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Agile development is a phrase that it appears no buzzword-compliant software development project can be without. However, it is a proper understanding of the motivation and practices, rather than the buzzword conformance, that makes the actual difference in development.

The concept of agility has differing (mis)interpretations and (ab)uses. Sometimes it is used as a synonym for Extreme Programming. By contrast, others use it to mean a generic notion of something that is not quite Extreme Programming, but may borrow ideas from it. Some developers may label a project agile just based on the occasional use of JUnit. Others may use the label to justify not writing any documentation or not agreeing to scope or delivery dates. To be fair, not all uses of the term are cynical or misguided, but the term has lost some of its potency through dilution.

This session begins by revisiting the motivation for agile development, and goes on to explore the wide-range perspectives that are encompassed by approaches that can claim to be agile, including both technical and non-technical aspects, the relationship between agility and architecture, the effect of skill and attitude, the role of organisation, and the support of practices and tools.

During this Vincent Massol interview you'll receive more information on the status, philosophy and strenghts of Maven 2.0.  "What were the shortcomings in Maven 1 and how do we now write maven 2 plugins ?" are just a few questions Dion Almaer asked.  Other topics discussed are Continuum, Cargo and Agile outsourcing and offshoring... check it out.

Spring 2.0 is a major release that makes the Spring Framework both more powerful and easier to use. In this presentation, Rod will survey the new features of Spring 2.0, before focusing on two of the most important: the introduction of extensible XML configuration, and significant enhancements to Spring AOP. Spring 2.0 allows Spring configuration to be enhanced with custom XML tags, which can provide valuable abstraction for repeated or complex configuration tasks. Rod will show how to define new tags, and how this capability will benefit all Spring users. Spring 2.0 makes Spring AOP both simpler and far more powerful, and marks a major milestone for AOP in general. In conjunction with AspectJ 5, Spring 2.0 provides a complete roadmap for AOP usage, from dynamic proxies up to full use of AspectJ weaving, using the same programming model. It becomes possible to use the powerful AspectJ pointcut expression language in Spring AOP, as in AspectJ. Spring AOP can even run AspectJ annotation-style aspects within its proxy based runtime, with the same low cost of adoption as Spring AOP.

In this services oriented interview with Ted Neward you'll get more info on Teds view of XML Services Vs Web Services within a possible generic container. Interesting about Ted is that he has a very comprehensive knowledge of both the C# and Java world. With that in mind Dion asked the following questions: "Can the Java Community learn from the .NET framework and from the Microsoft Web Services Stack?" or "What are the LINQ features (C# v3) that we might see in future releases of the Java language ?". Good stuff, just check it out!