there will be a Java appstore, which enables you to sell your own Java and JavaFX applications. Besides the fact that it feels very much an Apple appstore rip off, it actually is very interesting. They are not quite there yet however because they decided to first put the appstore online with no possibility to pay for applications. They want feedback to decide how the payment model is going to work. A stupid decision to my opinion. If you can't make money writing applications, there is not enough push behind it to get this thing popular. It still is interesting though. Reading between the lines this secures JavaFX's position too. JavaFX is crucial for the appstore's success. 

Everybody was waiting for some Oracle news of course, but that's still under strict rules, so nothing really new about that. Reading between the lines once again, it seems not that much is going to change at first, and another hint that JavaFX is not going to disappear. Happy about that :-)

The JEE6 specs are looking really good. I'm specially happy with EJB 3.1. The 3.0 spec was good, but some things were missing (such as a decent timer implementation). The 3.1 spec doesn't really add anything revolutionary, but EJB 3 now feels finished and complete.