Red Hat, which has made its fortune displacing Solaris, is now going to collaborate with Sun to advance open source Java, which Red Hat is particularly partial to given its JBoss investment. This is the third time this year that Sun has laid down with one of its enemies. It also cut d

WaveMaker, formerly known as ActiveGrid, has announced a new corporate brand and product strategy that will address the growing demand for technology that simplifies the assembly of Web applications, while meeting the architectural, security and governance policies of CIOs. WaveMaker w

Open source provides an incredible amount of technical leverage for small companies. No matter who productive your rock-star programmers are and no matter how much judo you apply to your problems, solid infrastructure takes a long time and benefits immensely from broad involvement. It

My own personal install of Leopard seems to be having periodic trouble completing a shutdown on the 17' MBP. Annoying? Yes. Worthy of posting something inflammatory such as 'wrong with Leopard's spots'? Doubtful. So, in looking at eWeek's Microsoft Watch's latest article, I leave you w

'We want to dispel any speculation that we would engage in 'scorched earth' transactions to entrench ourselves at shareholders' expense or discourage a fully valued acquisition of the company. We will undertake no such actions. Our goal has always been to maximize shareholder value, an

This is election time for the JCP: five seats on the Java ME Executive Committee (EC) and five seats on the Java SE/EE EC are up for re-election. All JCP members are eligible to vote and may cast one vote for each seat (hence the recommendation to vote often). The voting process is in

Open source technology is a boon to companies that want to add features and functionality to their applications without the overhead. It eliminates the cost of databases, operating systems, and other infrastructure components, enabling quick and cost-effective access to new features. A

Since its emergence, Web Service technology has gone a long way towards perfecting itself and finding its right application in the real world. With the maturity of the specifications, Web Service technology, with its power of interoperability, is now the major enabling technology of SO

Sun countersued NetApp last Thursday in an action that NetApp founder Dave Hitz describes on his blog as seeking a permanent injunction 'to remove almost all of our products from the marketplace' and 'make NetApp employees wonder 'Do I still have a job?' and customers wonder 'Is it saf

FiveRuns Corporation, a pioneer of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails, described by some as the new Java, has gotten $6.2 million in funding from Austin Ventures. The money is earmarked for acceleration product development, sales and marketing and the company's partnership efforts.

Wouldn't JSR 311 - a.k.a. JAX-RS: The Java API for RESTful Web Services - be more accurately named if it were called the 'Java HTTP Server API'? That is the question asked this week by Elliotte Rusty Harold, Java author and expert. 'I no longer think this API is a bad thing,' he commen

Now that Leopard is out and everyone is, I suspect, feverishly reformatting their laptops and desktops to install the retail copy of Leopard, developers can finally start sharing their Leopard code samples. Rather than me sitting around making up stupid reasons why such-and-such code s

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's cont

So while reviewing the release notes for Java on Leopard I noticed a couple of interesting bits. First they included junit 4.1 and maven 2.0.6 in the mix, which is great (except that maven 2.06 had some serious bugs with transitive dependencies). mvn is now on your path so you don't ha

Two years ago I started the Princeton JUG and its membership grew from 20 to 200 people. Typically, if a regular member makes a presentation, about 20 people show up. If the presenter is a published author, attendance doubles. Just doubles. We have a great sponsor (thank you, Infragist

Leopard introduces a bunch of amazingly powerful new controls, but one of my favorite new controls is the NSCollectionView. This control works a lot like the FlowLayoutPanel if you're familiar with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It essentially is a layout container responsible

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks

We all know and love the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE, but did you know that you can use it to create Web and server applications that run on open systems such as Solaris or Linux? Urix, a predictive modeling software company and Mainsoft customer since 2005, is doing just that. In Janu

I've actually seen a few reports of people having trouble with the upgrade - their computer hangs at the bootup screen for hours on end. Since I didn't 'upgrade' (like a good boy, I reformatted and started over) I didn't experience the hour-long hangs, however, I did experience some de

In the aftermath of the latest spat between Rubyists and Javaholics, it might be worth noting that Ruby is now the 10th most popular programming language, up from 13th place a year ago. That, anyway, is the story according to the TIOBE Programming Community index which gives an indicat

Often in software I find myself preaching restraint to those who wish to move platforms for no apparent reason than to keep up with the IT fashion industry; however, even harder than the silver-bullet chasers is dealing with organizations where change is required, not only in a company

NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 is now available for download. Beta 2 comes bundled with MySQL and PostgreSQL drivers, and improvements to Ruby code completion and Woodstock 4.1 Build 14. The focus of NetBeans 6.0 is superior developer productivity with a smarter, faster editor, and the integratio

'Some folks are far too eager to misinterpret statements and put words in my mouth,' wrote James Gosling recently in his blog, in a post titled 'JavaME Is *Not* Dead!' - a rebuttal to a recent report in the UK media that JavaFX Mobile was perhaps going to eclipse JavaME for good. 'This

Migration of software systems to the OSGi platform is gaining momentum with wide acceptance of the OSGi technology as the dynamic module system for Java. This transition is of special interest when it comes to popular Java application frameworks, which attract a growing number of Java

Message-oriented middleware is at the core of a vast number of financial services and telecommunications applications. It is also gaining traction in industries such as manufacturing, transportation, healthcare and supply chain management. The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPE

In the canon of anti-Java / Pro Ruby articles, none has achieved the center of attention swifter than the one written last month by blogger-developer Obie Fernandez, who self-describes himself as 'committed to making the world of software development a more enjoyable, productive place.

Adobe announced that it is offering Adobe Flex Builder 2 software at no cost to students and faculty at educational institutions worldwide. The Flex Builder 2 integrated development environment (IDE) is part of a toolset for designing and developing rich Internet applications (RIAs), a

Have you ever watched your fellow PHP/Ruby/Python developers at work? They make a change in the source code, hit CTRL+S to save the source code, press ALT+TAB switching to the browser window where only a refresh is needed and voilà - they can see the result in their browser within mill

Parasoft Corporation ha announced the availability of Automated Defect Prevention: Best Practices in Software Management (Wiley, 2007), by Dr. Dorota Huizinga, Associated Dean for the College of Engineering and Computer Science at California State University, Fullerton and Dr. Adam Kol

'In V2, the focus was on understanding how your code is structured today, and where it is tangled or overly complex. V3 takes it to the next level, letting architects define how the code should be structured and communicating this to the team so they can actually make it happen' explai

IntelliJIDEA is one of the best Java IDE available on the market. While this release is specifically focused on further upgrading performance, usability, and user experience, version 7.0 also provides efficient support for features, technologies, and tools you've asked.

InterSystems Corporation has announced that Four Points Technology will provide the InterSystems CACHÉ high-performance object database to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The contract for enterprise software and maintenance services, with an initial value of approximately $34.

For security reasons (similar to the Java sandbox concept), Flash clients can only access the domains they come from, unless other servers declare, explicitly or implicitly, trust to SWF files downloaded from our domain by a corresponding record in a crossdomain.xml file. But our portf

In a demonstration of its commitment to transparency and illustrating its philosophy of 'Innovate, Act, Share,' Sun has released its second annual Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report. The report features the company's progress and exemplifiesits continued practice of openness

XCome Technology, a mobile services provider and global technology partner of Microsoft Taiwan announced today the launch of the Java edition of Windows Live Messenger for mobile on Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan's number one mobile operator. This service is distinctive from other mobile IM

BEA, Cognos, and Informatica have all been named yesterday by a Credit Suisse analyst Jason Maynard as possible acquisition targets in the wake of the SAP acquisition of Business Objects. According to Marketwatch.com, the Dow Jones site, 'to date, SAP has been pleased to see its softwa

In last month's column Onno Kluyt announced that he would be handing over the role of JCP chair to me. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Onno for all of the effort he's put into the JCP over the past several years, to thank the hard-working staff of the Program Management Offi

With the arrival of Yahoo! and its Yahoo! Go Mobile 2.0 product, another A-list brand has entered the market. Yahoo!'s presence, like Apple's, expands the number of ODP (On-Device Portal) choices available to consumers, offering data services that are embedded directly onto the devices

As developers, we're familiar with the endless pains that result from maintaining overly complex systems. Some complexity is accidental, so we continually strive to remove its overhead from our application. The latest crop of frameworks and dynamic languages has demonstrated just how f

Being a Java and Mac guy I looked for Java on iPhone. Java is no where to be found. For years I've listened to Jonathan Schwartz, CEO at Sun Microsystems, talk about monetizing its Java investment because of the wide-spread availability of the Java runtime - today on 700 Million mobile