Aonix announced the beginning of implementation efforts to add symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) capability to its flagship product PERC Ultra. Dubbed PERC Ultra SMP, the product will address the added complexities inherent in design, development, and deployment of SMP-targeted applications where the benefits of scalability, portability, and maintainability of Java applications can be fully realized.

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.

A lot of rework still happens in projects applying UML techniques because of conflicts and omissions in requirements. To reduce rework, interactive storyboarding is effective, but it seems that projects that use the technique are limited because of the few tools available. To improve this situation, this article introduces the J-CASE open source Tag Library that lets us describe storyboards on JSPs based on use cases, and explains how to generate document and UML diagrams from the JSPs.

JadeLiquid Software announced the release of the WebRenderer Swing Edition 4.2. The WebRenderer Swing Edition is a Java browser SDK built upon Firefox 2.0 and rendering in 100% pure Swing. The rendering quality and Web standards support of Firefox 2.0 is paired with the lightweight drawing of Java Swing providing the commercial strength Java browser SDK.

Genuitec is pleased to recognize its recent showing in the annual Evans Data 'User's Choice IDEs' survey. MyEclipse was recognized as one of the world's top eight IDEs, along with CodeGear's Delphi, Sun's NetBeans, Sun Studio, Oracle's JDeveloper, Microsoft's Visual Studio, Adobe's Creative Suite and IBM Rational Tools. Of note, the top IDEs list included only four Java IDEs.

Carbonfund.org announced a new partnership with Azul Systems. While providing high-end performance products for businesses and increasing data center efficiencies, Azul Systems will go carbon neutral by offsetting its carbon emissions through Carbonfund.org's Carbonfree Small Business Program. Currently, Azul Compute Appliances yield improved power and cooling performance, as well as more predictable service levels to support data center transactions of capital markets, e-commerce, and telecommunication customers. Azul's multicore chip technology is designed to handle processing-intensive workloads associated with dynamic Web-based applications by creating a shared pool of compute and memory resources.

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.

SourceLabs announced that its Self-Support Suite now supports the open source Eclipse development environment. SourceLabs' automated tools and support services for Java and Linux developers, corporate IT professionals, and solution providers are an effective, on demand new way to more effectively support open source software development and operations. SourceLabs Self-Support tools dramatically reduce the complexity of enterprise Java and Linux application development and maintenance by bringing together in one bundle all the components developers need to create and deploy web applications using the Eclipse Foundation's open source development framework.

HP Tuesday named Don Grantham, Sun's global sales and service boss, and an ex-IBMer, its chief sales officer responsible for enterprise accounts and public sector sales as well as sales to the communications, media and entertainment, financial and manufacturing and distribution industries. He will report to Ann Livermore, head of HP?s Technology Solutions Group and run worldwide alliance sales, sales compensation, global pre-sales, sales support, sales operations and go-to-market 'effectiveness.' Grantham, who was at Sun for the last nine years, replaces Andy Mattes, who is now going to run HP's outsourcing services business.

A couple of recent Brazil-related news events suggested the theme for this column: Java in Brazil. First, the annual International Free Software Forum (FISL) was recently held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. FISL is one of the world's most important free software conferences, and more than 7,400 people attended this year, including many from Sun's Java organization.

Google is opening up App Engine to one and all. The cloud-sharing gambit meant to entice developers to build their web applications on the same infrastructure that powers Google's own applications - and in the process lock them into Google instead of Microsoft - has been in beta for the last six weeks and limited to 10,000 developers. Google says that another 150,000 developers are on the waiting list and so on Wednesday, the first day of Google I/O, the company's two-day developer event in San Francisco, will take down the barricade. Google also disclosed what it's going to charge for App Engine starting later this year.

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.

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.

Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic, stopped by to talk with SYS-CON.TV host Jeremy Geelan at SYS-CON.TV's JavaOne studio in San Francisco's Moscone Center at JavaOne earlier this month. Other CEOs interviewed by Geelan at JavaOne 2008 included Chris Keene of WaveMaker; Sean Walsh, Skyway Software; Rod Johnson, SpringSource; and Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian.

The popular code generator Clear Data Builder will become available free of charge. Originally, Clear Data Builder was released as a command-line open source code generator a.k.a. DaoFlex. We've submitted it to Adobe Flex component exchange about two years ago, and it quickly became one of the most downloadable components.

The activity and interest around virtualization in '07 including the VMware IPO and Citrix acquisition of XenSource is indicative of the importance of virtualization as the leading technology of the 21st century. At a time when the market was headed decidedly south, the VMware IPO emerged as a star. The timing of the Citrix acquisition of XenSource was impeccable. These two events showcase enterprise interest in virtualization.

If you've been working with Web Services for a long time, chances are you've worked with Apache Axis and that you have an Axis Web Service somewhere in your code base. You probably also know about the many improvements in Axis2, especially around support for the more modern WS-* standards. So maybe you've been planning on migrating these old Axis services, but it can be hard to justify spending a lot of time on something that's working just fine.

This webcast at 1:00PM EDT today will examine how Java developers can create powerful database applications using SQL Anywhere. Whether you use Eclipse, NetBeans, or any other development tool, SQL Anywhere allows you to implement rich data-driven applications that can run in a wide range of scenarios, including client/server, n-tier, mobile, and off-line. This webcast will also cover topics such as data synchronization, web applications, security, and deployment. Code samples will be used throughout to illustrate these topics.

Friday morning the local Fox television station in New York City broke the news - Apple was suing New York City. Six out of 100 of their viewers thought Apple had the right to sue the City, but 94 out of 100 viewers are now calling for New Yorkers to drop Apple and its products, including the iPhone and Macs. New Yorkers are pissed off! New York City, universally known as The Big Apple, is facing a lawsuit from Steve Jobs' Apple Computer Inc. for, of all things, copyright infringement.

I spent last week in India attending the Great Developer Indian Summit (GDIS) that took place in Bangalore, in the Institute of Science, one of the most prestigious graduate schools in the country.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' recorded on June 22, 2008, the day before the opening of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo - which was held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

Peer networks are really just logical graphs of computers, or, in many cases, logical graphs of connected applications. The physical topology of the peer network, means of communication, and weighting of the edges are all implementation-specific details that differ from P2P network to P2P network, but all of them can be reduced down at some point to a drawing containing nodes and edges.

Java applications have become steadily harder to understand and maintain in recent years. Object-oriented programming has proven an effective way to develop enterprise applications, but several recent trends are causing a sharp increase in code complexity. One is the increasingly common use of the Factory design pattern, abstracting away the object creation process.

Xenocode launched its flagship offering, Xenocode Virtual Application Studio. Xenocode Virtual Application Studio is a next-generation application virtualization environment that allows Windows, .NET and Java-based desktop applications to be deployed in standalone executables that run instantly and reliably, anywhere. Xenocode virtualization technology frees organizations from lengthy application setup and configuration, eliminates software conflicts and incompatibilities, and enables instant deployment via portable USB devices, intranets, the Internet, or existing desktop management infrastructure.

Azul Systems, the six-year-old start-up with its own multi-core chips fitted into Java-accelerating enterprise-grade appliances, is entering its third generation of machine, expecting to expand into new markets and consolidate more and more x86 and RISC widgetry that isn't as clever at 'unconstrained' Java application scaling as it is.

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.

Azul Systems announced the availability of the Vega 3 Series appliances, which provides a way for companies to run, process, and manage Java applications for their business critical needs. Compared to the company's pioneering first generation Network Attached Processing product, the Vega 3 products represent a fivefold improvement in performance demonstrating Azul's commitment and execution on an aggressive product roadmap. This new solution, packaged in compact 5U or 14U appliance form factors, makes it easier for Enterprises in the E-Commerce, Financial Services, Web Hosting, and Telecommunications markets to maximize transactional volumes and minimize downtime, while decreasing overall response time. The Vega 3 Series provides companies with opportunities to run their businesses in environmentally-friendly ways by aiding datacenter virtualization initiatives and reducing power consumption costs yet still consistently improving the performance of applications.

Fedora 9 is out. Red Hat says its community-driven operating system features the first non-destructive live USB with persistence - which Red Hat thinks is a first of a kind anywhere - and marks the first major KDE 4-based distribution. Other highlights include improvements and enhancements for OpenJDK6, a completely open source implementation of Java SDK Standard Edition; GNOME 2.22; NetworkManager, which supports mobile broadband, multiple connections and connection editing and sharing; PackageKit, the default cross-distribution software package manager; the Anaconda installer; and Firefox 3 Beta 5 browser.

Azul Systems announced its Green in Mind Commitment today, an initiative dedicated to consistently acting in an environmentally conscious way in all aspects of business. The Green in Mind Commitment furthers the company's dedication to operate in an environmentally-friendly way. With its Green in Mind Commitment, the company is now expanding its efforts to preserve the environment beyond simply offering a solution to customers that has green benefits. As part of its Green in Mind Commitment, Azul announced that it will offset all carbon emissions attributed to each of its products sold for the life of each product's deployment.

Backbase introduced Enterprise AJAX 4.2 for Java, a new Java version of the AJAX framework. This new release offers a complete AJAX solution for Java developers, with support for all popular Java frameworks, including Struts, Spring MVC and Java Server Faces (JSF). Backbase Enterprise AJAX for Java is an AJAX framework that actively supports multiple server-side Java Frameworks. Global 2000 companies can therefore standardize on a single AJAX platform, rather than use a patchwork of various open source AJAX libraries.

Mainsoft announced that its latest release of Mainsoft products provide full support for Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions and AJAX Control Toolkit. Mainsoft for Java EE, version 2.2, allows Visual C# and Visual Basic developers to use ASP.NET 2.0 components from Microsoft to create Java pages with sophisticated, responsive user interfaces and efficient client-server communications by adding a few server controls to their ASP.NET pages. Ported applications deliver equivalent performance and scalability on Java as the original application delivers in .NET.

Infragistics announced the availability of Infragistics NetAdvantage for JSF 2008 Volume 1 enabling web developers to leverage the power of JavaServer Faces to create compelling User Interfaces (UI). This new release provides a comprehensive package of AJAX-enabled JSF UI components for building commercial Web 2.0 applications in J2EE environments. With the ability to create re-useable components, NetAdvantage for JSF 2008 Volume 1 helps Java enterprise developers create consistent experiences with less code in less time.

Fiorano Software announced that Fox Interactive Media (FIM) chose FioranoMQ to power internal communications infrastructure. FIM makes stuff that excites, entertains, enriches and infuriates millions of imaginations establishing a commanding position in the global media industry. The need for a powerful backbone with minimized proprietary dependencies facilitating communication across all platforms was accomplished by FioranoMQ.

Sun is now offering a new virtualization service that will let ISVs run their Solaris apps in a multi-tenant on-demand environment without having to rewrite any code. The trick is in Solaris' Containers virtualization and its xVM widgetry. The new Solaris On Demand program will provide third-party hosting complements of NaviSite, AT&T USi Communications and NTT Europe Online.

eApps Hosting announced that the GlassFish Open Source Application Server for Java EE 5, from the GlassFish community project, is now available as a click installable application service in low cost Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting plans. The eApps Hosting service has supported Java since 1999, when the company's Tomcat hosting plans were launched. In 2001 a Java hosting service using JBoss, a J2EE compliant Java application server, was offered.

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.

Ulitzer, Inc., which initially made the headlines with its 'job descriptions from the future,' announced today that it will launch its Ulitzer 'beta' site on July 4, 2008, with 5,500 authors and 600,000 original articles, published in more than 5,000 topic-specific online journals. Each journal offers up to 14 content-specific sections, written by the world's most respected authors, who are experts in their particular fields. All Ulitzer authors will get paid for their contributions.

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.

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.

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.