A few days ago, we linked to a poll running on the eclipse.org site asking users to help decide the name for the 2013 Eclipse simultaneous release. 

Eclipse community members have voted and the most popular suggested name, with nearly half the votes at 48%, is Kepler.

To celebrate the release of JBoss AS7 Configuration, Deployment and Administration by Francesco Marchioni, Packt Publishing and Develop In Java are providing one competition winner with a free e-book of this title.

To be in with a chance of winning, all you have to do is reply to this post leaving a comment stating why you'd like a copy of the book or what you you think you'll learn from reading it.

The draw is open for four weeks until 12:00 GMT on 14th February 2012.  What better Valentines Day gift could you give someone?

For more information on the book, check out Packt Publishing's Web Site.

Remember, all you need to do to be in with a chance of winning the e-book is to reply to this blog post.

Good luck (and don't forget to leave your email address so we can contact the winner) !

A new community poll over on eclipse.org is asking readers to help decide the name of the 2013 annual release of Eclipse.  Each year the Eclipse Foundation releases a new version of Eclipse - this year it was Eclipse Indigo.

The 2013 release of Eclipse must start with the letter "K", and the suggestions for the poll are:

I know my favourite, what's yours?  Head on over to eclipse.org to cast your vote.  The poll will remain open until January 15.

We've just posted a new article on how to Deploy a Java EE Web Application to Open Shift Express using JBoss AS 7.  You can read the entire article here.

According to jboss.org:

Recently, we reviewed the EJB 3.1 Cookbook by Richard Reese.  We thought that it was an "excellent resource in an EJB developer's library".

Now, thanks to Packt Publishing, you can win a free e-book copy of the book.  All you have to do is leave a comment detailing why you would like the book, or what features of the book you think would be most useful to you.

To enter, simply leave your comment here in our forums.

The competition is open until Friday 2nd September when we'll chose a random winner to receive a free copy of the EJB 3.1 e-book courtesy of Packt Publishing.

You can get more details of the book Packt's web site at: 

The Tomcat team has announced that as of 30th September 2012 Tomcat 5.5 will be unsupported.
Mark Thomas states in the Tomcat mailing lists:

"This means that after 30 September 2012:
- releases from the 5.5.x branch are highly unlikely
- bugs affecting only the 5.5.x branch will not be addressed
- security vulnerability reports will not be checked against the 5.5.x branch

Three months later (i.e. after 31 December 2012)
- the 5.5.x download pages will be removed
- the latest 5.5.x release will be removed from the mirror system
- the 5.5.x branch in svn will move from /tomcat/tc5.5.x to /tomcat/archive/tc5.5.x
- the links to the 5.5.x documentation will be removed from tomcat.apache.org
- The bugzilla project for 5.5.x will be made read-only

Note that all 5.5.x releases will always be available from the archive."

Now that NetBeans 7 Release Candidate has been released, the NetBeans team are asking for your thoughts as to whether the software is stable for general release.

The NetBeans Community Acceptance Survey provides invaluable information to the NetBeans team about the stability and new features added into NetBeans 7,

If you're using NetBeans 7 RC, please consider completing the survey.

SpringSource are offering a free webinar tomorrow (March 17th 2011) on Spring and Getting Started with the SpringSource Tool Suite.

Two webinars are available, at 10am PST and 2pm UK time.

Further details are available from SpringSource.

Yesterday Apple released Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3.

This update is available to install via the standard software update in Max OS X.

In the release notes for this update however, Apple have stated their intent to deprecate Java.

What this means for the future of Java on the Mac platform is unsure.  It is well known there is no love for Java from Cupertino, but many developers rely on Macs for their Java development due to the features that OS X provides over Windows, so would Apple really abandon Java?

Is it time for Oracle to make a JVM for the Mac?  What do you think?

At this weeks DevCon 2010, the annual conference for BlackBerry developers, Research in Motion has announced new tools for Java developers.

The BlackBerry Java Plug-in for Eclipse running on MacOS X was announced with a Technical Preview being available to download.

In addition to releasing tools for MacOS X developers, RIM has announced several new platforms that will be available to BlackBerry Java developers over the coming months:

The advertising service (which is currently already available) allows developers to add advertisments into their applications with as little as 3 lines of code.  The payments service allows developers to add the facility to take payments for products or services securely, directly from the mobile device.  The analytics service allows developers to gain information such as how many times their application is loaded, or how much time a user spends running the application etc.

Full details of these 3 new services can be found in the BlackBerry Developer's Blog.