Sun has posted an early access release of Java Studio Creator, a.k.a. "Project Rave". This is their so-called VB Killer. (Long time Java programmers remember this is Sun's second whack at the VB pinata, the first being the moribund JavaBeans.) Frankly, I doubt any tool based on Java can replace Visual Basic. Java is simply too complex, high-level a language for the vast majority of VB programmers toiling away in corporate development. Still if it make client side Java devlopment easier, it may be a big boon to many exxisting Java developers, and maybe pull a few heads over from the .NET camp. So far it's available for Windows, Linux, and Solaris only. Early reports are that it will run on Mac OS X, but you'll have to install it on another platform and then copy it over first.
The tutorials are annoyingly PDF only. Worse yet, they're linked to via JavaScript so you can't even eaily download them to your disk and print them without doing the "Acrobat plug-in freezes the machine for 2 minutes" dance. Bleah. Hmm, it occurs to me that XML geek and known Acrobat disser Tim Bray has recently joined Sun. Tim, could you do us all out here in Netland a favor and walk over to whichever office produced this page and politely beat the developers upside the head with a clue stick? Thanks.
Not specifically Java related, but I note that XFree86 4.4.0 is out. I haven't tested it yet, but it looks like this release may actually support digital flat panels driven by ARI Radeon cards. At least I hope it will. XFRee86 4.3 could not handle my SGI flat panel at 1600x1024 resolution, even though XFRee86 4.2 could. I'll probably wait till 4.4 gets bundled with some distro to test it.
Bodo Tasche has posted JCalendar 0.7.6, an open source calendar GUI widget for Java that "provides a ComboBox (JCalendarComboBox) for selecting a Date and a simple Panel (JCalendarPanel) for showing and editing a Date." This release adds a few more languages and fixes a few bugs. JCalendar is published under a BSD license.