Here are my Top picks for Devoxx 2008 University day 2:

Comet: Never more!

The title of this talk is a little bit mysterious if you don’t know what Comet is about, but the content is looking very interesting.

The first part of the talk will be about HTML5 WebSockets and Server Side Events. WebSockets will enable full-duplex HTTP communication, and bring an end to the “click and wait” paradigm traditionally associated with the Web.

Attendees will also learn how WebSockets can be used to deliver information from a set of TCP-based backend services, such as Apache ActiveMQ and Jabber to a variety of clients (e.g. Java, Silverlight, and Flash) other than JavaScript.

The second half of this university session will be about deploying and scaling “real-time” Web Applications. Eg. the server and network architecture, performance requirements and scalability of a bi-directional Web application will be discussed.

Check out Jonas Jacobi’s blog for more info!

Filthy Rich Clients: beyond Java

Interested in the new Google Android phone? Then you certainly should not miss this univerity session by Romain Guy.

Romain Guy, who’s now working on the UI design of the Android phones as a Google engineer, always manages to impress the crowd with cool demos and knows what it takes to design a intuitive user-interface.
(which is more important than most programmers think!)

Chet Haase, who works on animation and UI components for the Flex SDK team at Adobe Systems, will likewise describe how to achieve beautiful Filthy Rich Client applications for Flex.