In Relation To

It looks like we can add to the Christmas cheer by announcing that Seam 2.1.1 is now out. Seam 2.1.1 is largely a bug-fix release, with a number of notable performance improvements, especially around hot deploy. We've added support for PDF forms to the iText integration as well as OpenID support. Seam-gen now generates IntelliJ IDEA projects. And, I should also point out that we've changed a few of the URLs on examples to match up better with the example names. If you are developing on Seam 2.1, you should consider upgrading quickly to get the latest fixes.

I'm pleased to announce the release of the Web Beans RI 1.0.0.ALPHA1. This release implements the core of the JSR-299 Web Beans specification and represents a major milestone on the road towards the GA release. Some of the highlights of this release include simple and enterprise Web Beans, support for JBoss Application Server 5, typesafe injection, events and producer methods. There's an exhaustive list below.

From all of us to all of you a very merry Candidate Release of JBoss Tools 3.

The Web Beans specification defines an XML configuration format that uses XML namespaces to achieve typesafety.

There's been plenty of discussion in the JPA group about my typesafe criteria proposal. My new favorite feature of the Java language is javax.annotation.Processor. Java 6 annotation processors are derived from the APT tool that existed in JDK 5, but are built into javac. Really, the name annotation processor is misleading, since this feature is only incidentally related to annotations. The Processor is really a fairly general purpose compiler plugin. If, like me, you've never been a fan of code generation, now is the time to reconsider. A Java 6 Processor can:

The Web Beans event bus provides a very nice way for stateful components to synchronize their state with changes that take place in the application.

The public draft of the JPA 2.0 specification is already out and includes a much-awaited feature: an API that lets you create queries by calling methods of Java objects, instead of by embedding JPA-QL into strings that are parsed by the JPA implementation. You can learn more about the API proposed by the public draft at Linda's blog.

Seam 2.1.1.CR2 is ready. We're really close to a final release, so please give it a test. Assuming we don't find any more issues, and right now things are looking good, you can probably look for a GA in the next week.

Seam 2.1.1 adds OpenID support as the first of, we hope, many external authentication options in Seam. Since this is fairly new, I've put together a mini-FAQ on our OpenID support.

Alexander Snaps and I were asked a few moments ago to do a emergency step-in Monday morning at Devoxx because Mike Keith will not be able to make it.