I am glad to introduce you to a new set of resources to help surface scalability and performance issues in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA.) The SOA Knowledge and Performance Kit is a free open-source resource to show you what it really takes to build services using today's leading SOA development platforms. The Kit delivers an SOA use case design, source code to the implementations of the use case on Oracle, IBM, BEA, and TIBCO platforms, developer journals describing our experiences step-by-step, a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator, and performance and scalability tests that leverage the PushToTest test automation platform.

Ulitzer, Inc., which initially made the headlines with its 'job descriptions from the future,' announced today that it will launch its Ulitzer 'beta' site on July 4, 2008, with 5,500 authors and 600,000 original articles, published in more than 5,000 topic-specific online journals. Each journal offers up to 14 content-specific sections, written by the world's most respected authors, who are experts in their particular fields. All Ulitzer authors will get paid for their contributions.

Being held for the first time on March 18, 2008 at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, AJAXWorld Security Bootcamp is a compelling, intensive, one-day, hands-on training program that will teach Web developers, Web designers, and other Web professionals how to build secure AJAX applications and demonstrate what the best practices are to mitigate security problems in AJAX apps. It is led by one of the world's foremost AJAX security experts and popular teachers, Billy Hoffman.

So it's kicking off an 'Enterprise Acceleration' initiative. It means to add products to its middleware portfolio, sponsor new open source projects, grow its partner ecosystem, and offer new enterprise-class performance and interoperability resources. It also means to buck up sales and marketing. It said it would set up facilities for performance tuning. testing applications, live certification and migration. JBoss, which cost Red Hat around $325 million a couple of years ago, runs on Red Hat, Windows and other Linuxes.

Genuitec announced the availability of 'MyEclipse 6.1 Blue Edition,' a toolsuite tailored specifically for IBM WebSphere users. This first milestone release is available for free trial download and use through April 1, 2008. MyEclipse 6.1 Blue Edition provides users with all the features of MyEclipse Workbench Professional Edition, but also includes advanced customized tooling and capabilities for the IBM WebSphere application server.

'It is very important to me that Acquia has a marketing leader who understands the importance of growing and sustaining a community and who is passionate about the principles of open source software,' said Acquia co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert as Jeff Whatcott joined the company as vice president of marketing, responsible for all marketing activity. Whatcott arrived from Adobe, where he led marketing for LiveCycle and Flex.

Nokia is buying Trolltech, the publicly traded Norwegian open source ISV, for roughly $153 million cash. Gee, and Trolltech just joined the LiMo Foundation, the anti-Nokia/anti-Microsoft mobile consortium that's building a middleware-focused Linux handset platform that can be shared by its members with third-party access to the APIs, and not Google's flashier Linux-based Android effort. The acquisition is practically in the bag.

Sun is offering ten grants of US $11,500 - equivalent to several months of pay for developers in some countries - for the best NetBeans projects submitted by open source developers. Conceived as a means of increasing general awareness around the NetBeans project as well as rewarding good work done by the NetBeans Community, the 'Dreams of Reality' contest is described in detail by worldwide NetBeans Community Manager Bruno Souza, the charismatic Brazilian developer, in a special audio webcast currently playing on SYS-CON.TV.

Besides commercial Apache support, Covalent, whose founders helped develop the hysterically successful Apache HTTP Web Server, also sell enterprise subscription to its own Enterprise Ready Server, Hyperic HQ monitoring, Terracotta Java clustering and the WSO2 Web Services Application Server. SpringSource picked up a $10 million A round check from Benchmark Capital last year.

Embarcadero is continuing its support of the Eclipse community with its release of EA/Studio Community Edition, a free business process modeling (BPM) tool. This tool represents the third database tool built by Embarcadero on the Eclipse framework.

Imagine you are a contestant on a TV game show and your grinning quiz master pops the question: 'Name the one thing you most associate with Google?' Think about your answer - write it on a card (don't show me yet). Turning your card over, it's likely to be one of the following...Great Internet search engine on google.com; Wicked share price, wish I'd bought some a few years ago; Powerhouse of innovation for Java

Genuitec announced a new partnership with ICEsoft Technologies. ICEsoft is the creator and provider of ICEfaces, the leading open source framework for simplified development of Ajax-enabled Java EE applications. The integration of ICEfaces with MyEclipse now allows enterprise developers to seamlessly create ICEfaces working code using MyEclipse JSF visual designer.

Aonix announced the release of ObjectAda for Solaris products. ObjectAda V8.3 for Sun's popular Solaris platforms running on SPARC and Intel processors provides a complete enterprise-level environment for the development of native Unix applications using the Ada programming language. These latest releases integrate AonixADT (Ada Development Toolkit), an Eclipse-based development environment, into ObjectAda, providing developers with access to the broad range of tools available through the Eclipse framework.

Skyway Software announced that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation. Skyway Software joins the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In Provider member to support the continued growth of Eclipse's development platform. Skyway Visual Workspace includes Skyway Builder (a development tool to prototype, design, and build solutions) and Skyway Director (a deployment tool to generate and deploy solutions). Some of the world's largest enterprises rely on model-based Skyway Visual Workspace, and our iterative, enabling methodology Skyway Collaborative Software Delivery, to facilitate collaborative development and deployment of SOA-based JEE applications more quickly and more accurately than ever before.

Embarcadero Technologies is continuing its support of the Eclipse community with its release today of EA/Studio Community Edition, a free business process modeling (BPM) tool. This new tool represents the third database tool built by Embarcadero on the Eclipse framework.

Eclipse is trying to develop an open source Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework based on technology contributed by Deutsche Post World Net. Nicknamed Swordfish, the Eclipse project is meant to result in widgetry used in developing and deploying a wide swath of software from embedded programs to enterprise applications. In this respect, its goal is different from existing SOA environments most of which are targeted at just the enterprise environment and require a good deal of memory and processing resources.

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.

The main concern of any project manager is if there are enough people in the pool of Flex developers to staff the project. Yes, there is a pool of Flex developers, but let's look at the creature called 'Flex Developer' under the microscope. If you are considering adding Flex to your set of skills, it?s still early in the game and you can join the fast growing Flex community. Decide which group of the Flex developers looks most appealing to you. Set a goal and go for it. Be what you can be.

The Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) is a new top-level project at eclipse.org. Originally proposed by Sybase in February 2005, DTP has attracted strong community support and is currently managed by a committee comprised of Sybase, IBM and Actuate. It is an open source initiative designed to provide solutions in the data framework and tooling domains.

Google's new-year special logo, which went live briefly as 2008 began, celebrated the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP - adopted by Arpanet on January 1st, 1983. While 'invisible' to most users, many of the layers built on top of TCP/IP are well-known even to laymen: HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), FTP (the File Transfer Protocol), SMTP and POP3, and IRC.

Adobe is open sourcing the remoting and messaging technologies in its commercial LiveCycle Data Services ES - Adobe's route to the Internet - as a new product called BlazeDS. The widgetry, along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification, is being sent into the wild under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL v3), making Adobe the first major company to use the little-used new license. Public betas are out at labs.adobe.com.

Adobe earned $222.2 million, or 38 cents a share, up 21%, on record fourth-quarter revenues of $911.2 million, up 34% year-over-year, exceeding the company's revenue target of $860 million-$890 million. It attributed the results to Acrobat, its Creative Suite 3 products and momentum in its enterprise business. Creative Suite 3, which started coming out in April, includes upgrades to Photoshop, Illustrator and software acquired with Macromedia like Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks. On a non-GAAP basis Adobe earned 49 cents in Q4, a penny more than Wall Street expected.

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.

ILOG announced ILOG JViews 8, the latest version of ILOG?s award-winning Java-based visualization suite that enhances the creation of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and desktop applications for supervision and monitoring. ILOG JViews 8.1 introduces a new presentation layer for the Eclipse platform and dramatic performance improvements for both desktop and Web applications to enhance the user experience of the most demanding applications.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions of applications. For deployment, BundleWorks supports local and remote deployment and provides a library of functions to handle common deployment tasks. For maintentance, BundleWorks tracks all bundle actions and configuration changes providing a complete history of activity.

Software virtualization is the ability to run multiple operating systems at the same time on the same computer. The basic premise is that for most of the day your server is basically idle and the CPU and memory are not tasked with processes all day long, the server has excess capacity and virtualization allows you to maximize your investment by installing another full version of an operating system on your hardware at the same time.

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

In my many years of programming, almost 20 years now, I have used countless integrated development environments (IDEs). I have used everything from a simple text editor all the way up to the high-end IDEs that Sybase, IBM, and Oracle use. More recently I have come to embrace the open source movement and development in Web environments. My programming language of choice for these days is PHP, so it stands to reason that I would be looking for an IDE. Like so many other developers I followed the path of looking for the pinnacle of IDEs for PHP. I started with basic text editors, moved into text editors with code colorizations, and then into project-based development environments, and finally to a fully robust IDE. The one that I've been using for a few years now is Zend's Studio Professional.

Sure, Oracle has its award-winning Fusion Middleware SOA-driven tools to integrate these sources. And Oracle already has a roadmap that ultimately merges/migrates its acquired customers into the Oracle fold. But what does an organization do while its waiting for the Fusion-driven SOA effort to reach critical mass before users can get the answers they need? Just wait? And should we tell this same organization to wait for the ERP migration to be completed before it tries to launch new information-driven initiatives? Of course not. As the kissin' cousin of databases and applications and the next door neighbor of SOAs and portals, mashups are the nimble-and-quick complement to these larger efforts. Mash and publish, growth and innovation continues.

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, as promised, put the Android SDK out in early access - along with a $10 million pot for the best apps written for its open Android mobile platform by third-party developers. It said the platform would be open and it's going about proving it. It also needs the buzz - and a killer mobile app - for Android to hit a homerun. The first $5 million will be paid out in $25,000 prizes for the continued development of the 50 most promising entries submitted between January 2 and March 3 2008 to the Android Developer Challenge I.

Oracle owns PeopleSoft and JD Edwards; they own SleepyCat; they own BEA; and of course they have their own enterprise database. This means they have the stack from top to bottom, with the exception of an operating system. They can take the CRM and banking and insurance and end-user apps that they now own, host them on an entire stack, and basically squeeze the middleware vendors out of existence.

Here are my thoughts on this. I was expecting Alfred - who is known to be an arrogant and incompetent CEO - to run away from Larry as fast as he could. But this movie usually ends as follows. First, history repeats itself. By that I mean that Alfred should remember Larry's PeopleSoft hunt, which ended up with the PeopleSoft's CEO's head on a stick. In my humble opinion, in Act 2 of Larry's BEA hunt, we will see Alfred's head on a stick and the BEA shareholders will make the wedding plans, as always happens when Larry plans another marriage for his baby Oracle.

After Google's Android announcement, at least four big guys should be irritated: Sun Microsystems, Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.Google approaches telephony from the open source side - Linux-based platform, uses Java but does not care about sticking to Java ME - they are planning to use fast OpenGL libraries and are not afraid to be hardware-specific.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

If you use Adobe Flex Web applications that connect to Plain Old Java Objects on the server side, chances are you use a popular, robust, and freely available server called Apache Tomcat. If you use Eclipse-based Flex Builder, you can smoothly debug both Flex and Java code without leaving Eclipse. Flex Builder debugger does not need any special configuration. But we need to add a couple of parameters to the startup routine of Tomcat so it'll engage the Java Platform Debugger Architecture (JPDA), which will allow other applications attach to JVM that runs Tomcat and debug deployed Java classes remotely.

BEA's Deputy CTO Theo Beack, who joined the San Jose, CA-based company in May to do 'all the cool stuff,' according to an exclusive interview with SYS-CON at the time, shared with delegates at SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 in San Francisco today his current thinking about Web 2.0, SOA, and Virtualization technologies, and how all three fit within BEA's evolving 'blended' application strategy.

WSO2, the open source SOA company, announced at the SOA World Conference & Expo, that it has significantly extended the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to support the heterogeneous, enterprise-scale demands of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The WSO2 ESB 1.5 adds the ability to run scheduled tasks, caching and other performance enhancements, message augmentation using standard databases, and a wide variety of file systems and FTP. Also new to Version 1.5 are support for XQuery and a simplified Plain Old Java Object (POJO) model based on the Command pattern.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.