Stories by Paul Krill

Sun Microsystems President/COO, Jonathan Schwartz, led off the JavaOne conference this week by heralding open source technologies and planned improvements to the company's development tools.

Sun Microsystems is releasing a slate of technologies as part of OpenSolaris, the open source version of the Solaris 10 operating system.

Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Anders Hejlsberg is chief architect of the Visual C# language and has been a key developer of the company's .Net application development technology. Previously, Hejlsberg wrote TurboPascal when he was with Borland Software. He also was chief architect of Borland's Delphi technology. InfoWorld editor-at-large Paul Krill talked with Hejlsberg at the Microsoft TechEd 2005 conference in Orlando, Fla., about a range of application development topics.

Microsoft Corp. is focused on tuning Windows Server to help businesses drive down maintenance costs and build more effective applications, said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows Server division, during a TechEd conference presentation in Orlando on Tuesday.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the Microsoft TechEd 2005 conference in Orlando touted the theme of a "New World of Work" focused on information access, business processes, and collaboration.

BEA Systems, whose annual revenues have been mired in the US$1 billion range for several years, is forging ahead with efforts to grow through provision of application services infrastructure and SOA.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology has sparked a debate in the integration space. Players in the ESB arena agree this newfangled technology is critical in providing a mechanism for application integration in service-oriented architectures (SOAs). However, vendors do not agree on whether an ESB is an actual product or merely a concept, even though various providers are selling software that they have labeled an ESB.

Oracle is rebranding its middleware line, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and laying out a road map for when these middleware products will be certified to work with newly acquired PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards applications.

Like a Roman Catholic speaking to an audience of Protestant evangelicals, a Microsoft representative at the Open Source Business Conference Wednesday focused on similarities between traditional commercial projects and open source ventures, rather than cite sharp differences.

In separate efforts, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are taking steps to try to satisfy developers irked with the vendors' recent policy decisions pertaining to application development.

Sun Microsystems Laboratories (Sun Labs) is working on a research effort to address issues with the memory footprint, startup and execution times when running multiple Java applications concurrently.

Jim Rumbaugh is an IBM Distinguished Engineer who currently leads software modeling efforts at IBM Rational. Along with Grady Booch and Ivar Jacobson, he was part of the "Three Amigos," a trio responsible for developing Unified Modeling Language, which was adopted by the Object Management Group in 1997. He also has participated in development of the Rational Unified Process and was chief developer of the Object Modeling Technique for object-oriented analysis and design. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with Rumbaugh at the SD West 2005 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., last week to discuss UML, SOA (service-oriented architectures) and ESB (enterprise service bus) technology. Rumbaugh had some harsh words for Microsoft and its fence-sitting on UML.

After describing Java as a stable technology with no great surprises likely to come, Java experts during a conference panel session fielded questions about the competitive power of Microsoft's rival .Net platform.

J2EE technology is in a very healthy state, staving off the rival .Net platform and fostering innovation, said Rod Johnson, founder of the open source Spring Framework for Java development, in a presentation on Friday

Microsoft is vowing dramatic productivity gains with its planned Indigo communications infrastructure for Web services, which is due in early versions via a Community Technology Preview in March and a beta release by June.