Bob McWhirter has been playing with JBoss and Rails integration; clearly he’s made a lot of progress – to the extent where he can start to eat his own dog food. His new work related blog (OddThesis) is running in a hosted environment on Rails on JBoss – great stuff.

I’ve already mentioned Jopr a couple of times but this wink demo caught my eye and I’m sure it will be a pretty important feature for the millions of Hibernate users out there – Monitoring Hibernate from Jopr. For what it’s worth – the name Jopr still isn’t working for me – my fingers want to type Jorp.

Max announced that JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS) 2.0 beta is available for free – you just have to sign up for an evaluation. Go here for more info. or here to register for the free eval.

Gavin King has an essay on how he thinks Web Beans needs to integrate with Java EE 6; it’s also a good explanation of what Web Beans is (and isn’t) and why it’s essential to EE 6.

Microsoft aren’t known for their commitment to openness, interoperability and providing customer choice; but the announcement that they’re joining the AMQP working group maybe demonstrates that a leapoard can change its spots. More importantly and practically – there is hope for simple and efficient interoperability with the world of Microsoft – assuming thet actually adopt AMQP in their platform.

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.