McObject announced the availability on the java.net Mobile & Embedded Community site ( www.mobileandembedded.org ) of McObject's ProScout demo application, incorporating the Perst Lite object-oriented, open source embedded database system, to the wide population of developers building mobile device-based applications using the Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME).

Well, Oracle's soon-to-be takeover, BEA - the feds just okayed the merger - said Wednesday that it had teamed with VMware to deliver Java virtualization to the enterprise. BEA's put a Client Extension on its LiquidVM so customers can deploy and manage enterprise Java apps as virtual machines in a VMware-virtualized environment.

IONA Technologies CTO Eric Newcomer, in SYS-CON's annual round-up of technology predictions earlier this year, had this to say: 'In the Java market fragmentation will increase rather than lessen. The recent split between JBI and SCA, and the disagreements over Java EE 6 and OSGi will escalate tensions as the pressure increases on BEA/Oracle, IBM, and Sun to take market share from each other in a diminishing market. Meanwhile, Microsoft has an opportunity to grow stronger behind the leadership of Ray Ozzie and is likely to surprise those who believe the battle for the enterprise is over and Java has already won.'

AccuRev and Electric Cloud announced a technology partnership designed to improve software development productivity and efficiency. The combined solution, which integrates the automated build, test and deployment functionality of Electric Cloud's ElectricCommander software with process-enabled software configuration management (SCM) using AccuRev, advances multistage continuous integration and scalable agile best practices.

AccuRev announced the availability of AccuRev 4.6 for ClearCase, the latest add-on to its software configuration management (SCM) solution. AccuRev 4.6 for ClearCase provides coexistence for optimal support of parallel, geographically distributed and Agile development with AccuRev in existing ClearCase environments. This enables a coexistence strategy, where teams are able to use the most appropriate SCM solution for each group, project or user.

Web Services are becoming the chosen way of exposing interoperable units of work as services. Today consumers and providers of software services talk different languages, and SOAP makes them understand each other. SOAP can be transported via almost anything, and we sometimes joke that we can even do SOAP over FedEx if necessary.

As I recently spoke at the Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days conference at Sun's Santa Clara campus, and the yearly Mobile World Congress conference was held in Barcelona in February, and the majority of the JSRs that have been active in the past few weeks are in the mobile space, I thought it would be opportune to focus on Java ME in this month's column.

The new Run Time Editor 3 (RTE3) is the next generation control system interface design environment designed specifically for network control from the ground up in Java. A true multi-threaded, multi-processor aware PC control system for almost any computer and operating system. The current version is ready for Windows and Linux, and Mac OSX will be available soon. Since the RTE3 was written in Java, this also means future capabilities with portable devices and more.

Sun closed on its acquisition of MySQL today, calling the billion-dollar purchase the 'most important acquisition in Sun's history' - oh, heck, make that the 'modern software industry' - with Sun preening that it completed the deal in less than six weeks convinced that it is now a proven open source leader ready to hustle platforms into the 'Network Economy.'

BEA Systems announced that it is working with VMware to deliver Java virtualization for the enterprise. The new BEA LiquidVM VI Client Extension enables customers to deploy and manage enterprise Java applications as virtual machines within a VMware-virtualized environment. BEA and VMware collaborated on the development of this seamless extension to VMware VirtualCenter to improve the performance, efficiency and simplicity of Java applications on VMware virtualization software. VMWare intends to package it within a future release of their Virtual Center product line.

Aonix announced that Aonix had been chosen to participate in DIANA, a (Distributed equipment Independent environment for Advanced avioNic Applications). DIANA, funded by the European Community at $4.26M, is chartered to modernize the tools and execution environments used in hard real-time and safety-certifiable avionics systems in order to reduce the development and ongoing operational costs of aircraft. Aonix will provide PERC Pico technology and virtual machine standards experience to support the DIANA initiative.

The absence of JavaScript support in today's search engine crawlers presents a serious SEO dilemma for Websites generating some or all of their content with JavaScript DOM manipulation. A quick glance at a million server headers eaten by Splunk and crawled by Grub shows the severity of the problem. A solution is presented by using a ghosting application in front of the Web server doing source rendering with a third party JavaScript engine library for various crawlers. The solution enables a Website to deliver rendered page content for crawlers, which subsequently increases the site's ranking. Using memcached, a scalable solution is provided for increasing throughput on large or busy sites.

Microsoft introduced Silverlight as cross-platform, cross-browser next generation RIA solution. No matter you have LAMP, ASP.NET or JAVA Web application, you can take advantage of Silverlight to impress your user with the 'WOW' effects. This session will use real world implementations to show you how to build a Silverlight application from start to finish, as well overall strategy why we should or shouldn't use Silverlight.

jMaki is an AJAX framework that provide a wrapper over rich widgets from multiple toolkits such as Yahoo!, Dojo and many others. jMaki-wrapped widgets can be easily used in a JSP, Rails, PHP and Phobos app. This session will explain what jMaki is and show using live code demos how easy it is to embed jMaki widgets in different pages.

Hippocrates, one of the founding fathers of modern medicine, realized that those who trained to become physicians were not only able to use their skills for good and for progress, but also might be inclined to misuse all they had learned. To protect against such abuses, new grads back in the 4th century B.C. were made to swear they would only use medicine in the best interests of their patients by taking the eponymously named 'Hippocratic Oath.'

ILOG. a member of the OpenAjax Alliance, announced that its graphical visualization offering for Adobe Flex, ILOG Elixir, is shipping with feature and sales channel enhancements. ILOG Elixir, available now, was warmly received by the Adobe Flex community during its Beta period.

Each day as an AJAX developer seems to bring another helpful revelation: a new tool, a new gadget, a new way to reinvent the browser. But even when I'm confronted with a breakthrough as big as Firebug - the brilliant debugging tool for Firefox - in the back of my mind I'm reminded that the AJAX state-of-the-art is trailing behind the debugging tools that we've had in Java for years. With age comes maturity, and with Java's maturity has come a wealth of development environments, field-tested frameworks, and a rich set of strongly typed APIs.

McObject has added support for the KD-Tree, a database index with uses in spatial and pattern-matching applications, to its Perst open source, object-oriented embedded database system. For developers working with Perst, the KD-Tree expands coding efficiency and helps make Java and .NET data objects easier to use in certain types of application.

IONA Technologies announced that Passenger has selected IONA to support its deployment of Apache ActiveMQ, the Open Source JMS-compliant messaging and integration platform. Passenger will deploy IONA's FUSE Message Broker, which is IONA's version of ActiveMQ, to deliver service-oriented integration for Passenger's customer collaboration platform.

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that, readers can themselves infer: where is AJAX headed next?

Sun is open sourcing SPOT, its Java-based Small Programmable Object Technology research project under the GPLv2 license. It said the contribution, made in search of Java-based wireless sensor and embedded apps, will include so-called eBones hardware architecture plans, the Squawk Java Virtual Machine and system software including libraries, drivers and networking stack.

Sun is going to buy innotek, a low-profile PC virtualization house based in Stuttgart, and its free, open source, GPLv2-licensed VirtualBox software to extend its xVM data center virtualization platform to the desktop - particularly and especially the developer's desktop. Sun said Tuesday that it had signed a stock purchase agreement to acquire the small, marketing-free, 'internally funded' innotek. Terms were not disclosed. Now this is not Sun's first brush up against desktop virtualization. It did of course buy the flagging Citrix-like Tarantella (which is what the old Santa Cruz Operation became after it sold Unix to SCO, née Caldera) and of course it has those Sun Ray thin clients - for which it bought Tarantella so they could run Windows. But VirtualBox is another kettle of fish.

First off, if you like programming, you should check out this hilarious site on the venerable song 99 Bottles of Beer. Ok, now I am assuming that you just spent the last hour or so at that website, but you are back. If you are into Java, one of the most interesting solutions is one that eschews typical control structures (for/while/do loops) and instead uses Java's exception system to sing the song.

Microsoft today attempted to exorcize the interoperability bogeymen that have haunted it since it was first discovered to be using secret APIs 20 years ago, bogeymen that now quote European antitrust law at it and carry writs from the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. To avoid further confrontation with the European Commission, which opened a broad investigation of Microsoft's interoperability last month, the company said it would voluntarily open up all the APIs and communications protocols in its biggest revenue producers now and forever. To be clear, it said that these are the APIs and protocols 'used by other Microsoft products.'

Today's applications require faster and more frequent access to data at the mid-tier than ever before. This is due to a number of factors, including massive growth of data volumes and the extreme processing requirements that accompany such growth, the pressure from ever-changing business requirements, and the adoption of architectural approaches and frameworks such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 and the resulting demands that these frameworks make on data.

ICEsoft Technologies is a leading provider of standards-compliant, AJAX-based solutions for developing and deploying Java EE, rich Internet applications. The company's portfolio of enterprise level Java products includes ICEfaces, an AJAX application framework that enables Java EE application developers to easily create and deploy thin-client rich Web applications in pure Java.

Kevin Nilson, the leader of the Silicon Valley Web Developer JUG, relayed to me the idea of creating an application in JavaFX Script that consists of a wheel that has the names of JUG attendees on it. The wheel would revolve and land on a name, who would then receive a prize. Today's post is a first cut at this, which also demonstrates several compiled JavaFX Script features.

I am glad to introduce you to a new set of resources to help surface scalability and performance issues in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA.) The SOA Knowledge and Performance Kit is a free open-source resource to show you what it really takes to build services using today's leading SOA development platforms. The Kit delivers an SOA use case design, source code to the implementations of the use case on Oracle, IBM, BEA, and TIBCO platforms, developer journals describing our experiences step-by-step, a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator, and performance and scalability tests that leverage the PushToTest test automation platform.

The common approach to securing applications is to try to identify and remove all of the application's security vulnerabilities at the end of the development process. However, this bug-finding approach is not only resource-intensive, it's largely ineffective. To have any chance of exposing all of the security vulnerabilities that may be nested throughout the application, the team would have to identify every single path through the application then rigorously test each and every one.

So is O'Reilly actually condoning the hacking of the phones? O'Reilly has had a long and prestigious history as being the ultimate source for *nix manuals, including many books that became so dogeared I actually bought multiple copies, including dozens of 'in a nutshell' books. Back in those good old days, 'hacks' which appeared in O'Reilly titles were actually just low-level down-and-dirty nuggets of pure gold that geeks and admins loved but were all perfectly legal.

So it's kicking off an 'Enterprise Acceleration' initiative. It means to add products to its middleware portfolio, sponsor new open source projects, grow its partner ecosystem, and offer new enterprise-class performance and interoperability resources. It also means to buck up sales and marketing. It said it would set up facilities for performance tuning. testing applications, live certification and migration. JBoss, which cost Red Hat around $325 million a couple of years ago, runs on Red Hat, Windows and other Linuxes.

Advanced Modeling Concepts has released a unique Java security tool -AfterthoughtSoft-Secure, that allows Java developers (or security professionals) to add powerful Role-Based Access Control logic, 'after-the-fact' to 'existing' Java applications.

4 of our 6 first quarter projects have major components in Java ME. These are new applications, from companies who understand the porting issues and the complexities. This quarter is not particularly different from other quarters: we get far more work designing applications than designing web sites. Java ME is going to keep on chugging, maybe even seeing a rebirth, for quite a while yet.

Aonix and Green Hills Software have joined forces to enable commercial availability of the Aonix PERC Ultra Virtual Machine (VM) for Green Hills INTEGRITY to the embedded market. The companies have also formed a partnering agreement paving the way to jointly market the INTEGRITY RTOS and Aonix PERC technologies to their mutual customers. The combination of these leading products provides an application execution environment geared for complex applications that require high levels of Java platform functionality along with hard real-time, predictable timing and secure, reliable operation.

Synchronica announced Mobile Gateway 3.5 with new back-end support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 and Sun Java Communications Suite 5. Mobile Gateway 3.5 also introduces support for the Java Content Repository (JCR) standard, allowing it to be integrated with third-party personal information management (PIM) systems, reducing the development time. The new product incorporates a billing API (Application Programming Interface) to facilitate both prepaid billing, predominantly used in the consumer sector, and post-paid billing favored by corporate accounts.

With version 4.0 of PDFNet SDK, PDFTron expands its development platform offering by adding full Java support to the PDF library. The new Java interface exposes the underlying API as a set of Java classes to enable developers to integrate PDFTron's powerful PDFNet API into their Java applications. PDFNet SDK for Java gives developers access to the same broad range of robust functionality already available for .NET, C and C++, while being able to take advantage of the many efficiencies and software development features available with the Java framework. Integration of the new Java version with other applications is a breeze and plenty of Java sample code is delivered as part of the standard distribution of PDFNet SDK.

SpringSource announced a technology partnership with GigaSpaces. The partnership enhances the integration of Spring and GigaSpaces, providing joint users and customers with the flexible programming Spring is known for with the high performance and scalability of the GigaSpaces middleware.

Deploying and migrating JavaEE applications is hard work. Specifically, it's work that's error-prone, repetitive, and time consuming because of the complexity of setting up or tweaking Web application servers. The result is lost man/hours, soaring costs, and potential problems associated with hidden or unseen configuration issues that might pop up at a later time. Furthermore the situation is often muddied by the 'fog of war' - technical personnel and their managers don't really have any easy way to take an accurate snapshot of current application server configurations, and no easy way to make decisions regarding those assets and how they can (or can't) support an enterprise's line of business.

Metallect announced the availability of an early beta release of its new architecture modeling software, XMuddle for Java. 'The response from our alpha users has been overwhelmingly positive, so we decided to make the software available to a wider community earlier than originally planned,' said Frank Auger, CEO of Metallect. 'Even though we are still in active development, we are seeing demand for more open access prior to the public beta There have been vast improvements in XMuddle's look and feel as well as to the underlying engine. Our focus on interactive white-board style diagrams makes XMuddle such a unique concept in its field.'

Some of the most scared people inside Yahoo right now have got to be the open source Zimbra crowd that Yahoo acquired last September for $350 million for its Microsoft-opposing enterprise-directed e-mail and calendaring, folks who just released their webby AJAX-based Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 5.0 this week - and intend to give it a browser-based document-creating and -sharing Zimbra Desktop, called the 'world's first offline-capable Web 2.0 collaborative experience.' Somehow we suspect Microsoft may not think e-mail is 'broken' like Zimbra, a partner of Red Hat, does, but if Microsoft does acquires Yahoo and you hear a crunch, you can imagine Zimbra's back breaking.