JDK 6u14 and JRE 6u14 are now available for download from Sun, or through the Java updater.

This new version contains many new features including:

• Support for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Vista SP2
• Blacklist Jar filtering
• Improved reliability and performance in the HotSpot VM.
• A preliminary version of the new G1 garbage collector.
• Upgraded JAX WS and JAXB.
• Upgraded JavaDB.
• Updated VisualVM.
• Numerous bug fixes.

Packt is pleased to announce a new book on Seam 2.x that teaches developers to integrate technologies like JSF, EJB, JPA with Seam. Written by David Salter, Seam 2.x Web Development helps readers develop rich web applications using Seam 2.x, Facelets, and RichFaces, and deploy them on the JBoss Application Server.

The Seam framework from JBoss allows developers to use JSF, Facelets, EJB, and JPA to write conversational web applications. But at first they would have to learn how these standard technologies are integrated using Seam, and how they can be built upon using additional Seam components. This book will teach developers just that in order to help them build a Java web application quickly.

This book provides a practical approach to developing Seam applications highlighting good development practices. The reader will understand the fundamentals of Seam and why it is different from many other web frameworks. They will learn to test Seam components and web pages in a Seam application. 

Developers will learn how to utilize the RichFaces library to develop advanced, rich user interfaces including AJAX technologies to improve the user experience. By using the Java Persistence API (JPA), they will also learn to develop persistent applications. Users will learn to build conversational web applications that can run over multiple browser windows and secure applications, using role-based security, CAPTCHA, and OpenId.

Java EE developers interested in developing with Seam 2.x will find this book useful. The book is out now and available from Packt. For more information, please visit http://www.packtpub.com/seam-2-x-web-development/book

Google Guice version 2 has been released and is now available fordownload.

Guice is described as alleviating

the need for factories and the use of new in your Java code. Think of Guice's @Inject as the new new. You will still need to write factories in some cases, but your code will not depend directly on them. Your code will be easier to change, unit test and reuse in other contexts.

Guice embraces Java's type safe nature, especially when it comes to features introduced in Java 5 such as generics and annotations. You might think of Guice as filling in missing features for core Java. Ideally, the language itself would provide most of the same features, but until such a language comes along, we have Guice.

According to Jesse Wilson of the Google Developer Team, Guice is used in almost every Java based application at Google, including AdWords, Google Docs and GMail.

Version 2 of Guice provides many new features which are listed on the project'sWiki.

Geertjan Wielenga has announced a new project hosted on java.net that adds RichFaces support to NetBeans.

The aims of the project are described as:

1. Automatic IDE registration of RichFaces libraries so that the user does not need to download these separately.
2. Web application template extension that lets the user put the RichFaces libraries on the classpath.
3. The necessary entries automatically added to the web.xml file.
4. A basic JSF bean automatically generated into the project when it is created, with related entries in the faces-config.xml file.
5. Tag completion of RichFaces tags in JSP files.
6. JSP file template that includes RichFaces taglibs.
7. JSP Palette with all the common RichFaces tags.

I'd recommend any NetBeans developers using RichFaces (or perhaps Seam) to look at this project. Although the functionality is limited at present, the potential and future of this project looks good.

Further details of the project, including examples can be found on Geertjan's blog.