yWorks announces <a href="http://www.yworks.com/products/yfilesflex">yFiles FLEX 1.3</a>, the new major release of its Adobe® Flex-based client-side add-on for our flagship product, the <a href="http://www.yworks.com/products/yfiles">yFiles Java</a> class library for analysis, automatic layout, and visualization of diagrams, networks, and graphs.

GMaps4JSF aims at integrating Google maps with JSF. JSF Users will be also able to construct complex StreetViewPanoramas and Maps with just few JSF tags.<br><br>GMaps4JSF is one of the JSF Mashups libraries that enables JSF users to build web 2.0 mashup applications in JSF easily.

Cascading is an API for creating complex and fault tolerant data processing workflows on top of Hadoop. It abstracts the cluster topology and configuration to enable quick development of complex distributed applications without having to "think" about MapReduce.

This library offers interesting features for java developers that need combination and compression of their javascript and CSS resources, to improve page loading times and YSlow grades. The latest version of Jawr brings the ability to use it with static HTML. Other features are i18n, DWR and Commons Validator support, or Facelets and Grails integration.

ZeroTurnaround has announced the final release of JavaRebel 1.1. JavaRebel is a JVM plugin (-javaagent) that enables reloading changes made to Java class files on-the-fly, saving developers the time that it takes to redeploy an application or perform a container restart. In addition to changes like the provision for dynamic proxies, full SDK availability, and full class reloading, ZeroTurnaround is offering a free license for bug reports.

The Grails team and G2One, the Groovy/Grails professional services company, have just released the final 1.0 version of Grails, the agile web application development stack, built on best of breed Open Source components such as the Groovy dynamic language, the Spring framework, and the Hibernate ORM solution.

Amazon’s EC2 service provides re-sizable compute capacity or a ‘pay as you use’ model for deploying web applications. This blog entry provides an overview for using such a platform with Java EE applications using a Groovy-based framework.

Chris Richardson has posted "Running JEE applications on Amazon EC2: deploying to 20 machines with no money down," documenting EC2Deploy, a Groovy framework that can launch MySQL, Apache httpd, a set of Tomcat instances, and JMeter, as well as deploying web applications to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

RestFaces is a framework extending JavaServer Faces with the aim of improving its support for web applications where bookmarking and indexing are very important features. With RestFaces1.2 you can annotate your HTTP actions and bean properties, pass query parameters or URI parameters to methods, use JSF converters, and generate bookmarkable URLs.

java.sun.com has posted a new article, "JSFTemplating and Woodstock: Component Authoring Made Easy" by Ken Paulsen, Jason Lee and Rick Palkovic. The article shows how to use the JSFTemplating and Woodstock projects to make JSF components with only two files: a .java sourcefile (with annotations) and an .xhtml template.