A friend a mine just bought the top of the line of the Dodge Grand Caravan... Really over-loaded...

My favorite feature is uConnect, that provide hand-free voice system based on Bluetooth...

I just turned on blue tooth on my phone, and five minutes later I was able to talk to my friends and family and share that with all people in the car. I have several bluetooth stuff (Macs, PDA, Phone) and this is the first time that using uConnect that I find a really cool usage of it...

The missing feature: I would like to see an integration between my address book on the PDA to the GPS system allowing the system to direclty set the destination from an address....

My first 2005 action was to give money for south Asia. I made a donation to the Unicef Organization and my employer Oracle is matching my amount.

So think about it and take five minutes of your time to make a donation to one of this organization:

• American Red Cross International Response Fund
• AmeriCares South Asia Earthquake Relief Fund
• Direct Relief International International Assistance Fund
• Médecins Sans Frontières International Tsunami Emergency Appeal
• Oxfam Asian Earthquake & Tsunami Fund
• Sarvodaya Relief Fund for Tsunami Tragedy
• Save the Children Asia Earthquake/Tsunami Relief Fund
• UNICEF South Asia Tsunami Relief Efforts

You can find a new How-To Document that explains how to use OC4J and Eclipse together using the Lomboz plugin.

You can download the server definition files for the Production release of OC4J 10g (9.0.4) or for the J2EE 1.4 Developer Preview 10.1.3.

###Application Server Control

Management and monitoring support is provided by a new version of Enterprise Manager Application Server Control which is included directly within the OC4J 10g (10.1.3) Developer Preview 3 release.

You can now find a preview of the Oracle Toplink & framework integration. This allows you to easily use Toplink features in your Spring application.

You can download it from OTN Web site.

As you may know this is Oracle Open World this week in San Francisco... I am working there all week mainly on the OC4J and JDeveloper demo pods. Come to see the new version that help you to develop J2EE and Web Services. Also I am presenting Thursday at 4pm a paper about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Event Driven Architecture (EDA)

I invite you to join this feast... if you can not take a look to the OTN at Oracle World blog, that highlights important keynotes, session and demoground activities...

You can also take a look to the official Oracle Open World Web site

Oracle Containers for J2EE 10g (10.1.3) Developer Preview

This fully J2EE 1.4 compatible release of OC4J offers improvements in classloading, data-source consolidation and configuration, TopLink integration and many other areas. This release also delivers a host of new capabilities in the area of Web Services, including management capabilities to enable and disable services and to configure message reliability, logging and security options. The brand new browser-based Enterprise Manager Application Server Control management console provides deployment, management and monitoring of all types of J2EE applications using the new standard JMX (JSR-77) and Deployment (JSR-88) APIs.

Download it now and experience OC4J for yourself: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/java/oc4j/1013

Oracle JDeveloper 10g (10.1.3) Developer Preview

The focus of this release has been to increase developer productivity, improve the user interface, and reduce the footprint. This Developer Preview release is intended to give you a sneak peek at the developer goodness to come and solicit your feedback. This release is the most substantial and ground-breaking we've had in years, adding many new features -- including a new look and feel, greatly improved coding environment, extensive refactoring options, J2EE 1.4/J2SE 5.0 support, and visual JSF development. We encourage you to take it for a spin.

Download the product and check out the related resources at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/101/

Jon Maron from Oracle has just published an article about transaction processing in distributed SOA.

You will learn in this article the challenges that you have when you want to manage transactions in a distributed Services Oriented Architecture running using Web Services.

J2EE 1.4 introduces a major release of JSP: 2.0.

Here some of the cool new features:

Oracle has published a new white paper about Service Oriented Architecture, and how Oracle Application Server 10g accelerates SOA development and deployment.

Read the paper on the Oracle Web Site.