Not to be left out, IBM are providing a database adapter for DB2 to allow you to build Ruby on Rails applications using DB2 as your database.
Read the article here for more info.
End of the road for WinFS – revolutionary new file system will not ship as a Windows component
One of the most exciting and interesting new features to be included in Longhorn/Windows Vista, but removed from the list of new features some time back, was the planned inclusion of a new file system, named WinFS, that was to replace the hierarchical file structure that we have lived with in Windows since MS-DOS.
WinFS was supposed to be a radical departure from current file system thinking, where application data (files) would be stored and managed by a database engine.
Well, according to this blog entry by the WinFS team, not only will WinFS not ship as an included component of Windows Vista, it is now no longer being developed as a Windows conponent as an optional add-on. Development has shifted and it may now find itself integrated into SQL Server.
Spring 2.0 RC Released
The first Release Candidate of Spring 2.0 has been announced and released.
Enhancements and new features added in 2.0 include simplified bean configuration, enhanced AOP support, support for Hibernate 3.1 and 3.2 plus Java Persistence API support, message driven POJOs and conventions based MVC.
I am especially excited about the last part since I have been doing a lot of development with Grails recently and can really see the benefits of the coding by convention and avoiding all the configuration necessary in so many other frameworks and J2EE approaches. I’ll be taking some time to look into this as I believe this is a huge step in right direction for Java development – anything to save developers from spending so much time in configuration files and back to writing productive code!
Toshiba to launch 1TB media center, including HD-DVD burner
Toshiba are launching a media center type device with 1TB of hard disk space, enough for over 130 hours of recorded HD TV, plus a HD-DVD recorder supporting both single (15GB) and double (30GB) disks. Wow. Now thats some impressive specs.
Expect prices to be in the $3000 range. Ouch.