At Paypal's first developer conference it was announced that the Java store will be using Paypal for application payments:

Developers can price their offering anywhere from $1.99 to $200.00 (USD) and select the license rights they wish to apply to their application. Developers will receive 70 percent of any for-fee application sold through the Java Store Beta. Utilizing the new Adaptive Payment API from PayPal, consumers can authorize the Java Store Beta to bill against their PayPal account so they can simply click the "Buy" button and never have to leave the store.

There's a link to the new client application for shopping in the Java Store on James Gosling's blog. He's looking for feedback as they're keen to launch to the U.S. market soon.

Joe Darcy has written an interesting blog post on the implementation of strings in switch statements, one of the changes accepted for inclusion in JDK 7 from Project Coin. The post highlights the steps he went through to modify the language.

If you like playing with the early access releases for JDK 7 you'll soon be able to use strings in switch statements in the milestone 5 release.

This week sees the release of Update 17 for JDK 6 which can be downloaded at the normal Java SE downloads page. Looking at the release notes, it's a security and bug fix release.

It's worth noting that this release coincides with the end of service life for JDK 5.

I've just been listening to the This Ain't Your Dad's Java team's latest podcast. This week the episode - Sh*t Happens, We're Sorry can be found online here. Or you can listen to it through iTunes with this link.

The podcast is about an hour long and is worth a listen if you want to hear about the Java Store (about 18 minutes in). The Java Store is due to go live (presumably just for the U.S.) in the next couple of weeks.

Have you been testing your JavaFX knowledge by playing the Tech Test Train? If so, you might be interested to know that it has been updated. Although, I should point out that when I tried to play it on Mac OS X 10.5.8 it crashed as soon as I pressed the "Play the Game" button (Edit: Working fine on the Mac now..). I did however have better luck with Windows XP.

The new version now allows your score to be carried over across the different routes allowing for a chance to get a grand total of 27,000 points. It's also had some performance tweaks. You can play the game on the JavaFX website.

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Just in case you're eagerly awaiting the next version of Firefox (a beta version of Firefox 3.6 is scheduled for some time next week), it's worth taking note that you'll need to be running a version of Java that's 6 update 10 or later in order to run Java applications in the browser. If an earlier version is installed you'll simply see a box where the application should be with a link to download the latest version of the Java plug-in.

Although I'm not sure what this might mean for Mac users as Apple haven't properly released their version of Sun's new Java Plug-in that came with Java 6 Update 10.

A new version of VisualVM, the tool that makes visualizing the performance of Java SE applications easier, has just been released. See the release notes for a list of the new features and enhancements including.

There's a good article by Jiri Sedlacek on one of the new features - the CPU and and Memory profiler plugin. It outlines how it can be used to find bottlenecks and memory leaks.

VisualVM v1.2 can be downloaded from the VisualVM website.

Starting with version 9.0, IntelliJ IDEA the Java IDE from JetBrains is coming in two flavors: a Community Edition which is free and open-sourced and the Ultimate Edition that focuses on the full Java EE technology stack. A breakdown of the differences between the two editions can be found in this comparison matrix.

For more information on the decision to go open source check out the Community Edition FAQ.

A couple of people who popped along to the Oracle OpenWorld conference have been blogging about their impressions:

• Cay Horstmann has thoughts on Day Zero and Day One.
• Arun Gupta has lots of pictures and links to videos for days 1, 2, 3 and 4.

If I start believing the speculation about the future of JavaOne, it might be the case that I'll be paying more attention to the Oracle OpenWorld conferences from now on. The Register is suggesting that JavaOne will no longer be on the calendar once Oracle completes its takeover of Sun Microsystems. It would seem a shame for one conference to swallow up the other methinks.

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 runs from October 11-15, 2009 in San Francisco and has several Java talks on its schedule. The conference has the tagline of "Come with questions. Leave with answers". So, if you're going, one question you could ask is about next year's JavaOne conference.