Jaspersoft announced that their Business Intelligence Suite achieved "Works with Windows Server 2008" certification.

Jaspersoft has worked together with Microsoft and just released an Excel connector, though not under an open source license. Their products are developed on the Java platform.

Equinox is a new implementation of OSGI (a component integration platform), which is quite a departure from the development tools focus of the Eclipse Foundation. Being developed under the Eclipse umbrella, the project has several resources available to ease your invlovement.

Version 2 of the GridGain open-source Java grid framework includes monitoring, intermediate checkpoints, a fully dynamic MapReduce implementation, Data Partitioning & Affinity Load Balancing and more. More details on The Server Side and InfoQ.

"Grails is a dynamic web-application framework built in Java and Groovy, leveraging best of breed APIs from the Java EE sphere including Spring, Hibernate and SiteMesh". This release features content negociation, REST and JNDI support. Worth checking if you're developing a website on the Java platform.

Sun's PDF rendered, which has its origin back in 2003, has now been released under the LGPL license This is not a PDF generator. It is an all Java tool that renders PDF documents to the screen using Java2D.
Potential uses listed on the project page are:

JPedal, an other Java PDF renderer is also available, but it released under the GPL.

Netbeans, the cross-platform (Linux, Solaris, Mac, Windows) IDE and development platform built by Sun on the Java platform, and initiallly focusing on Java development, but now also actively supporting Ruby and Ruby on Rails (and their equivalent on the Java platform powered by JRuby) and C/C++, has reached version 6. It is now available in several bundles, each with a specific focus: Web and Java EE (with Glassfish and Tomcat part of the bundle), Mobility, Java SE, Ruby, C/C++. The complete bundle, with everything included, is also available.

During the development phase of this release, Netbeans has received positive press when compared to Eclipse, but also for its first-class Ruby support with completion and refactoring.

And as mentioned above, it is also a platform on which you can build your own rich applications.

Time to get it and check it for yourself!

Joining other open source ESBs having a recent release, Apache Synapse reached version 1.1 and gives several enhancements, , including:

SymmetricDS reached version 1.0 early november. It is a "web-enabled, database independent, data synchronization software. It uses web and database technologies to replicate tables between relational databases in near real time. The software was designed to scale for a large number of databases, work across low-bandwidth connections, and withstand periods of network outage.". Database triggers can be used for synchronisation, garanteeing atomicity of operations, but push and pull of data at intervals is also possible. Advanced features such as data filtering and re-routing are also available. Mysql and Oracle are supported out of the box, but other adapters can be developed.

As seen on The Server Side.

JBoss, now part of Redhat, has released Seam 2, the web application development framework. Thsi is a major release with quite a few new things: conversational web services, Groovy support, hot deploy, Eclipse support and more. Gavin King, project lead, answered some questions at Infoq.

Red Hat has signed the contributor agreement needed to collaborate on the OpenJDK development, and has now acccess to the OpenJDK Community Test Compatibility Kit which allows it to implement OpenJDK and test its compatibility with the implementation the project itself develops.

Via News.com and Techworld.com.