"There are some important improvements to infrastructure (to BEA Workshop 3.2)," writes BEA VP Bill Roth in a recent blog entry. "Libraries for Hibernate, Kodo, Spring and Struts are downloaded on first use. This means that you do not have to agree to licenses for these features unless and until you choose to use them in a project."

Roth lists a number of new changes in the software, including:

* Upgraded to Eclipse 3.2 and WTP 1.5 (the Callisto release of June 30/2006)
* Updated Spring support -- automatic generation of Spring artifacts from O/R mappings
* Improved Kodo support: a Kodo facet, integrated Kodo development license, Kodo tutorial
* Support the final EJB 3.0 spec for persistence and in conformance with industry usage, our documentation is upgraded to refer to EJB3 persistence as the Java Persistence API (JPA).
* Upgraded documentation, including expanded documentation of supported servers
* New JSP tutorial for new users or Workshop for JSP downloaders

Improved Debug/test features include:

* Hot deployment
* Manual deployment
* Remote debugging

Roth said that developers can now "make a conscious choice about which Blended frameworks to use, and also allows a smaller download. Also, we've make a number of bug fixes and improvements geared toward making the Studio platform more useful and robust. We have also improved the trial period extended to 30 days (from previous 15 days)."

The full blog entry and more details can be found at Bill Roth's blog.