The Java Community Process (JCP) Program Management Office (PMO) and the Executive Committees, have announced the nominations for the 2008 JCP Program Annual Awards. Among the international honors for Java technology, the JCP Program Awards recognize excellence in Java standards development and innovation.

BlueWave Technology announced the availability of PipelineClaims 3.0. A Java-based web application that combines traditional claims administration with business process management to centralize claims operations into one business platform, the new version of the product also guides internal and external users throughout the full lifecycle of claims notice, adjustment, and resolution.

In last month's article I wrote about Open Source and Open Standards. This month, having just returned from the QCon conference (http://jaoo.d k/london-2008/conference/ ) in London, during which I discussed the role of community in the JCP, and particularly the role that individual ('non-corporate') developers could play in the organization, I'd like to address some other aspect of openness: transparency of process and community involvement.

Apple's taken some heat lately for their decision to push Safari to anybody who runs their Apple Software Update utility. I didn't want Safari, but unless I opt out of it I'll get it. Now Sun and Google are doing the same thing with the Google Toolbar. It isn't enough that they allow you to opt-out.

Is software development a science or an art? The software industry treats it as a science. It uses processes like MRDs, PRDs, and functional specs to convert customer needs into software that solves their problems. Various roles like product managers, engineering managers, project managers, architects, and programmers work together to drive the process like an efficient machine.

Zimbra announced the availability of its ZimbraME (Java Mobile Edition) client and source code for businesses. Users of any Java-enabled mobile phone will have access to the complete collaboration solution. The ZimbraME client provides Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) Open Source and Network Edition users worldwide with free access to the Zimbra experience with e-mail and calendar on mass-market Java-enabled mobile phones. This extends Zimbra's reach of services to the broadest range of devices available in the market and builds on Yahoo!'s standing in e-mail and mobile Web services and as a key starting point for consumers.

With only two weeks to go now before JavaOne, its annual Javaganza for developers, Sun has revealed that Java is at long last to be made 100% open source. 'We're trying to get Java into places it's never been before,' Rich Sands, group manager for developer marketing at Sun, told an interviewer on Tuesday.

Curl announced the beta release of Curl Nitro, the code name for an extension of the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform which offers enhanced desktop capabilities required by today's enterprises. The Nitro extension simplifies the process of installing and managing Curl applications accessed via a browser as well as directly from the desktop. Curl Nitro is the only platform for both traditional RIA and Desktop RIA that provides enterprise-level security, high performance and support for large data sets.

Sun Microsystems and the Java Card Forum (JCF) announced the availability of version 3.0 of the Java Card (TM) platform specification. The new Java Card 3.0 platform specification is available in two separate editions: Java Card Platform v.3.0, Classic Edition and Java Card Platform v.3.0, Connected Edition. Both editions are compatible with applications written for previous versions and can leverage the same security features within the platform specification.

Openadaptor is a software toolkit that may be classified as a lightweight Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution. It provides a configurable component framework for connecting various systems and middleware implementations. In less technical parlance, the components are akin to Lego building blocks that users can snap together to build adaptors, which themselves are the metaphorical glue or plumbing between applications.

Silverlight 2.0 is a freaking phenomenal RIA development environment and I would actually, at this point, put the development experience in Silverlight 2.0 above and beyond Flex. I can do more faster and have it look better and run more efficiently in Silverlight 2.0 than I can in Flex. BUT, when you're looking for case studies, look for ones where the person or organization who adopted Silverlight did so of their own volition, without being approached by Microsoft. I'm interested in hardcore, unbiased opinions from people who have been in the trenches doing their own coding, not watching Microsoft consultants do the coding for them. There are plenty of case studies like that out there, you just have to look past the shiny bouncing balls that are the Olympics and the Oscars and all the other crap that probably cost Microsoft a hojillion dollars in marketing funds and incentives.

Sun Microsystems announced that ITT has selected the Sun Java Real-Time System 2.0 (Java RTS) and the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) as the software development platform for its Eglin Control and Signal Processing Upgrade (CSPU) program. The Eglin Space Surveillance Radar (FPS-85), which schedules and tracks catalogued space objects, is undergoing a modernization process to replace legacy mission-critical components built from one-of-a-kind equipment and custom software. The Sun Java Real-Time System, a development platform for creating applications that require execution predictability, will enable ITT to run the new solution using Java technology on Solaris 10 OS and standard hardware.

Guiffy Software announced that Systar has licensed the Guiffy SureMerge diff/merge library. Guiffy is bundled with and integrated into the Systar BusinessBridgeNG upgrade tool. BusinessBridgeNG is Systar's Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) solution.

Terracotta and Hyperic announced a technology license agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Hyperic's SIGAR (System Information Gatherer and Reporter) has been incorporated into Terracotta 2.6. Hyperic's cross-platform SIGAR enables Terracotta to obtain key operating system and hardware information, important data points for monitoring and managing the health of application clusters.

Terracotta announced that Pearson VUE has deployed Terracotta's software following a thorough technology evaluation. Pearson VUE selected Terracotta to achieve scale and high performance for its web-based application, while reducing its cost of custom application coding. Pearson VUE is using Terracotta's open source Java clustering solution to create a shared application memory store across multiple servers in Pearson VUE's Iowa City data center. The result: Pearson VUE can now add computing capacity to support its growing business.

Terracotta announced the latest version of the open source Java clustering solution, Terracotta version 2.6. Building on the growing adoption of Terracotta, the new version offers a host of new features including cluster visualization, improved performance and official support for Tomcat 6.0. Terracotta lowers costs and simplifies web application deployment by reducing development effort and easing the load on application servers and databases, making it an ideal solution for scaling critical applications. Offering the performance of local memory with the high availability of a database, Terracotta eliminates the performance and reliability tradeoffs that constrain many Java applications.

Over the last several years, integration technology has been growing by leaps and bounds. The XML/REST/Web Services/SOA revolution has driven engineers and software firms to create an abundance of protocols, adaptors, transports, containers, standards, best practices...you name it. The bits and bytes that are now available are undeniably sophisticated, diverse, and capable of almost anything, but many of the packages are built from the technology up and leave the job of how to use the capabilities effectively as an exercise for the reader.

The real bummer is that Java 6 is not there. Who should we blame for it? Steve Jobs who openly states that nobody uses Java anymore? There are about 5 million professional Java developers around the world. Can you give them a good reason to buy MacBook Pro? I can't.

My friends recently debated who the greatest baseball player was. Names that popped up right away were Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Nolan Ryan, Cy Young, and Sandy Koufax. Cy Young had 511 wins, 14 seasons where he won 20 games and five other seasons where he won 30 games. But Sandy Koufax had three seasons where he had 300 strikeouts and in three seasons won 25 games. Babe Ruth hit 714 career home runs, a .342 lifetime average, and two seasons where he won 20 games as a pitcher.

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth has been telling Reuters that Sun is in the process of certifying Ubuntu on some of its low-end and mid-size hardware. The code it's certifying is Hardy Heron, the Ubuntu 8.04 rev that's due out later this month. Sun told the wire service that it's making sure its Java programming language, tools and Java server are compatible with Heron.

2008 is going to be an important year for Rich Internet Applications. Most organizations are delivering or planning to deliver Rich Internet Applications; however, at the same time, most IT managers are facing a dilemma: which Rich Internet Application technology and platform to use? The number of different frameworks and libraries is too vast to even consider evaluating a fraction of them.

Clerity announced that it has entered into an agreement to invest and take controlling interest in Veryant, a software technology firm focused on COBOL development and Java deployment solutions. With an estimated 200 billion lines of COBOL in use today, there is opportunity to enhance and integrate COBOL applications through Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures. All COBOL development and debugging tasks are performed in a COBOL environment, so no retraining or rewriting code is required. Since key isCOBOL technology such as the Compiler, Debugger and Runtime Environment is implemented 100% in Java, extending applications and delivering true cross-platform portability becomes a reality. The association of COBOL innovation with Clerity's professional services organization and industry partnerships will further extend the market reach of Veryant's offerings and improve its value proposition.

Aonix announced the release of PERC Ultra 5.1 with support for Wind River Linux. The characteristics of Java found in PERC Ultra to address the scalability, manageability, reliability, security, and performance needs of networking and telecommunications equipment providers are also addressed with the security enhanced and carrier grade Linux provided by Wind River making these products natural companions.

This article presents a case study of the use of meta-programming in Java compatibility testing. It shows how parts of the source code can be shared between different products and modified to generate programs targeting specific functions and describes the approach Sun Microsystems has used for building Technology Compatibility Kits (TCK) for more than five years.

SOA is mostly associated to 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.

Sun Microsystems announced that ITT Corporation has selected the Sun Java Real-Time System 2.0 (Java RTS) and the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) as the software development platform for its Eglin Control and Signal Processing Upgrade (CSPU) program.

The Dojo data API is a set of interfaces that data providers can implement so Dojo widgets and other application components can access external data. In DOJO-speak data providers that implement these interfaces are called data stores. A number of widgets supplied by the toolkit are capable of accessing data from these data stores. By presenting data as generic items with attributes they hide the underlying complexity of both the structure and access mechanism from consumers of the data.

Silverlight 2.0 kicks ass and I can't wait to start dropping more hardcore blog posts regarding it. Scott Guthrie's tutorials are a fantastic place to start. The issue I have, however, is that all of the tutorials assume you have installed Silverlight 2.0 tools for VS 2008. There is a small issue with that and I'm not sure everyone's aware of it.

A build tool helps developers compile, package, and deploy a component as part of a project's development lifecycle. Most of the time an enterprise needs a well-defined build process that can: 1) Define a process that can be adopted by various teams (developers, build engineers) to build software consistently and easily. 2) Manage reusable components generated from the projects.

JavaServer Faces (JSF) has seen increased momentum among enterprise Java developers ever since it was incorporated into Java EE 5.0 and became the standard framework for Java-based Web development. While some are just now taking their first steps with JSF, early adaptors have already discovered both the upside and downside of this framework. Some developers prefer to wait for the next major JSF release to get the problems ironed out, but others have implemented enhancements on top of JSF in various commercial and open source frameworks.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer.

Told ya Adobe was gonna reorganize and put its mobile/devices operation in with its platform operation in the name of moving to a single technology platform and runtime for PCs, handsets and consumer devices. Adobe's new CTO Kevin Lynch, the creator of AIR, is basically in charge of the whole magilla now. Gary Kovacs, VP of product management and marketing for the mobile and devices business, will be general manager of the unit, reporting to Lynch, replacing Al Ramadan, who is leaving.

Active Endpoints wants to make sure that Java developers who don't know JAK get introduced to a revolutionary technology. JAK - the Java Advancement Kit - is a way to create service orchestrations using the web services that Java developers have already created. JAK includes a trial of ActiveVOS Professional, access to detailed, self-paced training, the white paper BPEL for Java Developers, technical support during the evaluation period, sample code and more.

Phurnace announced the availability of a direct integration with IBM Rational Build Forge to enable Build Forge customers to automate their application deployment processes. The productized integration also includes direct connection to the ClearCase Source Code control system from IBM. Both IBM products can be accessed directly from within the Phurnace Deliver user interface or launched in the background from a Build Forge process or ClearCase task. The integration also provides the capability of creating Build Forge projects from within the deployment console of Phurnace Deliver.

Sun Microsystems announced the availability of Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) for Business, a new product subscription designed to more than double Sun's support periods for releases, provide faster access to technology updates and offer enterprise deployment features for customers. In addition, Sun also announced a redistribution agreement so that ISVs, service providers and integrators can offer Java SE for Business to their customers.

The NY Times had a story yesterday, much-written-about in the blogosphere, that said that bloggers were working themselves to death. This was one article about blogging I was glad to be left out of, even so, it could have been about me, a number of years ago, when my lifestyle almost did kill me.

A slow receiver is a node in a distributed system that can't process incoming messages due to network bandwidth issues, CPU issues, I/O issues or a combination of these factors. In all cases, the slow receiver either fails to pick up data from its incoming network buffers, causing the system to bottleneck, or fails to send application- or protocol-level acknowledgements that would let the sender proceed.

This was the first time I've included into the list of the RIA players a little known product called Curl. Even though this language was created in MIT, it's mainly used in Japan. I had a chance to spend an hour with Curl folks today, and it seems that this language may be a good fit for RIA that require solid processing power on the client. I need to spend more time studying this language to form an opinion about this language Curl.

Fiserv announced that Utica National Insurance of New Hartford is upgrading to the new Fiserv Claims Workstation. Utica National writes personal and commercial lines of business that are serviced through a countrywide network of in-house and independent adjusters. 'We wanted easier access for remote users, a simpler claims intake process and more efficient interaction with third party data. In addition, we can consolidate all of our claims management onto Claims Workstation, and the web-based platform opens the door for future claims initiatives as well,' said John Nobles, vice president-director of Claim Operations for Utica National Insurance. 'This decision supports our focus on meeting the needs of and providing outstanding service to our policyholders and agent/customers.'