Over the past 5 years or so, the hype around web services has grown continuously. At the same time, the complexity of the relevant specifications has steadily increased. Just think of all the buzzwords like SOAP, WSDL, XML Schema, etc....
One of the Java programming questions I like to ask in interviews is: "Is Java pass-by-value or pass-by-reference?" A surprising amount of Java developers get this wrong, generally because the variables you mostly deal with in Java (other than primitives) are actually references to objects, rather than containing the objects themselves....
I just came across Java Web Parts, a collection of open source, lightweight web components such as servlet filters, custom taglibs, utility classes etc. I still need to take a closer look at it, but it looks like there's some useful functionality. (via TheServerSide.com)
If you are a Java programmer and you're interested in Ruby, you should read this presentation about 10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know About Ruby. This blog entry also has some nice Ruby information for Java developers. About the most dangerous thing about Ruby is how more elegant and less verbose it is....
The final version 0.7 of the Eclipse WebTools Platform (WTP) was released a few days ago. I've been using the recent milestone releases for a few months now, and they've already been very stable and functional. If you're using Eclipse 3.1 or planning on upgrading to 3.1, I highly recommend that you install WTP as well....