For the upcoming release of Hibernate 3, which by the way has hit Beta 1, the query parser has been rewritten. The refactoring was done because the old code were getting messy, and to support new features in a cleaner way. The first article with details about the new parser can be found here.
There’s a good and extensive article here about processor performance development, and why concurrency will be increasingly important in the future.
Via Rickard Öberg.
Another good article with J2EE best practices here. There are heaps of other articles on the same theme, but this one tries to take a little bit of a different angle. Nice addition.