September is here and since the name comes from the Latin septem, for "seven" - September having been until 153 BCE not the ninth but the seventh month of the Roman calendar - I have no hesitation in saying that it's an appropriate month to pluck just seven items from the wealth of information and insight in this issue and say just a little about each of them, to help you to decide what to read first in this issue of JDJ.

In Part Two of his new "Gas Station" series, Yakov Fain gives us a crash course on open source software, through a conversation with the best-selling author of Succeeding with Open Source, Bernard Golden. They discuss licensing and QA, and Golden notes in passing that one advantage to open source, from the user perspective, is that open source "breaks the linkage between product and company." In other words, if a product is useful but the company behind it is unsuccessful, open source means that the user community will still have access to the product source base and can continue using the product even if the company goes bust - very different from the dot-com days, when companies would shut down and leave their users in the lurch.

Java experts Peter Zadrozny and Raghu Kodali road test EJB 3.0's performance for us - using Oracle's implementation of the specification - by doing a few things that developers typically do with EJB 2.1 and then trying out the equivalent with EJB 3.0. They use a developer's preview of EJB 3.0 and find themselves very attracted to the simplicity and power of EJB 3.0. "The wonderful work done with annotations and the persistence, the ability to use POJOs, and the ability to test outside of the container are very attractive all by themselves," the authors note.

J2EE technology provides a good base to develop and deploy AJAX-based applications, so in this issue we say a major hello to Asynchronous JavaScript + XMLHTTPRequest. Victor Rasputnis and Anatole Tartakovsky - who have been developing AJAX applications for the past five years and attest that "it's sound and very effective" - present a simple example and remind us that the best known AJAX applications already "out there" are probably Google Maps and Google Suggest from Google Labs (http://labs.google.com).

Java architect Kishore Kumar looks at part of the Spring Web application development suite, Spring Web Flow (SWF), which he finds to be a very powerful and elegant Web flow solution, suitable - as he shows in a sample scenario - for handling complex page navigations in any Web application.

Two of JBoss's best-known developers, lead developer Julien Viet and his colleague Roy Russo, discuss the overwhelming influence of the Portlet Specification (JSR 168) and wrestle with the question, "Are portals the magic bullet of Web application development?" The case for the use of portal software is not cut and dry, the authors suggest, but there are numerous advantages in adopting it.

Well-known Java writer Paul Mukherjee in "Blueprint for Developing Language Tools" presents an approach to developing language tools that has been used extensively for several products and projects that he has been involved with. The key, he shows, is to separate the triumvirate of core functionality, input format, and parsing to ensure the flexibility required for evolution over time.

Finally, in my (highly subjective) pick of seven pieces from the dozen or so excellent items in this issue: this month's "Back Page" is by JDJ's own Jason Bell, written from his newfound standpoint as founder of a company - a B2B auction site for the airline industry - using all his own technology and launched without funding. Be sure to read it, because it is a heartening entrepreneurial i-Technology tale in its own right. As Jason writes, "If you've ever wondered, 'What if...?' don't wonder any more. Do it!"