The introduction of Java EE 7 is a free online event where you can connect with Java users from all over the world as you learn about the power and capabilities of Java EE 7. Join us for presentations from Oracle technical leaders and Java users from both large and small enterprises, deep dives into the new JSRs, and scheduled chats with Java experts.

The webcast includes keynote addresses, on-demand breakout sessions featuring demonstrations of the new JSRs involved in EE7 and live chats with Java experts.

Check out the webcast registration page to register for the event. and to check the times in different timezones.

Are you excited about Java EE 7, and will you be registering for the webcast?  Leave your thoughts in a comment to this post.

The Apache TomEE project is proud to announce the availability of TomEE 1.5.2, a maintenance release focused on driving stability and maturity into the 1.5.x codebase. The 1.5.2 release does contain minor new features and improvements around tooling, such as the Arquillian adapters and TomEE Maven Plugin as well as key upgrades such as Tomcat 7.0.39 and OpenWebBeans 1.1.8. The vast majority of server-side new features and improvements are targeted at the coming TomEE 1.6.0 which has a very strong performance focus, specifically for small devices such as the Raspberry PI.

TomEE is the all Apache Java EE stack comprising many Apache technologies that build a Java EE 6 Web Profile certified application server.

TomEE can be downloaded is several flavours:

• Java EE 6 Web Profile Certified
• JAX-RS – The Java EE 6 Web Profile certified version plus JAX-RS web services
• TomEE+ – The Java EE 6 Web Profile certified version plus JAX-RS web services plus EJB FULL, Java EE Connector, JMS and JAX-WS

A full comparison between Tomcat and the different flavours of TomEE can be found here.

Full details of new features, bugs and improvements can be found on the project’s download page.

What are your thoughts about TomEE?  Are you a current user or do you plan to migrate to TomEE?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Existing users of NetBeans should see a notification icon at the bottom right of their IDE informing them that the patch is available.  If not, the patch can be installed by clicking the “Tools | Plugins” menu option and selecting the “Check for Updates” button.

The changelog details the changes in this release, however the important changes are said to be:

• There have been multiple improvements in the bytes to/from characters conversion process. The core conversion process has been refactored to use the NIO APIs. This has resulted in a number of improvements including invalid UTF-8 byte sequences at the end of a series of bytes now trigger a conversion error rather than being silently swallowed. Errors detected in request URIs will be replaced with the replacement character (allowing the application to respond to the invalid URI as it wishes) and errors in request bodies will trigger an IOException. The use of the JVM provided UTF-8 decoder has been replaced by a better UTF-8 decoder derived from Apache Harmony. This improved decoder has earlier detection of error conditions and more closely follows the Unicode specification regarding the use of replacement characters.
• The annotation scanning process now provides more information if the scan fails due to broken class dependencies. There is now enough information to identify the class(es) at fault. The JAR scanning process that supports annotation scanning has also seen multiple improvements and fixes including the exclusion by default of the Bootstrap class path from the scan.
• Upgraded a number of Tomcat’s dependencies including Commons Daemon to 1.0.14, Commons IO to 2.4 and Commons FileUpload to r1458500. A new dependency on Commons Codec was added to replace Tomcat’s internal Base64 encoder/decoder.

In the webinar, Josh Long, Spring developer advocate, was set to discuss exposing RESTFUL services through Spring MVC using HTML 5, Spring Mobile and Spring Android.

A recording of the webinar has now been made available and runs at just short of 90 minutes. You can watch the webinar below, or head on over to You Tube to watch.

EAP 129.17 contains many bug fixes in many different areas of the product (from Android and Flash development tools through to web and Java EE tooling) as detailed in the release notes.  This new release can be downloaded from the IntelliJ web site.

The full release of IntelliJ IDEA 12.1 is expected towards the end of this month and will be a free upgrade for current users of IntelliJ IDEA 12.

If you’re an IntelliJ IDEA user, what do you think of this EAP? Are you looking forward to the full release of IDEA 12.1?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

This new version of the Spring Framework can be automatically used within Maven projects by setting the artifact version number to 3.2.2.RELEASE, for example:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-beans</artifactId>
    <version>3.2.2.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

or the software can be downloaded from the Spring Community Downloads page.

This new release contains nearly 50 bug fixes and a similar number of improvements, both for ease of use and performance.

The full release notes for this version can be found here.

Several changes are made in this release of Ant that have the possibility of breaking older environments (although probably unlikely).  The main one if these is that this new release requires a minimum of Java 5. The others are described as:

• FixCRLF used to treat the EOL value ASIS to convert to the system property line.separator. Specified was that ASIS would leave the EOL characters alone, the task now really leaves the EOL characters alone. This also implies that EOL ASIS will not insert a newline even if fixlast is set to true. Bugzilla report 53036
• The CommandLauncher hierarchy that used to be a set of inner classes of Execute has been extracted to the org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.launcher package.
• Any FileResource whose represented File has a parent also has a basedir.
• Removing the Perforce Ant tasks replaced by tasks supplied by Perforce Inc.
• Setting the default encoding of StringResource to UTF-8 instead of null
• Upgrade JUnit 4 to JUnit 4.11

Full details of all the issues fixed with this release can be found here.

This updated version of Ant can be downloaded form the project’s download site.

Spring Integration is an addon package to the Spring Framework that provides support for Enterprise Integration Patterns within Spring applications.

Spring Integration

… “enables lightweight messaging within Spring-based applications and supports integration with external systems via declarative adapters. Those adapters provide a higher-level of abstraction over Spring’s support for remoting, messaging, and scheduling. Spring Integration’s primary goal is to provide a simple model for building enterprise integration solutions while maintaining the separation of concerns that is essential for producing maintainable, testable code.”

This new release is relatively minor containing approximately 10 issues being resolved.  The full release notes can be found here.

More information, including downloads of Spring Integration can be obtained from the project’s home page.

In the webinar Pete will show you:

• Cutting-edge frameworks.
• Recommended architectures and approaches.
• A choice of tools.
• Troubleshooting help.
• Hints and tips on getting started.

The webinar is to be held on Thursday March 14 at 16:00 UTC.

For registration and further details, check out the RedHat information page.