Java.net reports that the Copy and Paste History Module, a Netbeans plugin for maintaining copy action history, has graduated from the Java Tools Community incubator.

Added groups support and about 130 roles in security part. Translated into Italian and Spanish languages. Added JSP pre-compilation feature.

DonationCoder.com and Borland announced a donationware programming contest featuring Borland's C++ Builder. Over $15,000 in prizes will be awarded. Winning programs will be made available to the public as donationware.

ALM Expo is online May 23-24 featuring live interactive conference sessions and keynote presentations from industry thought leaders. Registration is free.

JIDE Software provides Swing widgets, including a docking framework, an MS Office-style look and feel, and a spruced up JTable. Among other UI components, JIDE features a table component that implements the master-detail view UI pattern.

NoMagic released MagicDraw UML 11, tightly integrating its design tool with Eclipse, and facilitating round-trip engineering between design and code.

The Apache Jackrabbit project released the 1.0 version of the first open-source implementation of the Java Content Repository (JCR) API (JSR 170). Jackrabbit provides structured content management, full-text searching, access control, the ability to maintain links between content elements, and much more.

While Java's exception handling mechanisms aid the creation of more robust code, few developers take full advantage of exceptions. A recent article discusses common exception-handling anti-patterns, and suggests some remedies.

Until recently, Swing applications lacked the high-level abstractions and frameworks that have long eased the development of their server-side cousins. There are now at least three Swing frameworks in development. One of them, the Spring Rich-Client Platform, reached a 0.1 release milestone.

While Java got its start with applets, client-side Java never came close in popularity to Java on the server. Instead, Flash and AJAX emerged to supplant Java applets in rich-client applications running inside a browser. Yet, Java has much to offer to rich-client apps. A recent blog post explores how Java might stage a comeback inside the browser.

In this developerWorks article, author Elliotte Rusty Harold shows you how to develop a test suite for legacy code that's never been tested.

Scala is an OO/Functional Language for the JVM and CLR that is designed to make working with XML easier.

Recent discussions on Artima focused on the merits of metaprogramming: writing programs that manipulate programs. One metaprogramming technique is to generate source code. In Java, one can use metaprogramming to generate bytecode as well, which is the subject of a recent article.

Java on Snails is an open-source web framework philosophy that's optimized for programmer job security and sustainable effort. It lets you write verbose code by favoring configuration over convention.

This developerWorks article presents a design approach that leverages EJB 3.0's new Java Persistence API (JPA). JPA provides a standard object-relational mapping solution that bypasses the need to rely on third-party frameworks such as Hibernate.