Its great to see some competition finally in the surface race. FlatFrog have got a siseable funding according to this gear crunch article. I can see all kinds of uses for this technology, but currently its very expensive. I wish FlatFrog luck in producing a cheaper alternative.
Christian Dupuis from SpringSource shows some of the new features on the SpringIde Blog
I used Spring STS for a few months before starting at Lab49, and found it to be a good distribution over the standard Eclipse build. It has lots of extra productivity features for Spring based development some of which are not available by downloading Spring plugins and adding them to a normal distribution.
The things I like best are:
Roo and Roo Shell
The Roo system looks great. Its a system to generate and support a JEE system. The roo shell can be used to configure JEE components. You can have a basic website up in seconds. Like Groovy and Grails you get spring standards built in, and your not dependent on the Roo system once your finished.
I am going to take a proper look at it at some point.
Jonas Partner has just announced that Spring Integration in Action is now available via the Manning early access program on his blog.
The spring integration project embodies principles found in the Spring Framework and Enterprise Integration Patterns (Hohpe and Woolf, 2003). The book and project are worth a look for anyone working in that space.