After some previous 3.2.0 ALPHA releases, this is the first 3.2.0 BETA release. It comes with some new features and some improvements.
The Netty 3.2.0 ALPHA3 already came with Web Sockets support and now the BETA also contains the zero-copy file transfer feature. It also contains a more user-friendly API ( 3.1 deprecated methods are removed ) and it has a higher performance.

About the netty project:
The Netty project is an effort to provide an asynchronous, event-driven network application framework and tools for rapid development of maintainable, high-performance, high-scalability protocol server and clients. 

What the future will bring:
Since the HTTP tunneling transport has been rescheduled to the next major feature release (3.3), all planned features have been implemented. Unless there is a critical issue, they will proceed to release candidate phase.

For more information, click here

The Griffon team is happy to announce the release of Griffon 0.3, nicknamed "Leopardus pardalis" - and is the fourth major release of Griffon. Griffon is a Grails inspired framework for writing RIA's , ( which are web applications that have most of the characteristics of desktop applications ) on the JVM using Groovy.

Some new features are:
* Upgraded to Groovy 1.7.1
* New Artifact inspection API -- adds the ability to inspect artifacts at runtime and apply meta-programming.
* New plugins: i18n, artifacts, db4o, berkleleydb, erlang, flyingsaucer, p6spy, jmx and more!

At the moment my project team and me are programming a Bank web application.

It is build using JBoss with JSF, and we are using JAAS for security reasons.
Since there can be many errors, a custom 404 error page can come in handy.
With JBoss, it isn’t all that difficult …  you just need to know how.

To do so ... edit your web.xml. You have to add this:
< web-app>
    ...
        < error-page>
            < error-code>404< /error-code>
            < location>/YourLocation/YourErrorPage.html< /location>
        < /error-page>
    ...
< /web-app>

Since much is done dynamically, you don’t have to define anything else but this.
(Of course you have to create your own error page)

As for complications:
I’m running Firefox and it all worked fine, but a member of my team is running Internet Explorer,
He got a “This webage cannot be found” message … after a little bit of googling, this was the trick:
Go to: Internet Options … Advanced Tab … and uncheck “Show friendly HTTP error messages”

This release does not have any new features, since its just a minor bugfix. But its still important news for the Spring Security projects out there, because Spring Security is a framework that provides advanced authentication, authorization and other even security features for enterprise applications. Its not really a framework you want any bugs in.

When doing a little research about the new release of Spring Security I also found a nice blogpost from Glen Smith: hacking custom authentication providers with grails spring security, which is also very recently posted.

So if you have a Spring Security project running, here is the changelog.

Here is just a small intro to recursive methods; Basically, a recursive method is a method that calls itself; e.g.

int fibonacci(int n) {
    if(n <= 1)     {
        return n;
    }     else     {
        return fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2);
    }
}    (this method returns the n'th value of the Fibonacci sequence)

As you can see in the example above, the part that makes this method recursive is:
       return fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n – 2);
because there, the method calls his own function again.

 In my opinion there are benefits to recursive methods ( but not always ) like: a problem can be defined as a recursive problem or because of a recursive method your programming code can be shorter.

JavaFX is a software platform for creating and delivering rich Internet applications that can run across wide variety of connected devices. The JavaFX SDK and the JavaFX Plugin for Eclipse 3.5.x IDE enable you to manage JavaFX applications in Eclipse. Getting started with JavaFX Technology.

New changes for version 1.2.1 since the June 2009 release is e.g.: it has a new wizard for importing NetBeans JavaFX projects into Eclipse. As well as an Improved Build System so that larger projects now can be built more succesfully.

I found a short demonstration of how to install the JavaFX Plugin in Eclipse                                    (using JavaFX Version 1.0.1 for Eclipse)

The release of jBPM 4.3 is a great milestone, because jBPM 4.3 includes BPMN 2.0.
BPMN2, Business Process Modeling Notation 2.0 adds execution semantics to the specification and is a standard accepted in IT. They were succesfull with including the BPMN implementation
 as an integral part of the jBPM, which means that no database or API changes are required.

The major achievement of this release is the native BPMN 2.0 execution on top of the PVM ( process virtual machine).

For more information see this video from Joram Barrez.

The complete distribution zip file can be found here.

One month after the original planned date, the NetBeans developers have announced that NetBeans IDE ( Integrated Development Environment ) 6.8 Beta is now available for download. This version has some nice new features such as updates for EJB 3.1, support for the latest JavaFX SDK ( 1.2.1 ) and not to forget; support for Java EE 6.

Since the beta version of NetBeans 6.8 is released with delay, the final version of NetBeans 6.8 can now be expected somewhere in mid-December, instead in the end of November.

More features and update information can be found in the Release Information. You can download Netbeans IDE 6.8 Beta here. ( And is available for Windows, Mac, Solaris and Linux )

Java VisualVM is a tool that provides a visual interface for viewing detailed information about Java applications while they are running on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and for troubleshooting and profiling these applications. As an application developer you can easily monitor, profile, take thread dumps and browse heap dumps. Furthermore, developers can extend Java VisualVM to add new functionality by creating and posting plug-ins to the tool's built-in update center.

With the new release, VisualVM 1.2 introduces many new features such as: sampling profiler, redesigned charts, enhanced jstatd support and customizable proxy settings. You can download it here or for more features and enhancements you can take a look at the release note.

JApplets: get your certificate here.

There are a lot of JApplets swarming around on the internet. Yet only some applets pop-up a certificate before running, and ask you to either grand or deny it access. Have you ever denied that question?