Kind of email-swamped here after my trip... some things that grabbed at least my initial attention (hope to report soon on my actual appreciation):

[1] The SE/EE Executive Committee has approved the Final Approval Ballot of: JSR-000031 XML Data Binding SpecificationView the ballot results here: http://jcp.org/en/jsr/results?id=1633

[2] Jesktop (http://jesktop.sourceforge.net/) is written by Apache commiters, Avalon based and could be a good foundation for a GUI project ;-)

[3] OJB provides a plugin to the JDO reference implementation. By using thisplugin you can write JDO compliant applications running against the OJB O/Rmapping.See here for a sample application:http://jakarta.apache.org/ojb/tutorial4.html.

off to bed now...