Portugal's Republic Parliament has lauched their Blog System in what seems to me an unprecedented idea.
However only one member of the parliament, the most obvious one, has adhered to this system. Dr. José Magalhão seems to be the only member of the Parliament who cares about Information Technologies.

I was rather surprised with Sun's new Rapid Development IDE, Sun Java Studio Creator.

It's main objective is to allow visual development, having certain similarities with Visual Basic's interface, in a fast and easy way. It's mainly oriented towards developing JSF (Java Server Faces) interfaces.

The programming challenge is reduced to programming in a VB style. Put your components where you want them and affect actions to each of them. One interesting feature is the navigation interface, where you see your pages in a reduced aspect ratio with its components, and you can drag a component to another page creating a link associated to the action of clicking that component.

In what concerns the act of coding it's not a hell of a thrill, so I would only advice it to build interfaces. Besides that, it's memory footprint is really heavy as most IDEs are (except IntelliJ IDEA).