'Java's always been a RIA platform - before the world really wanted one,' claimed Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz recently, as he reflected on the reinvention of the Java platform as represented by JavaFX. 'What's a rich internet application?' Schwartz wrote. 'It depends on your perspective,' he continued, adding 'From mine, it's any network connected application that persists in front of a user, typically outside a browser, that can operate when disconnected from the network.'

Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

Quest Software announced the latest release of its Java profiler, JProbe 8.0, which is now offered as a plug-in to the Eclipse Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The release of this capability aligns with the increased adoption of the open source development. Launching JProbe in an Eclipse environment enables users to adopt continuous performance testing best practices.

Before Java I was a Smalltalk guy. I remember switching from one language to the other and the tipping point that you reach when you've mastered the new language and how many months it takes, not to mention the years, to do really good design and know-how, which patterns to apply and how to avoid mistakes, understand performance issues, and so forth.

Today, the world of software development is presented with a new challenge. To fully leverage this new class of multi-core hardware, software developers must change the way they create applications. By turning their focus to multi-threaded applications, developers will be able to take full advantage of multi-core devices and deliver software that meets the demands of the world. But this paradigm of multi-threaded software development adds a new wrinkle of complexity for those who care the utmost about software quality.

AccuRev and Rally announced a technology partnership that will integrate AccuRev software change and configuration management (SCCM) with Rally's Agile lifecycle management solutions. The combined solution will provide a platform to manage multiple Agile processes and ongoing customer feedback, while improving visibility and requirements traceability between defects, issues and tasks and the actual source code changes made to address them.

Genuitec announced the availability of MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 6.5; Java's most compelling IDE for end-to-end development. Integral to this release is Maven4MyEclipse, a '1-Click,' ready-to-run implementation of the Maven2 project management and build services for MyEclipse. Maven4MyEclipse streamlines enterprise Maven adoption by eliminating the hassle developers have come to associate with traditional Maven installations and project setup and configuration.

AccuRev announced a new AJAX-based Web Interface and a native integration with Microsoft Windows Explorer for its process-centric software change and configuration management (SCCM) solution. These new capabilities make it easy to integrate every knowledge worker into the development process and offer new ways to share information.

Recursion Software released a private beta version of their Voyager mobile platform, with powerful interoperability for Android, Microsoft .NET and Compact Framework (CF), all Java editions (JME CDC, JSE and JEE), and more than 15 embedded operating systems. The Voyager platform is a powerful cross-platform development environment that allows developers to write one code-set natively in either Java or .NET and publish the code to mobile or desktop nodes that can execute transactions at runtime regardless of the virtual machine they employ. This beta version is an important step towards write once, run everywhere for application messaging and communications.

Commercial open source software has arrived. There have been commercial sponsors of open source projects for a long time, but the recent spate of high-price (for open source, at least) acquisitions of companies with open source products at the core of their business has made a splash in the technology industry. In addition, Sun's convulsions into the open source world have left the Java landscape decisively in open source territory.

Java developers have had a nice ride the last few years. With ferocious competition in the Java tools space, the tools they use have been getting better and better. Where one tool innovates, such as with quick fixes, the competitors quickly duplicate and expand on that innovation. This has led to a fertile field of tools for Java developers to choose from.

2008 is going to be an important year for Rich Internet Applications. Most organizations are delivering or planning to deliver Rich Internet Applications; however, at the same time, most IT managers are facing a dilemma: which Rich Internet Application technology and platform to use? The number of different frameworks and libraries is too vast to even consider evaluating a fraction of them.

Scalent Systems announced support for Sun Logical Domains (LDoms) server virtualization and partitioning technology by Scalent V/OE Infrastructure Virtualization software. Sun's LDoms technology is available on its chip multi-threaded (CMT) systems with CoolThreads technology including the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers.

Savvion announced it will now be providing customers with human-centric process solutions through Savvion's BPM platform and the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). By combining Java CAPS and Savvion BusinessManager, Savvion delivers an environment that supports process automation from conception through enterprise-wide deployment, fostering collaboration between business users, IT architects and developers, regardless of geographic or organizational boundaries.

Sun Microsystems announced the availability of Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) 6, the latest version of its flagship service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business integration software. Sun also released a new master data management (MDM) suite, a high performance and unified solution that gives users a single view of their customer data and helps them more effectively manage customer relationships.

AdaCore announced availability of the GNAT Ada-Java Interfacing Suite (GNAT-AJIS), which allows developers to build applications using both languages. With GNAT-AJIS, programmers can combine Java applications compiled to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Ada code that has been compiled either natively or to the JVM. Application areas as diverse as financial services, communications, aerospace, defense, and academic research can all benefit from GNAT-AJIS.

Azul Systems announced that its Vega 3 Compute Appliance recorded world record results in the industry-standard SPECjbb2005 benchmark, further demonstrating the company's commitment to providing customers with the highest performing solutions for Java enterprise computing.

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 highly 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.

Red Hat is beta testing its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as a solution on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It's a way to tickle enterprise adoption of its Java application server. EC2 offers developers, enterprises and startups a web-scale compute infrastructure with virtually unlimited capacity and pay-as-you-go pricing. And of course clouds right now are very chi-chi.

If you are planning to hit the job market, you may need to refresh some of the Java basic terms and techniques to prepare yourself for a technical interview. JDJ Enterprise Editor Yakov Fain here offers thirty of the core Java questions that you might expect during the interviews, 20 for mid-level developers and the final ten for senior-level developers. Why not try them and see how well you do?

InterSystems simplifies persistence for Java developers by providing product that allow simultaneous SQL and object data access without mapping. InterSystems Caché is the high-performance object database that runs SQL faster than relational databases. It includes InterSystems Jalapeño technology that allows you to automatically create persistent classes from POJO class definitions. With Jalapeño, you can work entirely within your favorite Java IDE to build database applications in less time than you ever thought possible.

Azul Systems and Axway announced that they are working together to address complex and demanding application performance needs for global financial businesses. Business critical applications present scalability and response time challenges that traditionally have led to server sprawl, low asset utilization, and growing IT administration costs. Azul Systems and Axway have partnered to address these challenges by automating check processing and other financial batch processes that are typically very time-consuming and inefficient.

Aonix announced the beginning of implementation efforts to add symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) capability to its flagship product PERC Ultra. Dubbed PERC Ultra SMP, the product will address the added complexities inherent in design, development, and deployment of SMP-targeted applications where the benefits of scalability, portability, and maintainability of Java applications can be fully realized.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Mike Neil is general manager for virtualization strategy in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. Mike is focused on the delivery of the Windows virtualization technology, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Virtual PC 2007. Mike also directs the technical enablement of Microsoft's broader vision for virtualization, to include virtualization management tools and virtualized desktop infrastructure. Prior to this role, Mike was responsible for Microsoft?s server and PC virtualization efforts since 2003.

A lot of rework still happens in projects applying UML techniques because of conflicts and omissions in requirements. To reduce rework, interactive storyboarding is effective, but it seems that projects that use the technique are limited because of the few tools available. To improve this situation, this article introduces the J-CASE open source Tag Library that lets us describe storyboards on JSPs based on use cases, and explains how to generate document and UML diagrams from the JSPs.

JadeLiquid Software announced the release of the WebRenderer Swing Edition 4.2. The WebRenderer Swing Edition is a Java browser SDK built upon Firefox 2.0 and rendering in 100% pure Swing. The rendering quality and Web standards support of Firefox 2.0 is paired with the lightweight drawing of Java Swing providing the commercial strength Java browser SDK.

Genuitec is pleased to recognize its recent showing in the annual Evans Data 'User's Choice IDEs' survey. MyEclipse was recognized as one of the world's top eight IDEs, along with CodeGear's Delphi, Sun's NetBeans, Sun Studio, Oracle's JDeveloper, Microsoft's Visual Studio, Adobe's Creative Suite and IBM Rational Tools. Of note, the top IDEs list included only four Java IDEs.

Carbonfund.org announced a new partnership with Azul Systems. While providing high-end performance products for businesses and increasing data center efficiencies, Azul Systems will go carbon neutral by offsetting its carbon emissions through Carbonfund.org's Carbonfree Small Business Program. Currently, Azul Compute Appliances yield improved power and cooling performance, as well as more predictable service levels to support data center transactions of capital markets, e-commerce, and telecommunication customers. Azul's multicore chip technology is designed to handle processing-intensive workloads associated with dynamic Web-based applications by creating a shared pool of compute and memory resources.

Conference in San Francisco. Dvorak held forth on a number of topics, including the new AMD/Intel lawsuit, the viability of Java and Sun, the value of (or lack thereof) of corporate PR, and whether or not a new book about Silicon Valley is really worth reading.

SourceLabs announced that its Self-Support Suite now supports the open source Eclipse development environment. SourceLabs' automated tools and support services for Java and Linux developers, corporate IT professionals, and solution providers are an effective, on demand new way to more effectively support open source software development and operations. SourceLabs Self-Support tools dramatically reduce the complexity of enterprise Java and Linux application development and maintenance by bringing together in one bundle all the components developers need to create and deploy web applications using the Eclipse Foundation's open source development framework.

HP Tuesday named Don Grantham, Sun's global sales and service boss, and an ex-IBMer, its chief sales officer responsible for enterprise accounts and public sector sales as well as sales to the communications, media and entertainment, financial and manufacturing and distribution industries. He will report to Ann Livermore, head of HP?s Technology Solutions Group and run worldwide alliance sales, sales compensation, global pre-sales, sales support, sales operations and go-to-market 'effectiveness.' Grantham, who was at Sun for the last nine years, replaces Andy Mattes, who is now going to run HP's outsourcing services business.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

A couple of recent Brazil-related news events suggested the theme for this column: Java in Brazil. First, the annual International Free Software Forum (FISL) was recently held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. FISL is one of the world's most important free software conferences, and more than 7,400 people attended this year, including many from Sun's Java organization.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

Google is opening up App Engine to one and all. The cloud-sharing gambit meant to entice developers to build their web applications on the same infrastructure that powers Google's own applications - and in the process lock them into Google instead of Microsoft - has been in beta for the last six weeks and limited to 10,000 developers. Google says that another 150,000 developers are on the waiting list and so on Wednesday, the first day of Google I/O, the company's two-day developer event in San Francisco, will take down the barricade. Google also disclosed what it's going to charge for App Engine starting later this year.

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.

SOA is mostly associated with 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 highly 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.

Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic, stopped by to talk with SYS-CON.TV host Jeremy Geelan at SYS-CON.TV's JavaOne studio in San Francisco's Moscone Center at JavaOne earlier this month. Other CEOs interviewed by Geelan at JavaOne 2008 included Chris Keene of WaveMaker; Sean Walsh, Skyway Software; Rod Johnson, SpringSource; and Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian.

The popular code generator Clear Data Builder will become available free of charge. Originally, Clear Data Builder was released as a command-line open source code generator a.k.a. DaoFlex. We've submitted it to Adobe Flex component exchange about two years ago, and it quickly became one of the most downloadable components.