Release notes:

• Finally converted security from the truly ancient ACEGI to Spring Security 3.1. The configuration is much simpler now.
• Began migration to Spring MVC 3.2; roughly one third of the controllers are complete.
• Updated to Hibernate 4.2. This is a temporary stop on the way to using JPA and Spring Data.
• Removed the old Hibernate OpenSessionInView pattern. Unfortunately this required wrapping almost all data calls with Hibernate.initialize() due to lazy collections. Another TODO...

Release notes:

• Hosting site on Jetty instead of Tomcat now.

Release notes:

• Moved to using HTTPS throughout the entire site.
• Removed CardSpace support.

This is the first code update in a while... New in this release:

• Moved all code repositories to Git. These can be browsed via GitHub .
• Updated Download module and Links section to reflect new locations for all resources.
• Updated the site to Maven 3. There was some significant bitrot in the codebase that needed to be cleared up to get this working.

Other upcoming changes include:

• Move from deployment as a Tomcat WAR file to a standalone app embedding Jetty. This should result in faster restart times and decreased resource utilization.
• Remove CardSpace support as it has been deprecated by Microsoft for some time now and never really gained wide adoption.
• Update libraries to more current versions. For example, update to Spring 3.2 (using 2.0 currently).
• Move to using HTTPS throughout the entire site.

Read on for a summary of the final day of JavaOne 2010.

More tales from JavaOne 2010 - Wednesday sessions...

Read on for summaries of the sessions I attended on Day Two of JavaOne 2010.

JavaOne 2010 is over now, and I intend to post a write-up of each session I attended throughout the week. Read on for my impressions of the opening keynote Sunday and the Monday sessions.

So... I just finished installing the beta of IE 9 in a Windows 7 VM and so far, I'm struck by a few things...

First, it's basically the same UI as early Chrome builds (minimalistic), but in Microsoft Blue ^TM instead of Google Blue ^TM . There are some minor differences, like the fact that the tabs go on the same line as the address bar, and confirmation dialogs pop up from the bottom instead of down from the top.

Second, performance, while decent, is nowhere near what I would have expected given the hype this browser has received. I tried out several of the HTML5 demos on the Microsoft IE9 Demo Site in both Chrome 6 and IE9 and neither one could manage more than a paltry 10fps on most of them, and this is on a fairly fast Mac Pro. To be fair, IE9 was probably somewhat hampered by running in a VM, but does Microsoft really expect us to believe that by the time IE9 ships, these demos will be smooth as butter? Seems like they may be a bit ambitious...

Finally, standards compliance. There's still some bugs, but this is so much further ahead than where IE8 (or any previous Microsoft product) was, that I'm fairly certain pigs are going to fly and cats and dogs are going to start having little barking fuzzy offspring... I never would have believed it possible. Too bad that it's still going to take at least a decade until we can be sure that IE6, IE7, and even IE8 will finally be a distant memory, especially since IE9 will not run on XP or Vista.

In short, I welcome Microsoft back to the web, and at the very least, this will someday make us web developers' lives easier. And, it should at least make the web a bit less of an ugly place for users too (especially the IE6 crowd).