Throughout the last decade, society has witnessed an explosion of network connectivity among PCs and mobile devices as well as a vast proliferation of networked applications, ranging from Web-based email to online banking. The end result of this is that network connectivity has become an almost indispensable resource for many individuals.

'Web developers never had it so good...' gushed Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz last week as he contemplated how in addition to Glassfish and NetBeans, millions of developers could now look to Sun to provide them with MySQL - which, as of February 26, is now officially a part of Sun.

Open source has made signficant inroads into middleware deployments in the enterprise. More and more, open source is being used to deliver the benefits of SOA and open source to the enterprise. There are many custom Enterprise Service Bus deployments waiting to be upgraded to a simple, open and affordable SOA integration platform. This session explores where open source is getting the most traction in SOA deployments with a focus on ESB and illustrates this by describing some of the customer SOA solutions the speaker sees at Red Hat.

Gartner is almost as suspicious of Microsoft's week-old interoperability promises as European Commission antitrust chief Neelie Kroes. It's warning open source developers to beware the patent trap. 'Do not use Microsoft's documentation,' it says, 'unless you have rigorous processes to keep track of applicable patents. Keep work that depends on these patents separate from other OSS work to avoid exposing downstream distributors and user to litigation risk.'

InterSystems Corporation announced that it is ranked as a leader in customer affinity- an accurate measure of predicting customers' technology purchasing intentions and decisions, according to a marketing effectiveness study recently released by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council.

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.

If you heard a thump Monday, that was the cost of memory crashing. What cost maybe five grand last week can now be had for, oh, $1,500. See, Monday was when ex-AMD CTO Fred Weber's stealth start-up, MetaRAM, came out of hiding sporting an attention-grabbing way to cut the price of a computer system outfitted with four quad processors and 256GB of main memory from $500,000 to below $50,000.

Nexaweb Technologies announced Nexaweb Advancesm - a technology-enabled modernization solution that allows enterprises to transform legacy business applications from 3GL/4GL technologies to rich, composite web applications with less risk, in less time, and at less cost.

McObject announced that NextPoint Networks has integrated McObject's eXtremeDB in-memory embedded database system in multiple applications within its IntelliConnect System product family, which enables operators to deliver intelligent, secure and scalable session management between fixed, mobile and blended IP networks.

LogLogic announced that software vendors Compliance Spectrum and UpperVision have used LogLogic's Open Log Services API to integrate their offerings with LogLogic's log management and intelligence (LMI) platform. Via LogLogic's Open Log Services, joint customers utilizing LogLogic's security and compliance appliances can attain business agility and productivity through ease-of-integration.

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.

Acquia provided new details on plans to deliver a commercially supported distribution and value-added network services based on the popular Drupal open source social publishing system. The company also threw open the doors on Acquia Projects, a collaborative environment for Drupal community members to participate in the direction of forthcoming Acquia products and services.

Sun Microsystems announced the latest additions to its open archive portfolio, adding a midrange modular library and tape drive. In addition, Sun introduced enhancements to archive data security and release of a multi-tiered archive appliance that will work heterogeneously with Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and other operating systems. Sun also announced that is has donated the source code for the Sun StorageTek 5800 system, formerly known as 'Project Honeycomb,' to open source communities.

Nothing will slow the progress and increased adoption of open software. What was traditionally viewed as developer and infrastructure tools has quickly infiltrated the enterprise environment. The public sector was one of the first to initiate the trend. For example, 400,000 workstations in the French administration have already migrated to Open Office.

Zaheda Bhorat, Google's Open Source Programs Manager, has reiterated Google's position that Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) 'doesn't meet the criteria required for a globally-accepted standard.' The comment comes as the deadline approaches for ISO member bodies around the world to possibly revise their September 2007 vote, when the original submission to ISO of OOXML as an additional international standard was defeated.

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.'

The European Commission this morning slapped Microsoft with a massive $1.33 billion fine (899 million euros) for charging too much for the communications protocols it was ordered to share with competitors in March of 2004. It is the largest single fine ever levied by the EC and the second time that it has dunned Microsoft for not complying with its original antitrust order.

Jcx.Software announced the availability of VS.Php 2.4 for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. This is the new edition to the VS.Php family of products. VS.Php users that are planning to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 should upgrade to this edition. VS.Php 2.4 continues to be providing unique value to PHP developers. This release includes support for both XDebug and DBG debugging engines.

Although organizations are not realizing the full potential benefits of open source due to the way open source projects are currently managed, this does not mean that there are no benefits from developing in open source. Once you get past the 'free developer' presumption and carefully look at the larger picture, it becomes clear that open source, even in its limited participatory forms today, brings real value.

PivotStor announced a tape library that combines LTO-4 tape's reliability with SAS interface connectivity speed and the demonstrated economy of half-height drives. The result is a full line of tape libraries that integrate more capacity, more data density, more bandwidth and greater performance into one unit: all of which means faster data protection at a lower price.

Caucho presents a new API and infrastructure for Enterprise Comet applications which takes care of issues such as thread and session management, while using an interface familiar to Java developers who have used JavaEE Servlets. Demos will be presented which use this framework and GWT to streaming data in a financial application. Benchmarks will also be presented which show the server load and network impact of large numbers of clients. This Comet API, part of Caucho's Resin Enterprise Application Server, is available today for download and evaluation.

Jeff Haynie will introduce the audience to Appcelerator's open-source RIA platform. Attendees will learn how Appcelerator has been able to help developers create AJAX-based RIAs in less than 1/3 of the time, with up to 90 percent less code, and with no Javascript or third-party toolkits. Key takeaways from the session will include: Developing fully-functional, client-only prototypes without writing a line of server codeCreating service-oriented UIs that can simultaneously access services in any language without code changes and Decoupling client and server components for accelerated development, simplified maintenance and rapid iterations. Haynie will also discuss the current technology options for rapid RIA development and how developers can leverage pre-built AJAX widgets, Web Expression Language, and other open standards-based languages to create RIAs with more functionality and less code.

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), marked its one-year anniversary with three new members, a global focus, and advances toward seamless interoperability between commercial open-source applications. 'The commercial open-source industry is no longer in an early-adopter phase,' said Dominic Sartorio, OSA president and senior director of product management at SpikeSource, an open-source services company. 'Now that we've entered the mainstream phase of adoption, it's even more important that open solutions have the fit, form and function that an enterprise organization expects.'

Enterprise networks are growing increasingly complex. Over the past five years, the increased focus on unified security, network optimization, and application acceleration has resulted in an explosion of new technologies, specialty devices, and vendors. The proliferation of high-speed connectivity networks and logical overlay networks - all running over the same physical links - have made it all but impossible for network teams to maintain consistent security, access, audit and change control using manual processes and device-specific management tools.

The Mozilla Foundation has set up a new Mozilla Messaging Inc subsidiary to develop Thunderbird 3, the next generation of the previously resource-starved free open source e-mail application, a sister application of the successful Mozilla Firefox web browser. The operation has its own CEO, David Ascher of ActiveState, who thinks 'e-mail is broken,' its own board including MySQL CEO Marten Mickos - soon to be working for Sun - Ascher and Mozilla Messaging general manager Christopher Beard, its own core engineering team and start-up funds of around $3 million.

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.

XAware announced the general availability of XAware 5, the open source data integration solution for creating and managing composite data services for SOA and Web 2.0 applications. XAware's proven data integration software, now in its fifth generation, makes it easy to access and integrate data to and from any source. XAware enhances the productivity of other development tools and frameworks by building composite data services. These services provide real-time access to information and the ability to abstract, transform, aggregate and mashup data. Developers use these XAware capabilities to create a services-based data virtualization layer, which delivers a single view of data that can be consumed or served up easily.

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.

OASIS announced that its members have approved the XML Localisation Interchange File Format (XLIFF) version 1.2 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. Developed through an open process by the OASIS XLIFF Technical Committee, the new standard defines a vocabulary for storing localizable data and carrying it from one step of the localization process to another.

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.

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.

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.'

FalconStor announced the deployment of a Fibre Channel FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS), powered by the FalconStor IPStor storage virtualisation platform, at the Office National Interprofessionel des Grandes Cultures (ONIGC). The FalconStor NSS solution, installed by FalconStor partner Astelis, ensures that anticipated storage growth over the next five years can be accommodated, providing ONIGC not only the necessary immediate data protection snapshot services, but additionally a clear path to deploying a disk-to-disk backup solution at a later date.

Open source web infrastructure management provider Hyperic's CEO, Javier Soltero, says the company is seeing rapid growth on a number of fronts. The firm, which says it is complementary to the big four systems management companies (IBM Tivoli, CA, Compuware, and BMC) because they don't focus enough on web infrastructure management, recently increased its European presence with new community managers in Germany and Spain.

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.

Ulitzer, Inc., which initially made the headlines with its 'job descriptions from the future,' announced today that it will launch its Ulitzer 'beta' site on July 4, 2008, with 5,500 authors and 600,000 original articles, published in more than 5,000 topic-specific online journals. Each journal offers up to 14 content-specific sections, written by the world's most respected authors, who are experts in their particular fields. All Ulitzer authors will get paid for their contributions.

Lattice Semiconductor expanded its commitment to open source embedded system design by releasing an implementation of the uClinux Operating System (OS) targeted for its LatticeMico32 embedded soft core processor. The new OS support allows developers to implement control systems in a design flow that builds on Lattice's open source embedded solutions approach. It also complements the enhanced capabilities of the LatticeMico32 microprocessor core announced with the release of Lattice's ispLEVER version 7.0 SP2.

JSON is not the only way to serialize objects for Web 2.0 applications, but it's the most abundant and heavily used throughout the Appclerator framework. Doing this is actually really easy to do with Appcelerator IModelObjects. Our IModelObjects can easily be used along with Hibernate for persistance, but let's leave that for later for now.

Appcelerator, Inc. is an open source software company specializing in products and services for rapid rich Internet application (RIA) and SOA-based services development. The Appcelerator Platform SDKs enable developers to develop rich Ajax and DHTML applications using cross-browser widgets, a unique Web Expression Language and other open standards-based languages like HTML and CSS - without the use of Javascript. Appcelerator supports most languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, .NET, Python and Perl.