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.

You’ll need JBoss AS 5 to run it in (download, getting started guide). If this is all new to you – I collected some useful links for Web Beans / JCDI here.

Since my last post on Web Beans – the specification has changed name – it’s now called “Java Contexts and Dependency Injection”, according to Gavin (the spec. lead) the name changed to :

… better reflect the fact that the focus of 299 is the definition of services that apply to all EE component types, rather than the creation of a new component model

The reference implementation and JBoss’ implementation will continue to use the Web Beans name which is great because I can say that without asphyxiating.

For an overview of Web Beans, Gavin (spec. lead) has written a five part series :

• Part I – Introducing Web Beans
• Part II – Injection, binding annotations and component types
• Part III – Declaring components using XML
• Part IV – Scopes, contexts and resolver methods
• Part V – Interceptors and events

There’s also the new Reference Guide written by Gavin and Pete to get you up to speed. Then you’re ready to download AS 5.0.0 and the Web Beans Alpha.

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.

Seam 2.1 was released a couple of weeks ago and in fact there’s already an update (Seam 2.1.0 SP1). Major updates in Seam 2.1 are :

identity management framework with ACL style permissions, an Excel reporting module, an embellished and more flexible seam-gen, first class support for Wicket, built-in support for URL rewriting and a technology preview of JAX-RS (REST) support through the RESTeasy project.