The JBoss AS team moved to a more rapid and incremental release cycle with the 6.x family and the second milestone was released today (release notes, download, repo.). The release was lead by Brian Stansberry and new features include :

• Servlet 3.0 / JBoss Web 3.0
• JPA 2.0 / Hibernate 3.5
• JAX-RS 1.0 / RESTEasy 2.0
• Microcontainer 2.2

More detail in blogs from Ales, Brian, Steve and Rémy. Congratulations to Brian on another on-time release and good luck to Jason and team for the next milestone release in a couple of months time.

JBoss Messaging 2.0 beta is out. According to JBM lead, Tim Fox – New features include, performance, performance, performance, flexible clustering, seamless high-availability, large message support. See Tim’s announcement for details.

Thomas Diesler has some thoughts on how the JBoss Microcontainer could fully implement the OSGi spec. It will be interesting to see the results of this and it will be a great example of the power and flexibility of the JBoss architecture. JBossOSGi 1.0.0 Beta2 was released last week.

If you are eager to try out Eclipse 3.5 / Galileo and want to explor the upcoming features in JBoss Tools / JBDS you now can – JBoss Tools 3.1.0.M1 is available. See what’s new and noteworthy.

The recently released Seam 2.1.2 includes improved support for JAX-RS (RESTful web services) – more details here.

Finally, we have a free online seminar tomorrow (June 10th) at 9am EDT, 3pm CEST which covers Web Beans (JSR-299 / JCDI – Java Contexts and Dependency Injection). More details here.

Bob McWhirter has been playing around with Ruby and JBoss – here’s his first progress report. The start of something cool I’m sure.

JAX-RS (aka JSR 311) is approved – now we just need a TCK. Bill has just released beta 8 of RestEasy and also posted some REST inspired articles on DZone (Intro. to REST, Putting Java to REST). Bill also provides some sage and hard-earned advice for Rod Johnson – I agree, and said this a while back – monetizing OSS is about more carrot and less stick.

Over on the JBoss Portal blog – there’s some nice horizontal scalability testing results. Portal is getting a real shot in the arm – we have a new Product Manager (thanks IBM) and a new project lead and the team seems pretty fired up. We even made Gartner’s MQ for horizontal portals – not bad given the young age of the project.

Nancy was murdered.

We are bereft.  While the family have lost “a spoke in their wheel”, we have lost the hub of ours.

Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!! about 2 hours ago from web

What do you do when you’ve established yourself as one of the largest, most sucessful software companies on the planet, with millions of customers who depend on your technology and billions in revenue – yeh – increase your prices. Thanks Oracle; great move; great timing.

The Mentos and Coke trick isn’t exactly new but this is a pretty funny – note this is probably dangerous – if you take one of your friend’s eyes out doing this – don’t blame me.

Beautiful visualization of an Open Source project via code_swarm.

Bill Burke is experimenting with JMS (Java Message Service) and REST – pretty interesting stuff.

A different perspective on our Solar system from the NASA’s Cassini probe – the pictures are simple yet stunning.

Bill Burke will be talking about REST and how the the new Java spec. – JAX-RS can be used to write RESTful applications and services.

Richard Stallman is ranting about London Underground’s use of FOSS for their new Oyster Card system – he thinks it’s unethical because the Oyster Card could be used to invade customer’s privacy. The system is built with RHEL & JBoss. Richard should go visit pretty much any  3-letter-agency in the world – I’m sure he’d find plenty of FOSS powering their ‘business’.