Doug Lea has posted the proposed final draft specification of Java Specification Request (JSR) 166, Concurrency Utilities, to the Java Community Process (JCP). There's also a public mailing list, CVS repository, and preliminary test release. Kudos to Lea for making the process mcuh more open than is customary within the JCP. There's a lot of cool stuff here including thread local variables, thread-wide exception handlers, queues, locks, atomic values and more. This is planned to become part of Java 1.5.
NOAA has released the Scientific Graphics Toolkit 3.0 (sgt), a set of JavaBeans that enables "platform independent, Java applications to produce highly interactive, flexible, publication quality, object oriented graphics of scientific data. Features include user settable or automatically scaled axes, sophisticated, automatically self-scaling time axes, labels as movable, customizable objects, automatic generation of legends to explain the data being displayed, and many more." Java 1.4 is required.
IBM's alphaWorks has released a Dictionary and Thesaurus API for Java, "a standard-based class library for accessing a dictionary and thesaurus using Java. It provides programming access to wordbook data from the Java programming language. Various actors involved in this library are driver providers, users, and applications with tightly- or loosely-coupled dictionaries, word processors, and/or thesauri. Using this library, applications written in the Java programming language can have access to data such as definition, pronunciation, synonyms, acronyms, etc., for a particular word, independent of vendors." The native storage format for the data files is XML.