As Gartner's ITXpo symposium gets under way, predictions and speculations about what the Web will evolve into have been in the air. Gartner sees a future Internet which will use standardized data enabling today's dissimilar networks to speak the same language.

Privately held Canadian RTOS house QNX Software Systems is going to multi billion-dollar-a-year Harman International Industries Inc, the Washington, DC-based outfit best known for its high-end audio and stereo brands, for $138 million. QNX will become a freestanding Harman subsidiary run by current management including its CEO Dan Dodge, who co-founded the company in 1980.

Since its original launch in February, multiple companies have used IBM's 'Autonomic Computing Toolkit' to implement autonomic functions into their applications and services, with some currently already on the market. A new version of that toolkit launched today will feature expanded Eclipse tooling and additional platform support.

After publicly retracting the results of J2EE versus .NET benchmark tests it conducted back in 2002, The Middleware Company (TMC) bravely ventured recently to revisit this minefield. From IBM's point of view, according to an internal document obtained today by WebSphere Journal, TMC has managed to blow itself up all over again!

Which application server will be found to most resilient and flexible? And which most secure? It didn't take long for the enterprise software community to start discussing the 'Application Server Shootout' outlined this week by SYS-CON Media as it tapped Burton Group to stage the shootout between main app server vendors - both proprietary and open source - due to be held at Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference & Expo next February, in Boston.

The Eclipse Foundation announced very strong gains within the organization. Growth occurred across all sectors, with increases in new Eclipse members, the number of companies using the Eclipse platform, and the number of new projects being developed.

SAP plans to support a new distributed environment, with its NetWeaver platform, that will support many Java virtual machines running together and sharing resources. This approach differs from the access model in place today, whereby multiple users are tied to one virtual machine, which uses resources allocated to it alone. SAP hopes this will make corporations less leery of using Java to handle tasks within enterprises.

SYS-CON Media today announced further details of the 'Application Server Shoot-Out' due to take place at its upcoming cross-platform technology event, Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edge) - in which leading application server providers are expected to participate. The Shoot-Out, with a particular focus on interoperability, resiliency, security, and ease-of-use in terms of development, deployment, and management, will be staged under the auspices of Burton Group; Web Services Edge 2005 East is to be held in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, February 15-17, 2005.

The PeopleSoft board's worst fear at this point may not be that Oracle buys the company but that it doesn't - or that PeopleSoft won't go for the $21 a share currently on offer. is that why one of its directors testified last week that PeopleSoft might now be open to Oracle's overtures - especially if a deal could be cut quick?

Visual Mining has released an Eclipse-based business intelligence-reporting tool that the company claims can provide clients more cost-efficient reporting solutions than similar Java-based applications. NetCharts Designer 4.5.3 uses guided, interactive methods that allow users, who otherwise would not know how to create reports, to build such applications using manual, point-and-click operations.

It remains to be seen whether or not Delaware Chancery Court Judge Leo Strine this week will side with Oracle and declare void PeopleSoft's poison-pill strategy designed to stave off the hostile takeover bid. Before then it may become moot; if Oracle ups its current $21 tender offer for example, and promises a quick transaction, perhaps PeopleSoft will dismantle the defensive measures itself.

'For years, the EJB and JDO specifications have evolved independently as they addressed different sets of requirements,' write Linda DeMichiel and Craig Russell, specification leads of JSR-220 and JSR-243, in an open letter to the Java community. 'The core of both specifications, however, includes persistence technology. Even to this day, the data persistence models in EJB and JDO differ significantly. This divergence has caused confusion and debates among Java developers, and is not in the best interest of the Java community.' Read the whole letter here.

Every now and again a newsgroup deals with an issue so generic that it seems helpful to air it in a wider forum. A recent question from a VB.NET programmer - who asked a Java newsgroup 'I have been forced to conclude I need to learn Java' - is a perfect example. The Java community has already hastened to assist with its suggestions.

Instantiations' CodePro family of applications, that includes CodePro Studio and CodePro Enterprise, has been released. The latest version, CodePro Studio 3.0, integrates seamlessly into major development environments, including IBM WebSphere, IBM Rational, and Eclipse.

'I get confused by a lot of Sun's technology advertising and marketing,' writes Roger Strukhoff. But there are numerous reasons, he argues, not to give up on Sun - the company that famously grew 'from start-up mode to $1 billion in annual sales without spending one cent on advertising its products.'

A 2003 initiative between IBM and Art Technology Group (ATG) has been actively developed by ATG. Art Technology provides software used to measure potential reactions by consumers using e-commerce Web sites. ATG created the plug-ins for Java developers to save time with the coding of such scenarios, used primarily by large retailers in marketing items. Applications can be created in WebSphere and Eclipse environments using graphical interfaces enabling developers to design solutions that the program will code.

Agitar, a leader in the testing of enterprise applications for developers, announced that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation. Agitar, which already supports Eclipse in its flagship Agitator enterprise testing solution, will be able to provide Java programmers a means to test and code from one IDE. Eclipse is rapidly being embraced by Java developers as an enterprise-grade IDE.

LynuxWorks is poised to release Luminosity, a new development tool based on Eclipse. For maximum interoperability across platforms and applications, Luminosity allows for Java creation, editing, compiling, and debugging among other things.

To use or not to use? That is the question. Or if they are to be used, then how? In this article, Chakra Yadavalli looks first at what static import is, explores how it might help us write code shorter, faster, and cleaner; then examines how the development tools could help us to 'code at the speed of thought' - without compromising the comprehensibility or maintainability of the code.

Recently elected as a W3C Advisory Board Member, ILOG's chief product officer, Jean Francois Abramatic, is certain to enhance the course of Eclipse development and use. Abramatic is a strong proponent of Eclipse.

IBM's director of WebSphere Foundation Software is aghast at rumors that Sun may be planning to merge its JavaOne and Sun Network conferences: 'JavaOne was supposed to be an industry event where any Java vendor or user who wishes to attend can do so and be part of the Java community....but it is not supposed to be a lot of people there to support and further Sun. We're there to support and further Java,' he writes.

'When we hear about short-term job losses that result from outsourcing to India and China, we also need to consider the long-term benefits of these nations developing into prime markets for U.S. exports,' says Dr. Adam Kolawa, the co-founder and CEO of Parasoft. Outsourcing actually offers the U.S. 'a tremendous opportunity,' Kolawa maintains, using post-war Japan as an example from which he feels we could and should learn.

There are some people who are passionate about the differences between 'free software' and 'open source.' I'm beginning to wonder if the difference matters. The term 'free software' came into use at about the same time that Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT, launched the GNU Project, and began writing the software that would eventually become the core of the free software community: emacs, the GNU 'C' compile (gcc), the 'C' libraries, and a few others.

The current target release date for J2SE 5.0 (Tiger) is September 30th, says Sun's Graham Hamilton, chief technologist of Java Software. 'That is the target,' Hamilton adds. 'As I am sure people understand, we are watching quality and customer feedback closely and will adjust if needed. But right now things are looking good for hitting that date.'

In a new version of its flagship product called FlowBuilder, Trilog has announced that it includes a new Eclipse plug-in that makes the entire framework available as an Eclipse perspective for Java developers. The release also 'tears down the wall between the Domino community and the J2EE community,' the company claims.

Built on the Eclipse platform and developed as a plug-in to IBM's WebSphere Studio, a technology called 'b+' enables the modeling, generation, migration and deployment of end-to-end, J2EE1.3 applications from UML models, legacy applications and JDBC-compatible databases, with no vendor specific runtime dependencies.

Describing Eclipse as 'awesome,' the IT project manager of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (Ansto) has started using it to build a Linux-based desktop app. The application, codenamed 'Gumtree,' will be used to control Ansto's laboratory instrumentation, allowing neutron beam instrumentation experiments to be performed locally or remotely.

'We are thrilled to welcome Actuate as an Eclipse Strategic Developer,' said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation Inc as he announced today that San Francisco-based Enterprise Reporting Applications specialist Actuate Corporation has become a Board Member for the Eclipse community, joining existing Strategic Developers IBM Corporation, Intel, and QNX Software Systems Limited.

It was bound to raise the hackles of Java developers around the world when writer-programmer Paul Graham last month wrote, in a widely circulated essay called Great Hackers: 'Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don't work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero.' Here Sachin Hejip responds to Graham's controversial assertion.

IBM is rewarding academics who develop innovative applications with Eclipse. The company announced today four recipients from the Australia & New Zealand region. Each is due to receive between $50,000 and $65,000 in IBM grants to further academic open source software creation.

As Eclipse environments grow, companies come closer to creating Eclipse plug-ins. Acucorp, a business partner of IBM, is at work on ACUCOBOL-GT Eclipse plug-in.

'I've downloaded it, and it works fantastically. I've got the settings at 200Mb minimum and 350Mb maximum and Eclipse is very, very snappy.' With these words, Jon Eaves enthuses about a new plugin for Eclipse.

'J++, being the dinosaur that it is, compiles and conforms to the 1.1 version of the JDK,' recounts dot-com CTO and Java advocate Thomas E. Davis. 'Eclipse, on the other hand, supports the 1.4 version of the JDK. So my right hand man sends me an instant message telling me that he's going to start using the newer 1.4 version of the collections API. That set off the klaxons in my head.'

In order to make deploying Java applications on Linux easier, IBM has announced the release of a free tools bundle for Eclipse.

IBM and the Apache Foundation announced that IBM is contributing the Cloudscape product it acquired from Informix to the Apache open source program. The project name for the effort will be 'Derby.' The contribution amounts to more than 500,000 lines of Java code. In related news IBM also clarified its Linux distribution strategy.

SYS-CON interviews Michael Norman, CEO of Scapa Technologies, live at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2004 in San Francisco, about Eclipse and - especially - the Hyades Project.

The so-called 'Beehive' and 'Pollinate' projects will be riding the next wave of Open Source innovation, if things go according to plan for BEA's scheme to release the source code for a large portion of its application development framework for WebLogic Workshop.

Whether you're a tool developer building new commercial products, or a user customizing your environment, every experienced developer interested in extending Eclipse or WebSphere Studio Workbench will possibly find a new book interesting - it's the first definitive, start-to-finish guide to building commercial-quality extensions for both Eclipse and IBM's WebSphere Studio Workbench.

IBM Rational will standardize its suite of automated software quality (ASQ) tools on the Hyades open source platform. By making its software-ality tools Hyades compliant, Rational will provide third-party testing tool vendors and IT organizations with a standardized platform on which to build products, reducing the need to re-create baseline capabilities such as HTTP load testing and runtime analysis.

On June 1, 2004, the Eclipse Board of Directors named Mike Milinkovich the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. The hunt had been on since Eclipse became an independent entity earlier this year. Here JDJ's Eclipse editor, Bill Dudney, talks exclusively with Milinkovich about the direction he wants to take Eclipse and what his vision is for the community.