'One of the thing that Web services does is open up your internal business applications to the outside world, to other business partners, or to your employees...so security becomes a very important aspect because basically you are managing your business in the open,' JCP Program Chairp...

Although some folks were predicting a 'bloodbath,' the App Server Shoot-Out at Web Services Edge 2005 in Boston did not result in any serious injuries. Instead, Anne Thomas Manes, VP and Research Director at Burton Group, brought together representatives from a wide assortment of appli...

Saying that its support of the open source scripting language PHP does not reflect any dissatisfaction with Java, IBM is partnering with Zend Technologies to create Zend Core, a bundling of IBM's Cloudscape database based on Apache Software Foundation Derby and Zend's open source PHP e...

'One of my resolutions this year is to start teaching part-time Java-related classes in some college,' writes JDJ editorial board member Yakov Fain. 'That's why I started browsing the computer science course lists that are being offered this year. While graduate-level programs offer ma...

Extreme Programming (XP) has been an accepted form of software development for about eight years now. Many of the concepts found in this lightweight method of development have been implemented into the software shops without even the awareness that they were XP techniques. XP takes man...

As open source technology is gaining more popularity in the press and among the general population, there still seems to be a lack of knowledge of what is available via open source amid many software development projects. While the mainstream media and the average computer user thinks ...

What does Apple have in common with Google, Ikea, Starbucks, and Al Jazeera? Answer: it has been rated one of the 'most influential brands of 2004' in a survey of about 2,000 advertising executives, brand managers and academics, conducted by the online magazine, Brandchannel. In fact, ...

An 'Internet advertising agency' last November successfully registered the domain name OpenJava.org, leading to speculation that Sun has no immediate plans to follow up on its OpenSolaris.org strategy with a similar open-sourcing of Java.

The recent HP management re-org have prompted recent concerns over Carly Fiorina and her performance, particularly in that this re-org slammed the company's underperforming PC business into its perenially successful printer division, a move that could, as the thinking goes, drag down t...

In a passing remark about how 'there may someday be a redistributable JVM RPM at jpackage,' a mailing list last week prompted new speculation that IBM's version of open-source Java might be on its way since 'someday' - apparently - 'may even be next week.'

'Sunshine returned recently to Silicon Valley after two weeks of Seattle-like storms and overcast skies,' writes our West Coast Bureau Chief, Roger Strukhoff, reporting from from Mountain View, CA. 'Now comes news of fair weather for Mountain View-based Mozilla's Firefox browser, which...

Up to 5,000 Oracle/PeopleSoft employees are about to be fired. 'What's not known,' write Roger Strukhoff and Matt Vande Voorde, reporting direct from Pleasanton, CA yesterday, 'is how many of those jobs will be plucked from the sprawling PeopleSoft campus, which dominates the Hacienda ...

With PeopleSoft finally in its pocket, reports Maureen O'Gara, Oracle is expected to start firing people wholesale today, January 14. Some 6,000 people, mostly PeopleSoft folk, roughly 11% of the total headcount - perhaps as much as 25%-50% of PeopleSoft's staff - are initially suppose...

Did the geek-fest just finished in Las Vegas, Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2005, herald the return of technology and the beginning of the 'post-PC' world?

Having written about Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) programming for almost five years now, I've been frustrated by the slow adoption of the J2ME platform, as have many of the early devotees. Those of us who saw Sun demonstrate Java running on Palm OS back in 1999 were hoping that the wire...

'Stop saying that 'Java is not Open Source,' and realize that 'Sun's implementation is not open source.' Even better, stop saying that 'Our implementation is open source,' it is not you know that, and this is OK, we're not blaming you, we want to work with you.' As part of our end of y...

No sooner had we begun our reader-driven quest for the top twenty software people in the world than - by popular acclaim, as they say - we're going to extend the field to choose from...from forty to over a hundred. Here we bring you a sneak peek at the sixty contenders that we'll be ad...

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 twent...

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. Thin...

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...

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 ...

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 revi...

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 Blu...

'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 fo...

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 - o...

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 fa...

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 conte...

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,...

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...

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 ...

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 midnigh...

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...

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 alread...

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...

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.