During years change I had got sime time: I left my latest employer to do something new. I thought, I could have some relaxed weeks before I go back to work. But I was wrong: I got several very interesting opportunities and will choose one of them very soon. All my current options are very good and very exciting so I am looking for promising 2011.
But as every developer who has too much time, I started to think about software and found myself suddenly working on a project in startup mentality. Finally I had some tools I would like to give a try or already have tried. I have already chosen them to be my faves for this year – let’s see if I can really explore/use them the way I want 
Webframeworks: last year I figured out how all this JavaScript stuff works (with jQuery) and this year I decided to put my focus on another very cool project from my favourite Open Source provider: Apache Wicket. I have already supported a diploma thesis which compared Spring MVC, Wicket, GWT and Icefaces last year. The result was what I have had as intuitive feeling: Wicket ist easy to learn, nice to develop and has some very cool features (at least they mention their cluster-bility at their website). Time to get into this hype-framework.
ORM: At my last projects I had to explain to often about the well known LazyInitializingException of Hibernate. I was aware there is some other stuff around, but never have tried. Usually I try the Apache stack first. iBatis left the foundation as I could see on their homepage. I switched to Cayenne, which already attracted me for a while. A very good and interesting conversation about Hibernate and Cayenne finally made me crazy about this – Cayenne seems to address most of my critics on Hibernate. Let’s see if this turns out well.
Version control: SVN is an apache project meanwhile. But before two years I played with GIT already. It was somehow cool, but I hadn’t had the time to dig so deep I could get the benefits. But now i found an excellent article about GIT, which reduced the time i needed to understand the concept behind. GIT is on my list again!
Hadoop – I cannot say this is currently my favourite tool, but if I have the chance I would love to check this out, at least some of the sub projects.
New to my personal stack is Keynote. I realized LibreOffice/OpenOffice Impress was unbearable slow on my mac and wanted something else. Keynote was available through the Mac App Store for only 16 euros. Since then I felt in love. Price good, quality good, everything good. And first time of my life, my presentations looked good too. I forgive this tool not being open source.
For UML I still use Violet. It’s not providing every diagram from the UML definition, but the most important stuff is there. It’s very easy to use and has a nice looking interface. One of the best java-based interface I know. It’s not really progressing, but for planning’s which are not going to be implemented in some far countries it’s good and useful. At least you can draw quickly and have results in short term without the pain of complex tools like Magic Draw.
And finally Pencil – based on firefox it provides quick sketching of interfaces on each platform. It has it’s bugs but you can work efficient and with fun. I am looking forward to new releases – probably the stand alone version on a mac.