The ink was still drying on Sun's billion-dollar deal to buy the webby, low-end open source database house MySQL when Sun turned around and put money in the high-end open source Postgres company Greenplum, evidently what Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz meant last week when he said 'and we ain't finished yet.' Schwartz did say that Sun would continue to invest in Postgres, Oracle and JavaDB last week when Sun's MySQL buy was announced. Looks like we should have taken him literally. Greenplum also attracted SAP, which has no track record of open source investments, as another strategic investor - and SAP is fresh from closing its acquisition of Business Objects, the Franco-American BI concern.

The Solaris Container typically can be categorized as an operating-system virtualization, which means the virtualization is done by enabling multiple isolated and secured systems in one physical server (operating system for operating system). The Solaris Resource Management and Zones are the basic functions that form the Solaris Container.

Where does someone start who wants to learn development with JDeveloper (and ADF)? I am asked so often that I figured I'll write down my canned answer here and in the future I can just point people to this brief basic advice. Start by picking up your favorite 'Java for Dummies in 7 days with no previous knowledge' type of book and learn the basics of the language.

SOA is mostly associated to technologies such as BPEL, SCA and Web Services. But does SOA really imply these technologies? In this session we will show how you can use the service oriented approach while staying inside the Java world. jBPM is a powerful lightweight framework that can be used to orchestrate services in the broadest sense. It is hightly extendable, very versatile and can be easily embedded in client and/or server applications. Attendees will learn how jBPM can be used in a pure workflow scenario as well as in a situation involving automated business steps.

More than 3 billion smartcards are produced every year. Generally defined as any pocket-sized card with embedded integrated circuits or chips, they have a huge number of applications including travel cards, chip and pin cards, pet tags, mobile phone SIMs and pallet trackers. Now with modern Smart Card technology such as Java Card and Basic Card it is possible for everyone to create his or her own applications on a smart card.

Tira Wireless unveiled new development and porting services that extend its mobile platform support beyond Java ME, BREW and smartphone platforms to include the Android platform built by the Open Handset Alliance.

Initially Quest Software acquired a controlling interest in Vizioncore in 2005, Quest broadened its virtualization product portfolio in 2007 with the acquisitions of Invirtus, a provider of virtual machine optimization, conversion and automation products, and provision networks.

Nuesoft Technologies announced its Authorized Agent Program, a new initiative to qualify resellers, agents, consultants, and other professionals who work with medical offices to distribute its NueMD medical practice management systems. The program aims to maximize sales opportunities for motivated Agents while increasing sales channels to offer more convenience and options for customers.

OpenEJB has been around for seven years and is one of the few standalone and embeddable EJB containers. Useful mainly for unit testing EJB beans (embedding the containers in unit tests), OpenEJB is also available as a Tomcat plug-in. Which means you can call EJB beans from your Web application's servlets. This fact alone opens up new possibilities for migrating current Web applications to JEE 5 in addition to facilitating development and testing using the popular Apache Tomcat server instead of a full JEE application server, even if you eventually deploy to a dedicated JEE application server.

Intel's Q4 results, as good as they were, failed to impress a panicky 'the sky is falling' stock market and Intel's light Q1 forecast, which the company called 'a little bit cautious' on the US economy, sent the stock and the market down Wednesday, erasing billions in stockholder wealth in another utterly abominable day on Wall Street, a pattern that continued Thursday. The market wanted Intel to return 40 cents on revenues of $10.8 billion in Q4. It came in with 38 cents on $10.7 billion, an execution Intel figures was 'very strong' with nearly all products and geographies, particularly Europe, growing. The company's telltale margin that everyone has been watching was up 6.9 points year-over-year to 58.1%, approaching the 60% that investors say they want.

It said this morning that it had reached a compromise price with BEA and that the acquisition would go through after all, having been resisted by BEA, demanded by BEA's biggest stockholder, the dangerous Carl Icahn, and walked away from by Oracle. Oracle is going to pay $19.375 a share, less than the $21 that BEA wanted but more than the $17 it put on the table back in October. That works out to $8.5 billion, less the $1.3 billion that BEA has in the bank, as Oracle pointed out, for a grand total of $7.2 billion cash to be paid for by a combination of cash on hand and a short-term loan. Oracle has $8.4 billion in the bank so the financing's no problem. Its original bid valued BEA at roughly $6.66 billion.

ESPRE Solutions reported that it has released ESPRE LIVE Media Platform 3.0 which provides an end-to-end delivery system for live video over any IP network. Additionally, with the release of ESPRE LIVE 3.0 ESPRE Solutions also discloses that it is currently working with several significant systems integrators and is actively seeking additional systems integration partnerships to respond to the exploding market in video enabled applications.

For BEA, I was hoping they would succeed at combining the power of JRockit with AquaLogic to build scalable workflow (a la BPM) services. Instead, we users and developers will be waiting for years to see WebLogic and AquaLogic integrated into the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack. For MySQL, I was hoping for an IPO.

Sun, Oracle's sometimes best friend, turned into an Oracle competitor this morning when it said it was buying MySQL, the open source database that's part of the famous LAMP stack. It's paying a billion dollars. MySQL was supposed to go public this year but picked the easier monetization route. Sanford C. Bernstein estimates MySQL?s financial position at breakeven on $60 million-$80 million on trailing 12-month revenues although over 100 million copies of the database have been downloaded. Sun is paying $800 million cash for MySQL's stock and assuming about $200 million in options. But Sun has been known to overpay for acquisitions before. Remember its fatal $2 billion Cobalt Networks deal?

NetBeans 6.0 brings a host of new features to Java and Ruby developers, including a totally rewritten editor, support for local file history, a new graphical file comparison utility, and support for the new Swing desktop framework. One area of particular emphasis is its profiler, which has improves support for detecting and fixing memory leaks, the focus of this article.

Actuate announced that its spreadsheet management product, Actuate e.Spreadsheet has been honored as a SearchDataManagement.com Product of the Year in the category of Business Intelligence (BI). Actuate e.Spreadsheet was selected for this honor by the SearchDataManagement.com editorial staff in conjunction with a team of users, industry experts, analysts, and consultants.

2007 was the undoubtedly the year of Social Networking, but what of 2008? Will '08 be the year of 'Unified Communications' or the year when CMS comes to stand for 'Community Management System' - or even 'Collaboration Management System'? Or will it be the year of a giga-merger, to beat the mere mega-mergers of 2007? As usual at the end of each year, SYS-CON has been informally polling its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors. As always, the range and depth of their answers is fascinating, throwing light not just on where the industry is going but also how it's going to get there, why, because of who, within what kind of time-scale. Enjoy!

SOA World Magazine announced today that nominations are now open for the SOA World Magazine Readers' Choice Awards, which recognize excellence in the software, solutions, or services provided by the industry's top vendors. SYS-CON's Readers' Choice Awards, also known as the 'Oscars of the Software Industry,' has been one of the most prestigious industry award programs for more than a decade.

Jaxcent from Desiderata Software is a Java API for accessing and modifying the Document Object Model (DOM) of the browser. Version 1 of Jaxcent worked entirely on the client side. While it explored some possibilities of doing AJAX-style operations in Java, it was best suited for intranets and special scenarios such as automated testing and automated browsing.

Creating reporting applications in AJAX is often more challenging than developing data entry CRUD applications. Reporters usually need to process lots of data, preferably on the client side to minimize the amount of information that goes through the wire. Reporters need to know how to apply formulas, group the data, and calculate totals and subtotals. Add to the mix a requirement to give the end user an ability to customize the look and feel of the report, and you're facing a serious project.

A7Soft has made a significant step in development XML related Java application. Releasing JExamXML, A7Soft transferred XML comparison technologies from the Windows application ExamXML to the industry standard Java platform, allowing mullions of XML developers to embed the XML differencing technologies into their application.

Microsoft disclosed late Thursday that Jeff Raikes, the head of its Office operation, second only to Windows in bringing in revenue, was retiring and will be replaced by Stephen Elop, 44, Jupiter Networks' short-term COO. Before Jupiter, Elop was president of worldwide field operations at Adobe by virtue of Adobe's 2005 acquisition of Macromedia, where he was president and CEO. Elop also has experience as a chief information officer. The plan is for Raikes, 49, to hang around until September as a backstop as a member of the senior leadership team for purposes of transition.

Intel turned up at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this week loaded down with 16 new 45nm Penryn chips, including its first 45nm Centrino mobile chips, and the idea that it can now cultivate a new category of tiny gadgets that'll put broadband Internet access 'in your pocket.' These devices are supposed to start appearing later this year thanks to the 45nm shrink. Intel said it would ship a first-generation low-power platform chipset known as Poulsbo this half that will help these ultra-mobile Internet devices (MIDs) or ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs) materialize.

Vringo announced the addition of Discovery Channel video ringtones to its offering. Vringo users can share video clips of volcanoes, bees, skyrockets and any of 20 other videos, using their mobile phones. Vringo subscribers worldwide will be able to personalize their own video ringtones, or 'Vringos,- by downloading free clips excerpted from Discovery Channel programming.

IT Mill Ltd has released version 5.0 of its IT Mill Toolkit under the Apache 2.0 open source license. With IT Mill Toolkit 5 developers now have the building blocks for RIAs that will allow them to work with Java alone. Toolkit 5.0 unites client-side AJAX tools with server-side Java tools, shortening the RIA development cycle.

Redmond Developer News has published an interview with Dr. James Gosling, creator of the Java language, where among other things, he talks about JavaFX and competing technologies. And he made a comment I can't agree with. Here it is: 'If you look at something like Flash, when you get to the much more advanced stuff - richer interfaces, more complex network protocols, more complex APIs - it really falls short.'

Is it easy yet to make AJAX applications that easily go offline? Are developers better off using an AJAX framework, a toolkit or just coding their own AJAX/JavaScript? Will JavaScript 2.0 be a success, or a dud? How can AJAX apps be made secure? Sessions on these and dozens of other topics have already begun streaming in to AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City on March 18-20, 2008.

Front-end engineering rocks right now. The era of boring web sites is over and we're all into pushing the envelope, erasing boundaries and getting beyond whatever prevents us from building the next killer web application. New companies building quick-turnaround web products spring up like mushrooms and many an old convention of web design is cast aside to make way for quick prototyping and agile development.

McObject announced that Perst, its all-Java object-oriented, open source embedded database, has been verified as compatible with the Android mobile device platform backed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance.

In October we announced the winners of the first round of this year's JCP elections, during which members voted for three Sun-nominated candidates on each Executive Committee (EC). To refresh your memory, the winners on the Java ME EC were Research in Motion (RIM), Samsung, and Time Warner Cable. The Java SE/EE EC winners were the Apache Software Foundation, Red Hat Middleware, and Nortel.

The open source Mobile & Embedded Community is a gathering place where developers can collaborate, innovate, and drive the evolution of the Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME). Launched in November 2006, more than 500 active members are participating in more than 80 projects, most of them created by the community's members.

JavaFX is a scripting language that provides more powerful client applications in term of features for the user interface experience as well as being incorporated with server platform technology such as RMI, Web Services, and EJB. Its ability to reuse all Java libraries opens an opportunity for JavaFX to create flexibility and ease the integration and reuse of existing Java applications.

Introduced commercially by Sun Microsystems in 1995, the Java programming language will be a teenager in 2008. Java has seen tremendous growth in its 13 years. Its design, ease-of-use, and most importantly its portability has made Java the fastest-growing programming language in computing history. Java.com says that Java today powers more than 4.5 billion devices worldwide.

To wish you Happy Holidays (and if you'll permit me, a very merry Christmas) I wrote this Compiled JavaFX Script Applet (that executes in a browser). For fast deployment I used the latest version of Java SE 6 Update 10 (formerly known as Java SE Update N, formerly known as Consumer JRE, formerly known as Prince.

froglogic GmbH today announced version 3.3 of the leading, cross-platform automated GUI testing tool Squish. Squish supports creating and running automated GUI tests of applications based on many user interface technologies including Trolltech's Qt, Java AWT/Swing/NetBeans, Java SWT/Eclipse RCP, Web/HTML/AJAX and Mac OS X Carbon/Cocoa. Squish is being successfully used in QA departments across the world in companies such as Reuters Financial Software, EADS, Siemens, Synopsys, Xilinx, Trolltech and France Telecom Group.

Unit tests give us the confidence to change applications, even legacy applications that we didn't write ourselves. To avoid the drudgery of writing a test case for every edge and boundary, we can let JUnit Factory generate a large set of characterization tests for us. If we need to explore an existing code base, characterization tests can act as a learning guide by documenting what the code actually does. If we need to change existing code, characterization tests act as critical 'change detectors' that help us avoid unforeseen side effects.

One of the most fundamental design principles of Java is captured in its motto 'Write Once, Run Anywhere.' It describes how a .class file encodes its instructions at the bytecode level, allowing portability between different machines that, through a specific virtual machine implementation, resolve the bytecodes into executable instructions to give the program life. It's a goal that's almost enshrined in the Java fundamental commandments, as Sun took out a high-profile advertising campaign to back up the '100% Pure Java' slogan and engaged Microsoft in battle for their proprietary language extensions.

In a surprise move Thursday Red Hat named the former COO of Delta Airlines Jim Whitehurst president and CEO, replacing Matthew Szulik who remains chairman. Szulik said he was stepping down after almost 10 years with the company because of serious health issues with his family that he has to pay attention to, a noble thing to do considering he'd rather be CEO of Red Hat. Well, if nothing else, it'll give Dell vice-chairman and CFO Donald Carthy somebody to talk to. Cathy was president of American Airlines before being pluck from Dell's board amid its crisis and given his current job.

With any new technology, best practice documents are invaluable in helping developers avoid common errors and design quality systems. There is much literature already available regarding best practices for using Java Management Extensions (JMX) in monitoring and management applications. Popular J2EE application servers, such as BEA WebLogic and JBoss, have used JMX for years to manage and monitor the health and status of their many components.

A mere 5 ½ months after contract singing, net-linx is pleased to announce that Folha de Londrina has taken nxAdvertising into live use, including 12 remote locations, supporting some 30 remote users. Folha de Londrina, a daily metro, is located in Londrina in the state of Parana, approximately 500km West of Sao Paulo in Brazil. Folha de Londrina is a privately owned publishing company.