GeoTools is alive and kicking; well kicking out 2.5.5 release anyways. The developers have been very busy lately (organizing due to some staff changes).
Catching up with news posts - on May 5th GeoTools 2.5.5 was released featuring:
- Improved support for sparse shapefile
- JDBC-NG improvements
- Support for case insensitive like comparisons
- WMS client timeouts
- New filter functions that can convert types and format numbers
- New SLD vendor parameters to turn off label conflict
- resolution and set the goodness of fit while labelling polygons
For more details please check out the Release Notes.