From Kris Thompson:
Sun invites you to participate in a free demo of Java Studio Creator (a.k.a. Rave) next Wednesday and/or Thursday.
Hmmm, the word free seems to imply they're going to charge for this sucker. It's gonna be a Java-filled month of April for me. This weekend is the NYC Seminar, next week I'm training folks on Spring, Struts, Hibernate and AppFuse and then the week after I'm in Orlando for the MySQL Conference and JUG Meeting. When it rains, it pours...
View changelog or download. New features in this release include a EL tag that allows JSTL's EL expressions in all attributes, as well as the ability to use Struts Menu outside of a Struts application. I also took the time to add a database-driven example to the sample app.
For the database-driven menu (as well as the app I'm writing for Spring Live) - I'm using HSQL. I never even touched the sucker before last week and I gotta say - damn it's easy. Just drop the JAR into WEB-INF/lib and when you make a database connection - it'll create the database on-the-fly. Even better, if you're using Hibernate, you can set a property (hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=create) and it'll create your tables on-the-fly too. Cool stuff - HSQL rocks for sample apps. I don't know if it's production worthy - but I certainly like what I've seen so far.