Transparent RMI
  There's an interesting article over on JavaWorld: "Empower RMI with TRMI". Transparent RMI makes it simpler to create RMI services. No more extending Remote and having every method throw RemoteException & it also centralizes error handling on the client side. It appears to be using dynamic proxies to simplify things... I need to investigate this further.
11:33:32 PM    

Persistence...
  I've been looking into a lot of different persistence strategies for Java lately for projects I'm working on at work. Currently most of our projects still use hand-coded SQL (JDBC) which is far from desirable. We've started using EJBs in limited fashion on some of our newer projects but only session beans. Neither BMP or CMP beans support inheritence (!?!). I'm not sure what Sun was thinking when they came up with that. Why develop a framework that doesn't support the major features of the language? More thoughts later...
7:30:23 PM