Microsoft releases final version of IE 7

After several months of development and beta testing, Microsoft have released the final version of IE 7. This is the first browser update from Microsoft since IE 6 almost 5 years ago, and also since Microsoft announced back in 2003 that they would not be developing any standalone (non Windows integrated) browsers in the future, but chosing to spend their time integrating the browser into the OS instead.

This latest release does not really offer any new features that what have alreadty been available in Firefox. IE7 seems to be more or a ‘catch up’ release to ensure that IE has ‘me too’ features, so that there is not a chance that it will be left behind in the attention that Firefox has been generating in the past couple of years.

Rails Live CD 0.2.1 released – bootable Linux with Ruby on Rails development support

If you’re interested in taking a look at Ruby and Ruby on Rails but haven’t yet downloaded the frameworks or development tools, then the Rails Live CD is an awesome idea to get you started quickly.

Rails Live CD is a bootable Linux distro that contains all the tools you’ll need to get you started, without you having to install or configure a thing. This is well worth a look if the only thing putting you off so far has been to download and install the tools.

JavaPosse GWT Roundtable discussion

The JavaPosse recently had a roundtable discussion involving people connected with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) – Robert Hanson, who works with the GWT Widget Library, Bruce Johnson, the Tech Lead of the GWT project, and Ryan Dewsbury, developer of the GPokr.com site (which is implemented using GWT).

The podcast is worth a listen to get some background information about the development of GWT and it’s usage, and how it has been used on projects so far.

JBoss release Hibernate 3.2

JBoss have released Hibernate 3.2, which is now fully compliant with the JPA spec.

Using Hibernate Annotations, O/R mappings can now be declared using EJB3.0 style annotations inline in the Java classes, instead of (or together with) the previous approach of XML based mapping files.