It's been a long time coming, but we've finally managed to get the first alpha release of Connector/J 5.1 out the door. The key thing in this release is support for JDBC-4.0, including:

Ease-of-development features including auto-registration with the DriverManager via the service provider mechanism, standardized Connection validity checks and categorized SQLExceptions based on recoverability/retry-ability and class of the underlying error.

Unwrapping to interfaces that include vendor extensions

Support for XML processing via JAXP interfaces to DOM, SAX and StAX

Support for setting per-connection client information (which can be viewed in the comments section of a query via "SHOW PROCESSLIST" on a MySQL server, or can be extended to support custom persistence of the information via a public interface)

Support for JDBC-4.0 NCHAR, NVARCHAR and NCLOB types

It's available for download now at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/5.1.html.

I'll be speaking about our JDBC-4.0 implementation with demonstrations of using XML and the ease-of-use functionality as well as how to approach scalability with your Java applications that use MySQL at the MySQL conference and Expo, April 23-26, 2007 in Santa Clara, CA. Hope to see you there!