Our search for the Twenty Top Software People in the World is nearing completion. In the SYS-CON tradition of empowering readers, we are leaving the final 'cut' to you, so here are the top 40 nominations in alphabetical order. Our aim this time round is to whittle this 40 down to twenty, not (yet) to put the twenty in any order of preference. All you need to do to vote is to go to the Further Details page of any nominee you'd like to see in the top half of the poll when we close voting on Christmas Eve, December 24, and cast your vote. Happy voting!

While at lunch with colleagues recently I overheard four very able Java developers swapping horror stories of the kit they'd cut their teeth on as junior programmers. One had used a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1K of RAM and a black and white TV and a tape recorder in lieu of a hard drive. Things were so bad with the memory that the screen buffer was used to store program data.

In a transaction that is supposed to be the largest software acquisition ever, Symantec, the consumer anti-virus house, is buying Veritas, the enterprise storage and backup manager, for $13.5 billion in stock. The price works out to roughly $30.75 a share, better than a $5 premium over Veritas' closing price on Friday before trades shot up on rumors Monday and the story leaked to the New York Times on Tuesday.

In the November issue of JDJ (Vol. 9, issue 11) I explained the theory behind the JSR 168 (Portlet Specification) from an academic perspective. The specification provides the infrastructure, classes, interfaces, and JSP tags for building applications that can be pieced together from a handful of off-the-shelf or custom portlets. This time around, I provide you with a real-world implementation that utilizes the knowledge you picked up from Part 1 of this series.

In an all-cash deal worth approximately $10.3 billion, Oracle is going to acquire 100% of PeopleSoft's shares, at a newly increased price of $26.50, a $2.50 increase on its 'best and final' offer which expired in November. PeopleSoft's board has approved the deal. 'We believe this revised offer provides good value for PeopleSoft stockholders and represents a substantial increase in value from October,' says the chairman of PeopleSoft's transaction committee, George 'Skip' Battle. Says Oracle's Ellison: 'Today we announced both a great quarter and the agreement to acquire PeopleSoft. This merger gives Oracle even more scale and momentum.'

By now you've probably either heard about or read the analyst report from the Burton Group entitled 'J2EE in Jeopardy.' In summary, the claim is J2EE as a standard is in danger due to several market forces.

Once publicly free of the PC division, will IBM either buy, or form a close joint venture, with Apple - to sell its PCs, which coincidentally are now built around IBM's PowerPC chip? That's the question being asked by tech-savvy commentators who wonder what will happen next if Big Blue truly goes ahead and sells the division to the Chinese company Lenovo.

'The OS wars are down to three - Microsoft Windows, Sun's Solaris, and Red Hat's Linux,' according to Sun's president and COO, Jonathan Schwartz, the industry's First Blogger Extraordinary.

Despite receiving 61% of PeopleSoft shares in its tender last month, Oracle hasn't yet overcome PeopleSoft's 'poison pill' provisions aimed at making a takeover too costly even for Larry Ellison. Just in case Oracle fails in its attempt to have a court remove the pill so it can move forward with its takeover, it's keeping its 'hit list' of alternative targets fully alive, said its president in an interview yesterday.

To enumerate means to itemize or to list. In the world of programming, enumerations, enums for short, are used to represent a finite set of values (constants) that a variable can attain. In other words, it defines the domain of a type. For instance, different states of a fan switch - off, low, medium, and high - make up an enumeration.

Vice-chancellor Leo Strine Jr wants to understand 'the reaction of the PeopleSoft board to the unconditional offer and Oracle's application to enjoin the application of the rights plan to that offer,' reports Maureen O'Gara. Observers think the Delaware decision won't go in Oracle's favor, she adds, catapulting the situation, if Oracle sticks to its guns, into a fight for control of PeopleSoft's board at the company's next annual meeting this spring.

What are the five most important trends for the future of software tools, Alan W. Brown was asked recently. As a Distinguished Engineer at IBM Rational software responsible for future product strategy of IBM Rational's Design and Construction products, his choices - made from his context of design and construction tool strategy - are interesting.

Rob Gingell, Sun's chief engineer and a 20-year Sun veteran, has left Sun to become executive vice president and chief technology officer of the same company that Sun's former VP of developer software, Rich Green, joined - also as an EVP - when he left left Sun last April. The company, Cassatt Corporation, is based like Sun in Santa Clara, and headed up by BEA Systems co-founder Bill Coleman, the 'B' in BEA.

Part 1 of this article ('Java Gaming: Understanding the Basic Concepts,' [JDJ, Vol. 9, issue 10]) covered the basics of a game framework. Part 2 goes into more depth on the actual 2D rendering specifics and the resulting demo: the Ping program.

Some heavy-duty Java gurus try to stay away from business applications, reports JDJ's Yakov Fain, believing that the real fun coding is in companies that develop compilers, browsers, search engines, application servers, and the like. But Java has now come to Wall Street to stay. 'Trust me, these IT guys on Wall Street are not counting crows either,' Fain notes, 'You can work for a solid financial company and have as many earrings as you'd like, a long ponytail, grow a beard, and wear T-shirts and jeans. Wall Street welcomes the James Gosling look and feel!'

Over the past 15 years, each revision of middleware specifications like DCE, CORBA, and J2EE evolved into a larger, more complex definition of new functionality and bloatware. Rarely has a standards-based specification stepped back and actually tried to make development easier for its user base. Until now that is.

The JFC/Swing API, natively precompiled on Linux for the first time, delivers measurable improvement in Java GUI performance. The Excelsior Engineering Team has ported Excelsior JET, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) with an ahead-of-time compiler, to the Linux/x86 platform.

JavaServer Faces (JSF) technology is a new user interface framework for J2EE applications. This article uses the familiar Pet Store application to demonstrate how to build a real-world Web application using JSF, the Spring Framework, and Hibernate.

The PeopleSoft board today recommended to its shareholders that they give Oracle the cold shoulder and reject its $24 per share bid for the company, seriously undervaluing it - says PeopleSoft - at just $8.8BN. Larry Ellison issued a statement saying that the offer is good till midnight on November 19 - after which time, if a majority of shares have not been tendered, Oracle will move on to other prey and the would-be hostile takeover of PeopleSoft will pass into the annals of software business history.

Version 1.0 of Firefox, the free browser, is officially released today, after more than 7 million people downloaded it during its 'preview release' period. The Mozilla Foundation, which inherited much of the underlying software code from Netscape, hopes Firefox will take a 10% chunk of browser market share overall, mostly from Microsoft - which currently has a 92.9% stranglehold.

What does the runaway success of Firefox mean for the Java developer community? According to Harshad Oak, it shows the Java community that it's possible to compete with Microsoft. Firefox users had to relate with the product and promote it as if it was their own creation. 'Linux already did that in the OS space and Firefox is now doing it in the browser space,' he notes.

Novell has agreed not to sue Microsoft on antitrust grounds in exchange for $536 million in cash. Novell has also agreed to drop out of the European Commission's case against Microsoft where it has been one of the five primary complainants, but says it will sue Microsoft in federal court in Utah by the end of the week - charging it with monopoly maintenance and anti-competitive behavior against WordPerfect and the Quattro Pro spreadsheet.

In a memorable discussion, Microsoft SOAP guru Don Box and Anders Hejlsberg - the 'Father of C#' - both paid tribute to Java last week at a conference in Canada.

Spare a thought for a poor suppressed CEO. Scott McNealy has told reporters that the reason Jonathan Schwartz has become Sun's unofficial blogger-in-chief is that McNealy himself is not being permitted to start one. 'They won't let me start a blog,' he said, referring presumably to Sun's legal advisers. 'It would be very well-read, but I have to play a little bit more like Switzerland,' he added.

'It must be the lunar eclipse. I'm agreeing with a lot of statements being made in the industry.' With this opening line, Sun's president, COO, and blogger-in-chief yesterday shared his thoughts on software pricing, on 'multi-core computing' as being the wave of the future, and on integration standards for Web services.

Some of you may remember a time when the world of multithreaded programming was limited to a small set of C or C++ applications. Often the threads were used sparingly and restricted to a specific task or computation or even operating system.

'There are those that persist in trying to draw the industry as filled with binary extremes,' writes Jonathan Schwartz, currently the industry's highest-profile blogger. But it isn't an either/or choice these days, Schwartz argues, in his latest effusion. It isn't open-source or proprietary. It all depends 'upon the constituency you're serving,' Schwartz says.

'I've got the same job, the same big mouth.' In vintage McNealy fashion, that was the Sun supremo's answer to USA Today this weekend when it asked him whether - with Sun president and COO increasingly becoming the public face of the company - he was 'stepping back.' McNealy also said: 'I've been asked that for 23 years.'

You know how to write good Java code and deployment to a server is no mystery either. But have you ever had to work in large development teams, maybe geographically dispersed (off-shoring...)? Ever had to address the pain of application software updates?

'To call Sun proprietary is as big a lie as you could put in your newspaper,' Sun's CEO Scott McNealy told a reporter this week. 'If I were to say IBM is bankrupt and you were to publish that, that would be the same as saying Sun is proprietary.'

Is the Java certification program offered by Sun really the route to a higher salary and better quality of code for businesses? William Knight has his doubts. In his fifth year of Java programming, after being involved in several distributed developments for large companies, a prospective employer tested his ability, saying 'Don't worry, you'll have no trouble; this is for beginners.' How did he do? Read on.

Any business-savvy engineer knows that algorithm improvements come at a price: the engineer's time. But what about asking programmers to be a little more lazy? Warren MacEvoy chews over some of the technology issues of the day and offers his own suggestions.

The PeopleSoft board's worst fear at this point may not be that Oracle buys the company but that it doesn't - or that PeopleSoft won't go for the $21 a share currently on offer. is that why one of its directors testified last week that PeopleSoft might now be open to Oracle's overtures - especially if a deal could be cut quick?

In an out-of-court settlement reached this morning, pending the signing of a final agreement, Sun has agreed to pay Kodak $92 million cash, bringing to an end the patent infringement proceedings instigated by Kodak last week, in which Java was declared by a federal jury to breach certain Kodak-owned patents, a breach for which Kodak was demanding $1.06 billion in damages and back royalties from Sun.

At JavaOne 2004 we gave a presentation on Java game development that included general framework information and tips and tricks on using the media APIs effectively. We also showed an application named 'Ping' that demonstrated some of the ideas we discussed.

'Software is more complex than a cotton gin or whatever else you might typically invent in a bricks and mortar world,' argues Groklaw.net Editor Pamela Jones. 'Software and patents don't belong together,' Jones maintains.

Three US patents - 5,206,951; 5,421,012; and 5,226,161 - could end up costing Sun up to $1.06 billion in damages, in the form of lump-sum royalties, if Eastman Kodak Co. gets its way in federal court this week. On Friday Kodak won its patents dispute case - which centers on the middleware mechanisms provided by Java. Kodak bought the patents from Wang Laboratories in 1997. Now the trial moves into its damages phase, and the stakes are very high.

These days Calvin Austin is one of the busiest people in the Java world: J2SE 5.0, that was also known as the 'Tiger' project, is being officially released today! JDJ's Yakov Fain was able to catch Austin, spec lead for Java 5.0, right before the plane from San Francisco to New York where he'll today be presenting the new features of the Java language to the New York Java Users Group.

Sun has proposed a new specification that would be based on the convergence of two other specifications, EJB 3.0 and JDO 2.0. The effort is aimed at providing a unified data persistence model for the Java community. What is proposed is a Plain Old Java Objects (POJO) persistence model.

'Thank-you, everyone for developing, deploying, and improving the Internet,' writes Roger Strukhoff. 'Thank-you Tim Berners-Lee for realizing its power. But no thanks to everyone who has overemphasized it, paradigmatically hyperbolized it, obtusely not gotten that it doesn't matter if you don't get it, what matters is that it doesn't fundamentally change a thing...no way, no how will it ever 'change everything'.'