The latest NetBeans release provides Kenai-based project collaboration, a Maven library dependency graph viewer, PHPUnit support, support for the Shoulda Ruby testing framework, improved C and C++ refactorings, and a host of other new features.

In this episode I explain how to break hygiene in Scheme macros by using datum->syntax. I discuss how you can play with the lexical context. Finally, I spend some time on non-hygienic macro systems versus hygienic systems.

In a recent interview, Alex McGuire describes how his team has been moving to Scala, and how they can interface with a 300,000-line Java codebase, in a mission-critical application.

IntelliJ IDEA 9, the first milestone of which was posted today, includes more productivity enhancements for Java developers, faster startup, Java EE 6 development, OSGi programming, Android, improved Flex code editing, and a host of other features.

Eclipse Galileo is a coordinated release of 33 Eclipse projects, and includes the work of over 380 committers from 44 different organizations. Galileo features include support for OS X Cocoa, a memory analyzer, and support for Xtext, a new framework for building custom editors for domain-specific languages.

In a recent blog post, Erik Engbrecht notes that there are a handful of Actor implementations in Scala, in addition to the Actors library that's part of the standard Scala API, and that each attempt at Actors has slightly different design tradeoffs. He also wonders if there should one, highly extensible library, or several specialized libraries.

In a recent Sun Developer Network article, Janice Heiss and Sharon Zakhour discuss upcoming additions to the Java filesystem API.

Sun's latest JavaFX SDK makes it straightforward to use Swing components in a JavaFX application. Noted Sun UI engineer Any Fowler provides a ten-step guide in a recent blog post.

The Java Community Process (JCP), the Sun-sponsored standards body for Java technologies, launched a new Web site this week, and is hosting a virtual town hall meeting to discuss the site's collaborative features.

I showed up at the organizational meeting for the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee because Bjarne Stroustrup asked me to. I knew him from my early C++ work and from conferences, and I suspect he considered me a friendly influence.

In this episode, I add another item to the macro programmer toolkit (macros taking macros as arguments) and I bring an argument in favor of good old parentheses.

In this interview with Artima, Gwyn Fisher, CTO of Klocwork, describes cases where well-known Java APIs work differently based on deployment platform, and how well-defined type systems can make resource management more reliable.

In this interview with Artima, Terracotta co-founder Ari Zilka discusses various techniques to load-test a stateful application on a cluster, highlights features of the open-source Terracotta clustering environment that make such load-testing simpler, and talks about managing heavily disk-bound workloads.

In this interview, Adobe's Shafath Syed and Steven Heintz discuss the differences in how designers and developers approach rich-client application development, and how Adobe's Flash Builder 4 and Catalyst tools can make their interaction more effective.

At this year's JavaOne, you can notice the buzz around "cloud computing." Vendors seem to have different takes on just what this term means. Then there are fun new languages for the VM, such as Scala, JavaFX, and Clojure. And old languages seem to be moving to the VM, too: There are JavaOne sessions on running PHP on the JVM, for example.

Some thoughts about programming-language communities.