This is the story of a Mac application developer (okay - it's about two of them) who set out on a quest to find an application development tool based on Java so his boss would let him develop on the Mac platform, which he loved. There was only one catch - he had to find a tool that was fast. Traditional Java programming was going to take waaaay too long to convert the internal custom programs that had been written in an old 4GL.

SOA is mostly associated with technologies such as BPEL, SCA and Web Services. But does SOA really imply these technologies? In this session we will show how you can use the service oriented approach while staying inside the Java world. jBPM is a powerful lightweight framework that can be used to orchestrate services in the broadest sense. It is highly extendable, very versatile and can be easily embedded in client and/or server applications. Attendees will learn how jBPM can be used in a pure workflow scenario as well as in a situation involving automated business steps.

Any large Java source base can have insidious and subtle bugs. Every experienced Java programmer knows that finding and fixing these bugs can be difficult and costly. Fortunately, there are a large number of free open source Java tools available that can be used to find and fix defects early in the development life cycle. In this article, we'll look at a few examples of specific uncommon1 or unusual defects that can happen in code and see how different Java static analysis tools detect them.

One of the things I really enjoy at the moment is the recognition and adoption of agile programming as a fully fledged powerful way to deliver quality software projects. As its figurehead is a group of very talented individuals who have created the agile manifesto (http://a gilemanifesto.org/). At its core are four simple principles that, when followed and applied to software projects, generally will ensure a great flexibility and hence higher agility.

Sun Microsystems announced it has entered into a multi-year agreement with On2 Technologies to add comprehensive video capabilities, using On2 Technologies TrueMotion video codecs, to Sun's JavaFX, a family of products for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) with immersive media and content across all the 'screens of your life'.

Conference in San Francisco. Dvorak held forth on a number of topics, including the new AMD/Intel lawsuit, the viability of Java and Sun, the value of (or lack thereof) of corporate PR, and whether or not a new book about Silicon Valley is really worth reading.

At Java One this week Sun has been selling its year -old-but-still-upcoming - and definitely late-to-the-party - Adobe AIR- and Microsoft Silverlight-competitive JavaFX Rich Client environment as a potential revenue-generator capable of putting ads on mobile applications and JavaFX Script, its newfangled high-performance GUI declarative scripting language, as the way to build consumer next-generation RIAs for desktops, mobiles, TV and other consumer devices.

My first technical session was about Java SE presented by Danny Coward from Sun. It was about the current situation of Java SE 6 and the roadmap to Java SE 7. The talk started with a few encouraging stats. For example, Java's performance increased 220% between Java SE 5.0_04 and Java SE 6.0_05P. It's always nice to hear this kind of good news.

This is my third JavaOne. Many topics were discussed, friendships were made, new partnerships were started. I must say things have changed a lot and stayed the same yet again, here are my thoughts in no particular order, bear in mind that they do not represent the opinion of my current employer nor the open source teams I am member of.

It's only taken Borland two years but it's finally dumped its CodeGear tools division, responsible for Borland's hereditary JBuilder, Delphi and C++ Builder lines as well as its new web ventures into PHP and Ruby, said to be used by 7.5 million developers. Embarcadero Technologies is buying it for about $23 million and the transaction's supposed to close in 30-60 days. Thomas Cressey Bravo the private equity house that bought Embarcadero and took it private last year, is fronting the money.

Sun's mule train has finally pulled into Indiana after three years on the road. Indiana is the Linux-friendly Fedora-like OpenSolaris project meant to move the Solaris-shy Linux community off Linux and on to Solaris tempted by Solaris widgetry like the highly scalable, rollback-easy, 128-bit ZFS default filesystem, Linux-like network-based Image Packaging System (IPS) application install accelerator, DTrace predictive self-healing and scalable Containers virtualization, not to mention its Gnome 2.22 front-end and built-in Firefox browser.

At WaveMaker, we have hitched our wagon to Java so I hope very much that JavaOne is showing us the ghost of Java present, not the ghost of Java to come. The Sun promise to put Java runtimes everywhere is meaningless if nobody wants to develop for those runtimes. Adobe and Microsoft are doing a far better job making their tools simple enough for mere mortals and focusing on the presentation layer.

Virtualization Journal now reaches more than 60,000 online readers with monthly digital editions and weekly newsletters. The premier issue of the magazine's print edition, which debuts on May 6, 2008, at JavaOne in San Francisco, as a media sponsor of this event, will be available on newsstands worldwide. Article submission inquiries can be directed by email to editorial(at)sys-con.com and the world's most targeted advertising opportunities can be explored by contacting ad vertising(at)sys-con.com, or by phone 201 802-3021.

MySQL has backed off a plan to charge for some encryption and compression backup widgetry in the next version of the database - and, heavens, NOT OPEN SOURCE THE STUFF, an idea it trotted a few weeks ago and predictably caught hell for. Sun, which bought MySQL for a billion dollars, a good reason to try to make some of the money back, took the rap.

Fiorano Software announced that Premiere Global Services, a global provider of on-demand business process improvement solutions chose FioranoMQ to enhances its e-mail marketing product lines with higher response rates, instant consumer actions and direct results tracking.

db4objects has announced that its db4o object database is now optimized for Microsoft's LINQ. With the new support, developers can choose an object-oriented optimized engine without changing the API or compromising performance. db4object's db4o database offers a persistence solution to store objects of any complexity natively with a single line of code.

Kaazing Corporation and Sun Microsystems announced an alliance to deliver the scalable and advanced real-time Web 2.0 platform. The integration between Kaazing's real-time Rich Internet Application (RIA) solution, Enterprise Comet, and Sun Microsystems' open source Java EE application server, Glassfish, enables customers to create and deploy scalable mission-critical real-time solutions such as trading systems, betting and gambling applications, and interactive sports and news broadcasts, to the Web.

Mike Neil is general manager for virtualization strategy in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. Mike is focused on the delivery of the Windows virtualization technology, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Virtual PC 2007. Mike also directs the technical enablement of Microsoft's broader vision for virtualization, to include virtualization management tools and virtualized desktop infrastructure. Prior to this role, Mike was responsible for Microsoft?s server and PC virtualization efforts since 2003.

Sun Microsystems announced it has entered into a multi-year agreement with On2 Technologies to add comprehensive video capabilities, using On2 Technologies TrueMotion video codecs, to Sun's JavaFX, a family of products for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) with immersive media and content across all the 'screens of your life'.

According to Sean Walsh, President and CEO of Skyway Software, 'Our Skyway Community is thriving and our members are very talented. We truly look forward to their RIAs submittals and Skyway Builder extensions and are excited that all of the contributions will benefit the entire Skyway Community.' With Skyway Builder CE, Java developers get an open source Eclipse-based plugin that offers a seamless blend of coding and modeling for delivering RIAs and Web Services in Spring. Unlike any other modeling tool, Skyway Builder CE provides comprehensive modeling capabilities at four distinct application layers:

Virtualization Journal now reaches more than 60,000 online readers with monthly digital editions and weekly newsletters. The premier issue of the magazine's print edition, which debuts on May 6, 2008, at JavaOne in San Francisco, as a media sponsor of this event, will be available on newsstands worldwide. Article submission inquiries can be directed by email to editorial(at)sys-con.com and the world's most targeted advertising opportunities can be explored by contacting ad vertising(at)sys-con.com, or by phone 201 802-3021.

Skyway Software, announced a SOA developer contest. The SOA design and delivery solutions provider announced the contest with a prize of a $2500 gas card for the winner. The company feels that the basics are very easy. The winner would also get a copy of the Skyway SOA Platform - Developer Edition. The Developer Edition is valued at $5400.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Parasoft announced they will be featuring the next generation of application security solutions at JavaOne. Improving security without impacting productivity, Parasoft's Application Security Solutions establish a continuous process that helps ensure security verification and remediation tasks are ingrained into workflow across every stage of the SDLC.

CodeGear announced it has teamed with Instantiations to fully integrate the Instantiations Swing Designer visual layout tools into CodeGear JBuilder, making it the commercial Java IDE to include this technology. Java developers using JBuilder will now be able to construct more sophisticated and reliable Swing-based graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that enhance the user experience for enterprise applications.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.

The Ubuntu Linux-based gOS operating system from Good OS LLC (www.thinkgos.com) includes so many Google applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google News Google Maps and YouTube that it's often referred to as the Google operating system. It also includes Firefox, Skype, Facebook and OpenOffice 2.3.

TIBCO announced it is demonstrating how the combination of SCA and the TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Grid provides a highly scalable Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) combination for enterprise developers looking to reap the benefits of both models. Using SCA helps in part by laying a common framework for organizing, modeling and composing services within the enterprise. SCA goes beyond previous interoperability standards and provides a design standard that allows enterprise architects and developers a model driven approach to creating composite service oriented applications.

EnterpriseDB released a plug-in for Postgres Studio that creates an AJAX-enabled Java application based on a Postgres database table or schema. Postgres Studio is a graphical database administration console that is built on the widely admired pgAdmin foundation and only available as part of Postgres Plus. The plug-in generates Java source code, scripts, NetBeans, and Eclipse project files for screen-based applications that can create, read, update, and delete records in target Postgres databases. The plug-in extensively leverages the JBoss Seam Framework, creating a pre-configured Seam environment for Postgres Plus.

Instantiations announced that its customer base has grown to more than 10,000 customers. Instantiations reached this milestone through increased enterprise adoption of its Eclipse-focused product lines. An early participant in the commercial Eclipse market, Instantiations continues its growth with its WindowBuilder Pro and CodePro AnalytiX product lines. As a result, the company has achieved year-over-year revenue growth as well as record growth in the past two quarters.

Sun Microsystems and the GlassFish community announced the availability of the technology preview release of the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server version 3 and new Sun GlassFish Communications Server. Sun also announced a new GlassFish Partner initiative designed to provide developers, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and System Integrators (SIs) with access to a large number of frameworks and applications running on the GlassFish application server.

Sun Microsystems and the OpenPortal community announced a new open source initiative with Liferay to develop a common Web presentation platform that incorporates portal and integration technologies from both companies. Developers will now have access to a new, stable, standards-based Web presentation platform. The Sun and Liferay products resulting from this initiative will bring developers simple, lightweight presentation capabilities for GlassFish, Sun's open source Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server.

Mainsoft announced the release of its SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes. This add-on to IBM Lotus Notes 8, an Eclipsed-based Rich Client Platform based on Java, provides point-and-click access to Microsoft SharePoint content, including Word documents, Excel worksheets, and PowerPoint presentations, from within Notes. Mainsoft professional services can also build composite applications across SharePoint data and Java or .NET line-of-business applications.

Continuing employing an open application model, Sprint introduced the latest version of its developer toolkit, relaunching its Professional Developer Program and preparing to deliver new Sprint devices and a new Java platform that will open the door to millions of developers who have traditionally designed for a desktop environment.

Rogue Wave announced that Patrick Leonard, Vice President, Engineering and Product Strategy, will be a panel member at the 2008 JavaOne Conference. The panel session, 'Open Standards for SOA and Java,' will take place on Wednesday, May 7 at 4:10 PM. The discussion will address questions about the Service Component Architecture (SCA) standard and its relationship to Java and C++ technology-based SOA development. Of particular interest to Rogue Wave customers is how these standards can assist with parallel computing for high-performance applications.

Genuitec announced the availability of the initial milestone release of MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 6.5. Among noted enhancements is the upgrade of MyEclipse Spring tools, which provides the most up-to-date technology as well as the integration of the latest Spring framework 2.5 libraries. Also in the milestone release, JSF developers can expect to see an improvement to the JSF/Facelet visual page designer with all new support for coding and WYSIWYG preview of custom components.

Coverity announced the release of Coverity Thread Analyzer for Java. The product is a dynamic analysis tool for multi-threaded applications that automatically detects concurrency defects that can cause data corruption and application failures. Coverity Thread Analyzer can also be used in concert with Coverity Prevent, the static analysis tool, to create a software quality solution that will help developers control the complexity of writing multi-threaded applications.

Mobile phone maker Nokia has announced that they are now going to work with Ikivo to develop tools for java development on the mobile platform. The two companies announced their collaboration at the JavaOne conference. They would offer a tool set that integrates Nokia?s Platform SDK for Java, Adobe Illustrator, Ikivo Animator, and NetBeans.

Embarcadero Technologies announced that they signed a definitive asset purchase agreement with Borland Software Corporation to purchase its CodeGear division. The transaction is expected to close in 30 to 60 days. By combining these comapnies in development tools and database tools, Embarcadero will be able to address the growing productivity and resource challenges companies face as a result of different applications and diverse database platforms. With more than $100 million in annual revenue and over 500 employees worldwide, the combined companies will operate under the Embarcadero Technologies name.