Once upon a time, software developers wrote code and ruled their kingdoms. Good programs had few bugs and performed their tasks efficiently and with style. The elite programmers went on to become designers who would lead others in their wake, instilling in them good software practices in a master/apprentice relationship. However, someone was needed to sell the code, so software salespeople were hired who, like pretty boy band members, tended to spend their weekends at the mall browsing shelves of hair products rather than intellectually challenging books.

This being the week that virtualization graduated to being an everybody's-g otta-have-one checkbox item, Sun rolled up to Oracle OpenWorld festivities, where Oracle had just unveiled the Xen-based Oracle VM, with its own free young open source Xen-based xVM program for Solaris confident that in the next few years every self-respecting data center in the world will be virtualized. Sun had in tow a supporting cast consisting of Red Hat, MySQL, Quest Software, Symantec and of course AMD and Intel to lend their huzzahs to the announcement of the unfinished widgetry. Sun claims it's not too late with its virtualization bid because VMware, the leader, only has 9% of the market.

Looks like Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz should have waited for his boys to give Google's Android spec the once over before endorsing the thing last week expecting Java to get a 'massive endorsement' out of it. Oh, Java gets a 'massive endorsement' all right; it's just not standard off-the-shelf Java. Android calls for a special Google Java that now has Sun folk nibbling their fingernails and worrying out loud to the press about 'write once, run anywhere' Java ME/MIDP fragmenting.

Spring Source, formerly known as Interface21, a provider of open source software for building and deploying mission-critical enterprise applications, announced the release of version 2.5 of the Spring Framework. With a focus on delivering enhanced annotation options, this latest release completes Spring 2.0's mission of providing the most flexible, most comprehensive configuration model for both Java 1.4 and Java 5.

New features and improvements in the next release of NetBeans make it a better IDE for any kind of developer. From editing to browsing, versioning, building, debugging, profiling or visual design, there is great news for everybody. It's that time again. A major, dot-zero release of NetBeans will be available soon - over a year and a half after 5.0, which introduced significant new features like the Matisse GUI builder, and extensive improvements in CVS integration, Web services and module development, to cite but a few.

Dana Gardner says: 'Someone had to pull the trigger, and few companies could better leverage and extend the value of BEA than...Oracle.' In addition to Gardner, read what Om Malik, Eric Savitz, Ray Wang, Jeff Nolan, Jason Bell and Curt Monash think...here's what the industry is saying about the opening salvo by Oracle in a bid to acquire BEA Systems, launched last week.

Oracle owns PeopleSoft and JD Edwards; they own SleepyCat; they own BEA; and of course they have their own enterprise database. This means they have the stack from top to bottom, with the exception of an operating system. They can take the CRM and banking and insurance and end-user apps that they now own, host them on an entire stack, and basically squeeze the middleware vendors out of existence.

Here are my thoughts on this. I was expecting Alfred - who is known to be an arrogant and incompetent CEO - to run away from Larry as fast as he could. But this movie usually ends as follows. First, history repeats itself. By that I mean that Alfred should remember Larry's PeopleSoft hunt, which ended up with the PeopleSoft's CEO's head on a stick. In my humble opinion, in Act 2 of Larry's BEA hunt, we will see Alfred's head on a stick and the BEA shareholders will make the wedding plans, as always happens when Larry plans another marriage for his baby Oracle.

It's unclear where BEA is going to run and hide to avoid a shotgun wedding, but its board late Friday rejected Oracle's $6.66 billion marriage proposal. In a letter to Oracle that the board made public it expressed irritation that Oracle had made its wooing known and rated Oracle's $17-a-share offer as undervalued.

Former JBoss maestro Marc Fleury has been considering the contenders in any race to counter-bid for BEA in the face of Oracle's $6.6BN bid. His conclusion: Most of the big players would be better off buying Red Hat. 'Red Hat is a better, and potentially cheaper, option for many of the other players,' he writes.

BEA's Board of Directors is unlikely to accept Oracle's offer of $17 a share by Sunday, when the Oracle-set deadline for acceptance expires. It says that it would only be willing to begin discussing a sale of the company if the offer price were $21 per share. BEA is maintaining its position already expressed, that 'We simply cannot accept an offer that seriously undervalues BEA.'

Carl Icahn, BEA's biggest shareholder with approx 15% of its stock, has told a reporter that it is 'insane' for the company to reject out of hand Oracle's unsolicited bid. 'I'm not saying I accept $17,' Icahn told Reuters. 'It's going to be a three-month process.' BEA is insisting that it's worth $21 per share.

November 15, BEA will report its financial results for the third quarter, with investors having the opportunity to listen to its financial results conference call over the Internet. Both Larry Ellison and Carl Icahn will doubtless be waiting with considerable interest. Ellison wants to buy; Icahn wants to sell.

After Google's Android announcement, at least four big guys should be irritated: Sun Microsystems, Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.Google approaches telephony from the open source side - Linux-based platform, uses Java but does not care about sticking to Java ME - they are planning to use fast OpenGL libraries and are not afraid to be hardware-specific.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

FFE Software has announced the first release of its new Java DB - FirstSQL/J Embedded Mobile Edition. Embedded Mobile is a special packaging of the standard FirstSQL/J Java DB for a small footprint, supporting JME and suitable for other embedded configurations.

It's hard to overestimate the importance of having a good logging facility when you develop distributed applications. Did the client's request reached the server-side component? What did the server send back? Add to this inability of using debuggers while processing GUI events like focus change, and you may need to spend hours if not days trying to spot some sophisticated errors. That's why a commercial-grade logger is a must if you work with an application that is spread over the network and is written in different languages such as Adobe Flex and Java.

If you use Adobe Flex Web applications that connect to Plain Old Java Objects on the server side, chances are you use a popular, robust, and freely available server called Apache Tomcat. If you use Eclipse-based Flex Builder, you can smoothly debug both Flex and Java code without leaving Eclipse. Flex Builder debugger does not need any special configuration. But we need to add a couple of parameters to the startup routine of Tomcat so it'll engage the Java Platform Debugger Architecture (JPDA), which will allow other applications attach to JVM that runs Tomcat and debug deployed Java classes remotely.

BEA's Deputy CTO Theo Beack, who joined the San Jose, CA-based company in May to do 'all the cool stuff,' according to an exclusive interview with SYS-CON at the time, shared with delegates at SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 in San Francisco today his current thinking about Web 2.0, SOA, and Virtualization technologies, and how all three fit within BEA's evolving 'blended' application strategy.

Enterprise software developers and corporate IT architects have established the Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) platform as a leading choice for building enterprise software applications. The platform is widely used for everything from eCommerce Websites to back office data aggregation systems. Its versatility and reliability as an enterprise computing platform is well established.

ILOG has expanded its ongoing strategic partnership with Software AG to the webMethods product suite. Building upon the standards-based interoperability that already exists between Software AG's webMethods product line and ILOG JRules, full integration of the products is expected in 2008.

In the wake of the Google's announcement of Android, its Linux-based cell phone platform, on Monday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on his blog said he would 'like Sun to be the first platform software company to commit to a complete developer environment around the platform, as we throw Sun's NetBeans developer platform for mobile devices behind the effort.' By Jonathan's count Java is on well over a billion phones and he sees the newfangled Google-created Open Handset Alliance as a 'massive endorsement' of Java and Linux.

Former Sun VP of global information systems strat egy-turned-consultant Larry Singer told at CIO conference in California the other day that he left Sun in March because it's overemphasizing open source when it should be concentrating of generating revenues. According to InfoWorld, Singer had a tiff about the strategy with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Singer calculates that Sun won't see a return on investment from open sourcing Solaris and Java and everything else it's throwing into the pot for 10-12 years, but 'There's not going to be a company in 10, 12 years unless we get our revenues up in two years,' he told the book. It should be looking at differentiating its core products to attract enterprise customers.

That leaves Java developers in a bad position. Java developers love the clean Unix-based Mac OS X environment for development. But we have been suffering with an unstable developer-only d ont-run-this-in-productio n release of Java 6 for the past year. Mac OS X is now the getto for Java 6. I love Apple and Java. I wish Sun would do more to get Java on iPhone and Java 6 on Mac OS X.

Some of the supported languages are on-the-fly byte-code compilers. For instance, Jython is the Python scripting language that runs in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM.) At runtime Jython converts a Python script into Java Byte Code and runs the script in the JVM. For the on-the-fly byte-code compiler script engines, the current JVM lacks an efficient way to dynamically dispatch calls to methods. Enhancing the JVM with an 'invokedynamic' instruction will make it much easier to write this kind of script engine.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Sun earned $89 million, three cents a share, on revenues of $3.22 billion in the September quarter, a better showing than this time last year when it lost $56 million, or two cents a share. It attributed the results to high-end servers and its identity management software. The results include a $113 million restructuring charge, or three cents a share, with more job losses expected going forward. Wall Street was disappointed that its revenues barely budged since last year although its gross margin improved five points to 48.5%.

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 deals with Microsoft and IBM. Red Hat will get a fully compatible open source Java Development Kit (JDK) for its Linux operating system out of the deal. All it has to do now is build it - and that includes a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) - and optimize the runtime for JBoss-on-Linux. Red Hat's IcedTea project - which brings together Fedora, the early access version of Red Hat Linux, and JBoss.org technologies on Linux - gets pushed. It's supposed to supply free alternatives to some of the pieces of the OpenJDK project that are still proprietary.

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 will bring to market software enabling the visual assembly and rapid deployment of scalable, enterprise Web 2.0 applications that are both Web Fast and CIO Safe.

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 really does take a village to raise great infrastructure. The Ruby on Rails framework of today is a lot more productive than the one I was using before it was open sourced. I use features every day created by others, enjoy polish done by others, evade bugs caught by others. All work I would otherwise have to do myself. So I simply get more done for less effort than it would otherwise have taken. The same holds true for the other open source projects that have been cultivated in 37signals, like Prototype and Capistrano.

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 with this parting thought: If it walks like a shill, acts like a shill, and smells like a shill....

'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, and we continue to explore ways to further this fundamental goal, including the possible sale of the company.'

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 two stages. During October members cast their votes for three ratified seats on each EC.

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. According to a survey conducted by IT research firm Optaros, companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue reported average savings of $3.3 million in 2004 as a result of open source technology (September 2005). A similar survey conducted by IDC showed that open source databases are used by 33% of the 600 companies it surveyed.

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 SOA, which is being adopted by more and more enterprises to build their application integration infrastructure.

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 safe to buy NetApp products.'' And Hitz was ignoring Sun's claim of treble damages. And he was writing before Sun piled on a second suit Monday. The overriding point of the second suit, according to Sun's general counsel Mike Dillon, is get the litigation out of the district court in Texas, where NetApp filed suit first, and sent to California.

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. Since it kicked off a year ago August, FiveRuns has secured $9.2 million in funding. It claims a customer base of 65 organizations or so that it says are monitoring hundreds of servers, with 'hundreds' in evaluation.

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 comments. 'However this API is badly misnamed.'

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 sample might be useful to you, I figured I would ask what code you want to see written in Leopard. Keep in mind that I will not write code samples that do not use garbage collection or the new property syntax, so you'll just have to suffer through that.

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 content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.