Microsoft this morning made a $44.6 billion hostile bid for the floundering Yahoo, striking at a point when it has become evident to all and sundry that Yahoo doesn't have a pray of turning things around on its own let alone getting competitive. Yahoo's first official reaction was basi

CodeGear announced the sale of a 1 million seat license deal to the Russian Federal Agency of Education for teaching programming and application development to Russian students. CodeGear's products -- Delphi, Delphi for .NET, and C++ Builder - will be available for use in all of Russia

JSF did well in 2007. Let's put it this way: If job demand for the Struts framework and JSF were a stocks and you invested in it in April of 2005 by July of 2007 you would barely break even with Struts, but with JSF your investment would have grown 700% as of July 2007. (According to i

Imagine you are a contestant on a TV game show and your grinning quiz master pops the question: 'Name the one thing you most associate with Google?' Think about your answer - write it on a card (don't show me yet). Turning your card over, it's likely to be one of the following...Great

InterSystems announced that Oleen, an InterSystems implementation partner, will provide the InterSystems CACHÉ-based SurgiDat system to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). A database provider in healthcare, InterSystems develops and markets innovative database and integration soft

In response to the proliferation of other frameworks used to create rich Internet applications such as Flex from Adobe (formerly from Macromedia) and AJAX-based frameworks, Microsoft Silverlight was recently introduced. All three of these applications, as well as the others on the mark

Terracotta announced it has closed a $10 million round of venture financing. In this latest round, DAG Ventures made its initial investment in Terracotta, and was joined by existing investors Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, and Goldman Sachs. This latest investment from top tier inv

Managed Methods has announced the availability of their SOA management and runtime governance product JaxView 3.7. While providing full support for SOA and Web service management for the IT operations, JaxView 3.7 expanded runtime policy enforcement features around the creation of Serv

PreEmptive Solutions announced that it has launched a Professional Services organization and is shipping new releases of DashO, Dotfuscator Gold, Dotfuscator Professional, Dotfuscator Community Edition (CE) and Dotfuscator CE Enhanced.

Our very favorite reaction to the Sun-MySQL acquisition came from industry pundit John Dvorak who calls it 'perhaps the worst single event I have ever witnessed in the history of tech mergers and acquisitions.' He says that given Sun's abominable track record with acquisitions and the

Software professionals usually take a great deal of pride in some combination of: Chasing and groking the latest software methodology/technology (e.g., AJAX, JPA, PMP, Spring JMS, Ruby, etc.) making them more marketable (and better positioned to pay their bills!). Creating software pro

Sun Microsystems announced that it has expanded the Sun Startup Essentials(SM) program into Canada, France and Germany to help early-stage companies in these countries get up-and-running quickly while conserving cash. As part of Sun's ongoing commitment to fostering the global startup

Klockwork announced the availability of Klocwork Insight, a major product release that is designed to dramatically change the effectiveness of source code analysis technology. Klocwork Insight brings the full power of Klocwork's sophisticated, system-wide source code analysis capabilit

The turn of the year provides an opportunity to review the events of the past and to think about what lies ahead, so I'll address these themes in this month's column. But first I'd like to wish you all a peaceful and successful New Year. It's been a year of steady progress for the JCP.

The term Software Archeology has been used in various forms since early 2001. The concept of Software Archeology is an approach or methodology that helps individual team members or entire teams to understand exactly what they have in the code they're going to be working on. The approac

You're paying your application developers to write code. But are they doing what you're paying them to do? In most IT organizations, the answer is no. Industry analysts estimate that developers spend only about 20 percent of their time designing and coding. How do they spend the bulk o

The ink was still drying on Sun's billion-dollar deal to buy the webby, low-end open source database house MySQL when Sun turned around and put money in the high-end open source Postgres company Greenplum, evidently what Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz meant last week when he said 'and we ai

The Solaris Container typically can be categorized as an operating-system virtualization, which means the virtualization is done by enabling multiple isolated and secured systems in one physical server (operating system for operating system). The Solaris Resource Management and Zones a

Where does someone start who wants to learn development with JDeveloper (and ADF)? I am asked so often that I figured I'll write down my canned answer here and in the future I can just point people to this brief basic advice. Start by picking up your favorite 'Java for Dummies in 7 day

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 b

Tira Wireless unveiled new development and porting services that extend its mobile platform support beyond Java ME, BREW and smartphone platforms to include the Android platform built by the Open Handset Alliance.

More than 3 billion smartcards are produced every year. Generally defined as any pocket-sized card with embedded integrated circuits or chips, they have a huge number of applications including travel cards, chip and pin cards, pet tags, mobile phone SIMs and pallet trackers. Now with m

Initially Quest Software acquired a controlling interest in Vizioncore in 2005, Quest broadened its virtualization product portfolio in 2007 with the acquisitions of Invirtus, a provider of virtual machine optimization, conversion and automation products, and provision networks.

Nuesoft Technologies announced its Authorized Agent Program, a new initiative to qualify resellers, agents, consultants, and other professionals who work with medical offices to distribute its NueMD medical practice management systems. The program aims to maximize sales opportunities f

OpenEJB has been around for seven years and is one of the few standalone and embeddable EJB containers. Useful mainly for unit testing EJB beans (embedding the containers in unit tests), OpenEJB is also available as a Tomcat plug-in. Which means you can call EJB beans from your Web app

Intel's Q4 results, as good as they were, failed to impress a panicky 'the sky is falling' stock market and Intel's light Q1 forecast, which the company called 'a little bit cautious' on the US economy, sent the stock and the market down Wednesday, erasing billions in stockholder wealt

It said this morning that it had reached a compromise price with BEA and that the acquisition would go through after all, having been resisted by BEA, demanded by BEA's biggest stockholder, the dangerous Carl Icahn, and walked away from by Oracle. Oracle is going to pay $19.375 a share

ESPRE Solutions reported that it has released ESPRE LIVE Media Platform 3.0 which provides an end-to-end delivery system for live video over any IP network. Additionally, with the release of ESPRE LIVE 3.0 ESPRE Solutions also discloses that it is currently working with several signifi

For BEA, I was hoping they would succeed at combining the power of JRockit with AquaLogic to build scalable workflow (a la BPM) services. Instead, we users and developers will be waiting for years to see WebLogic and AquaLogic integrated into the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack. For MyS

Sun, Oracle's sometimes best friend, turned into an Oracle competitor this morning when it said it was buying MySQL, the open source database that's part of the famous LAMP stack. It's paying a billion dollars. MySQL was supposed to go public this year but picked the easier monetizatio

NetBeans 6.0 brings a host of new features to Java and Ruby developers, including a totally rewritten editor, support for local file history, a new graphical file comparison utility, and support for the new Swing desktop framework. One area of particular emphasis is its profiler, which

Actuate announced that its spreadsheet management product, Actuate e.Spreadsheet has been honored as a SearchDataManagement.com Product of the Year in the category of Business Intelligence (BI). Actuate e.Spreadsheet was selected for this honor by the SearchDataManagement.com editorial

SOA World Magazine announced today that nominations are now open for the SOA World Magazine Readers' Choice Awards, which recognize excellence in the software, solutions, or services provided by the industry's top vendors. SYS-CON's Readers' Choice Awards, also known as the 'Oscars of

2007 was the undoubtedly the year of Social Networking, but what of 2008? Will '08 be the year of 'Unified Communications' or the year when CMS comes to stand for 'Community Management System' - or even 'Collaboration Management System'? Or will it be the year of a giga-merger, to beat

Jaxcent from Desiderata Software is a Java API for accessing and modifying the Document Object Model (DOM) of the browser. Version 1 of Jaxcent worked entirely on the client side. While it explored some possibilities of doing AJAX-style operations in Java, it was best suited for intran

Creating reporting applications in AJAX is often more challenging than developing data entry CRUD applications. Reporters usually need to process lots of data, preferably on the client side to minimize the amount of information that goes through the wire. Reporters need to know how to

A7Soft has made a significant step in development XML related Java application. Releasing JExamXML, A7Soft transferred XML comparison technologies from the Windows application ExamXML to the industry standard Java platform, allowing mullions of XML developers to embed the XML differenc

Microsoft disclosed late Thursday that Jeff Raikes, the head of its Office operation, second only to Windows in bringing in revenue, was retiring and will be replaced by Stephen Elop, 44, Jupiter Networks' short-term COO. Before Jupiter, Elop was president of worldwide field operation

Intel turned up at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this week loaded down with 16 new 45nm Penryn chips, including its first 45nm Centrino mobile chips, and the idea that it can now cultivate a new category of tiny gadgets that'll put broadband Internet access 'in your pocket.' T

Vringo announced the addition of Discovery Channel video ringtones to its offering. Vringo users can share video clips of volcanoes, bees, skyrockets and any of 20 other videos, using their mobile phones. Vringo subscribers worldwide will be able to personalize their own video ringtone