Nominations for the 2012 Duke's Choice Awards are open. The awards look to highlight innovative projects using Java technology. The nomination form can be found on the Duke's Choice Java.net site
The end date for nominations is June 15th, 2012. The ten most innovative projects will be announced in the September issue of Java Magazine as well as at JavaOne.
Winners receive a free JavaOne full conference pass and a Duke Award Statue.
Java SE 7 Update 4 turned out to be an exciting release for Mac users. This is the first release from Oracle to have a version of the JDK and JavaFX 2.1 SDK for the Mac OS X.
The first thing to note is this release is only for systems running Mac OS X Lion (v10.7.2) or later. Older Mac systems will be sticking to the Java for Mac JDK 6 versions previously released by Apple.
Also, this release doesn't support Java plugin and Java Web Start applications. This will be available in an upcoming JDK 7 release. There is a developer preview release for the JRE for Mac OS X with applet support available to try.
Have a look at the known issues section if you have any problems. NetBeans v7.1.2 supports the Java SE 7 Update 4 release.
The JDK for Java 7 Update 4 (and the corresponding Java 6 Update 32) are available to download from Oracle's Java download page.
The Java 7 Update 4 release includes:
Have a look at the release notes for full details.
NetBeans v7.1.2 supports the Java SE 7 Update 4 release.
I've had a couple of String related questions recently so I thought I'd highlight a couple of articles. The String Literal looks at how String values can be created, The String Class is an overview of working with Strings and Manipulating Strings look at some common String processing using String class methods.
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