Sun's posted the call for papers for JavaOne 2005. Submissions are due by January 31. Mostly, though, speaking slots at this conference seem to be increasingly restricted to Sun employees. From year to year it gets harder for anyone else to get a slot, and Sun exercises very tight control of the conference to make sure no one goes to far astray from the party line.
Eric Lafortune has released ProGuard 3.2, a free-as-in-speech (GPL) "class file shrinker, optimizer, and obfuscator. It can detect and remove unused classes, fields, methods, and attributes. It can then optimize bytecode and remove unused instructions. Finally, it can rename the remaining classes, fields, and methods using short meaningless names. The resulting jars are smaller and harder to reverse-engineer." Version 3.2 fixes bugs and improves performance and documentation.
Rob Lougher has releeased JamVM 1.2.3, a free (GPL) Java Virtual Machine that "conforms to the JVM specification version 2 (blue book). In comparison to most other VM's (free and commercial) it is extremely small, with a stripped executable on PowerPC of only ~100K, and Intel 80K. However, unlike other small VMs (e.g. KVM) it is designed to support the full specification, and includes support for object finalisation, the Java Native Interface (JNI) and the Reflection API." Like most free VMs it relies on the Gnu Classpath library. 1.2.3 is mostly a bug fix release. JamVM only interprets code. It does not have a Just-In-Time compiler.
YourKit, LLC has posted the first public beta of YourKit Java Profiler 4.0, a 295€ payware tool for detecting memory leaks and memory consumption bottlenecks. It features Automation of memory leak detection, an object heap browser, JUnit integration, IntelliJ IDEA, Borland JBuilder integration. Version 4.0 adds support for Mac OS X and simplifies analysis of custom class loaders and the classes they load.