Red Hat's Whitehurst Sees Obama in Open Source

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has issued a statement praising President Obama for bringing a culture of openness and participatory governance to the White House. According to Whitehurst, the Obama administration's commitment to transparency and inclusiveness reflects the same values that are found at the core of the community-driven open source software development model.

Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC Open License Draws Mixed Reviews

Microsoft has released the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). This new ASP.NET enhancement brings a Rails-like model-view-controller framework to Microsoft's Web development stack. The move came just two weeks after the release of ASP.NET MVC, Microsoft's design pattern for test-driven development of enterprise-scale Web applications. It also comes as Microsoft last week continued to emphasize its open source initiatives. In a blog entry published on Wednesday, Microsoft developer division vice president Scott Guthrie announced the move to an open license. "MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license. The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code," he wrote.

Run Java Code on Top of the Service with AppEngine

Google has announced Java support for its App Engine developer toolkit. The App Engine platform lets developers build and host web applications on Google's infrastructure. It now supports a number of Java standards, including the Java Servlet API, Java Data Objects, Java Persistence API, javax.cache and javax.mail. "We wanted to give developers something that they could be ecstatic about, but we knew we would have to marry the simplicity of Google App Engine with the power and flexibility of the Java platform," Google engineers Don Schwarz and Toby Reyelts wrote in a post to the official App Engine Blog. "We also wanted to leverage the App Engine infrastructure - and by extension Google's infrastructure - as much as possible, without giving up compatibility with existing Java standards and tools. "And so that's what we did. App Engine now supports the standards that make Java tooling great.

Firefox 3.6 Namoroka Roadmap Revealed

Named after Namoroka National Park located in the northwestern part of Madagascar, the successor to the yet to be released Firefox3.5 ("Shiretoko") is loosely expected to arrive in 2010. Firefox 3.6 is expected to focus on several big ticket changes and enhancements around performance, personalization & customization, task-based navigation, web application support and system integration. Mozilla is currently working on Firefox 3.5, which is maturing rapidly. The third beta release, which landed last month, includes a number of compelling features such as support for the HTML 5 video element and the new high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. A fourth beta is expected to arrive later this month, and the final release is expected in June. Firefox 3.5 was originally called 3.1, but the version number was increased to reflect the large number of features that have been introduced.

Microsoft Releases Low feature SP1 for SQL Server 2008

Microsoft today released Service Pack 1 for all seven editions of SQL Server 2008, its relational database management system that uses Transact-SQL as its primary query language. Service Pack 1 (SP1) focuses on essential updates only, primarily roll-ups of cumulative updates 1 to 3 and fixes to issues reported through the SQL Server community. SP1 eases deployment and management of Service Packs by introducing Slipstream, Service Pack Uninstall, and Report Builder 2.0 Click Once capability.

Cloud Gets Cloudier - Sun Challenges Amazon as IBM Buy Looms

Sun Microsystems is offering the strongest challenge ever to Amazon, one of the leading providers of cloud services, with the debut of its open cloud platform. Sun's new products compete directly with Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 services. Incidentally, with reports flying around that Sun is look to sell itself, and IBM emerging as a potential buyer, the cloud space is getting even more cloudier.

Businesses Shunning Web 2.0 Security

A local industry survey conducted this month has revealed a startling paradox between the acknowledged security threat of Web 2.0 applications and the access given to everyday users during business hours. While 92 per cent of respondents claimed to allow their employees access to Web 2.0 applications such as social networking, blogs and wikis, 71 per cent considered the consumer technology typically used to access these services as security threats.

Microsoft Oslo Talk for the First Time In India

"Oslo" is the code name for a family of new technologies that enable data-driven model based development. At TechEd United States 2008 (June 2008), Chairman Bill Gates discussed in his keynote the ways in which modeling would transform the future of application development, and the role that “Oslo” plays in these efforts. He also disclosed that a community technology preview (CTP) will be released at the Professional Developers Conference in October 2008.

Finally, a Dedicated Summit for India's Eclipse Ecosystem

Eclipse is no longer open source’s best-kept secret. It has come out of the closet, and how! Now at a crossroad in its evolution, the ecosystem's footprint is broadening to encompass a larger spectrum of offerings for software developers in areas such as modeling, embedded, mobile, RIA and Ajax, SOA and dynamic languages.

Killer RIA Team to Take Charge at GIDS.Web

An expert team of killer RIA evangelists including Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan, Anirudh Sasikumar, Harish Sivaramakrishnan, Hemant Khandelwal, Raghunath Rao Thricovil, Rakshith and Sujit Reddy Gurrala will take center stage at GIDS.Web on the 23rd of April 2009. Instrumental in building several open source libraries and contributing to the richness of the RIA ecosystem in India, this team of evangelists from Adobe will hold forth on several focused sessions and workshops.

Celebrate COBOL's Golden Anniversary at GIDS 2009

Cobol continues to be the most important programming language in the world today, despite the sheen of a .NET or Java.