Spring Roo 1.1 M2 and STS 2.3.3 M2 were simultaneously released this week with hundreds of bugfixes and enhancements since milestone one.  Spring Roo 1.1 M2 has increased its performance by a factor of three and gained better GWT support by eliminating the GWT 2.1 "bikeshed" JAR.  There is also integration test support for GAE and improved shell usability.  One of the biggest new features is the large number of preparations for the add-on discovery and management features.  

HP Beat Google, Apple, and RIM in Palm Bidding War
Analysts weren't sure that anyone was that eager to buy Palm when they went on the market to be acquired.  The asking price was high, but according to a Business Insider report, HP won a bidding war against the major players in the smartphone market, including RIM, Google, and Apple.  The report claims that Apple was looking to secure Palm's valuable IP portfolio, and Google started bidding in order to prevent the patents from falling into Apple's hands.  HP eventually bought Palm for $1.2 billion.

Teiid Moving Fast Towards Next Release
JBoss' Teiid 7.0 was released just a few weeks ago and the 7.1 alpha 1 is already available.  Along with several SQL support enhancements, Teiid 7.1a1 reestablished parallel execution of source queries within a query plan and added client handling for the SHOW statement.  Upcoming versions will have ODBC access and caching improvements.  Teiid is a project consisting of tools, components, and services for generating and executing bi-directional data services.

Android Market Access Granted in Korea
This week, South Koreans gained access to the Android Marketplace.  It should be good news for a country that already has Android devices and is one of the most internet-connected nations.  

Is there Novelty in Visual Basic 2010?
A nice overview of the new features in VB 2010.  Posted by Mickel Mas.