As noted by John Munsch, MyJavaPack looks pretty cool. At first glance, it looks like an open-source version of Open Logic's Blue Glue. Since I actually did some work on Blue Glue this summer, I downloaded MyJavaPack and did a a quick install.
I was quite impressed. All it did was download the packages I requested and installed them. In most cases, this is what I want - especially on my machine where I already have everything setup. Blue Glue goes a bit further than MyJavaPack. It installs and configures everything for you. This is great for brand new machines, but can be a pain for pre-configured machines since it adds stuff to your PATH.
The thing I like about MyJavaPack is that it's open-source. Therefore, I might be able to dig in and customize it for an AppFuse-based installer. Such an intaller would include tools for developing AppFuse: Ant, Tomcat, MySQL, Eclipse and AppFuse. That'd be pretty cool to be able to download and install an entire development environment.
Neither product does what we all really want: the ability to do an "update" (like Windows Update or Software Update on OS X) of our existing packages.
Last April, I attended the MySQL Conference in Orlando. It was a good time, but the number of Java Developers there was pitiful. I had a good time hanging out with Mark (Matthews) and Anthony, but it was still a poor showing. Now MySQL is gearing up for this year's conference (April in Santa Clara) and I'm thinking about submitting a proposal. Anyone interested in joining me? Let's bombard them with proposals and see if we can take over the sucker! If nothing else, it'd be cool to hang with more Java Developers in California.
The conference actually ends the day before Julie and I's 5th year anniversary (April 22nd). If my proposal gets accepted - I think we're going to have Julie's sister babysit and Julie will fly out to spend the weekend touring around wine country. Sounds like fun, eh? Now I just need to find some sort of limo so we can do lots of tasting. 
I got an interesting e-mail the other day from my.rsscache.com. It appears to be a caching service for your RSS feeds. I definitely have bandwidth issues, but I'm not too concerned because Google Ads pay for my hosting costs. This looks like a valuable service, and it's cool they have a cached version of my RSS feed, but I'm wondering what the catch is? There has to be some sort of catch. Are they just trying to get weblogs to signup, and advertise their service - and then hope to get big corporate players that will pay?
