According to Jesús Rodríguez, the Apache group finally released version 1.2 of Axis, still the most popular SOAP toolkit for Java despite being complex and slow, while I was celebrating my birthday with a particularly horrible cringe. Good. Now I can replace the RC version I've been using. It should show up here soon, but you can download it here until then.

Update:

Drools 2.0 RC1 was also released. I've been using a beta version in an ongoing project so I am glad to see a release candidate version. FYI, Drools is the fastest open source Rete-based rules engine that I know of. It supports JSR-94 (Java Rules Engine API) and domain-specific rule declaration languages. Definitely recommended.

Updates to two key third party components in a single day!