Industry News

Red Hat Tickles Open Source SOA

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:00:00 EDT

By the end of the month Red Hat will release JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3 and JBoss Operations Network 2.1, which are supposed give it more skin in the enterprise SOA game. The company said the new revs feature cooperative support and allow for remote monitoring and management of open source SOA deployments. Red Hat’s SOA strategy is centered on driving down cost and complexity.

Twelve Things You Didn't Know About Jetty

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:15:00 EDT

In the past couple of years, interest in Jetty has surged. Jetty is an open source Java-based web and application server and servlet container, but what else do you know about it? To commemorate the 12th anniversary of Jetty, here are 12 things that might surprise you

Mono 2.0 Released

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:00:00 EDT

The open source Mono project that makes Microsoft's .NET development framework cross-platform – and is meant to entice Windows developers to Linux by making things seem warmly familiar – is now loosely compatible with .NET Framework 3.5. It lacks Windows Presentation Foundation, Workflow Foundation and Communication Foundation.

Obama May Win by a Landslide: Thomas M. DeFrank

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:15:00 EDT

Also in the book, DeFrank writes about Ford's opinion of Bill Clinton's addiction to women. Ford says about Clinton: 'He's sick - he's got an addiction. He needs treatment. He's sick. You know there is treatment for this kind of addiction. A lot of men have gone through the treatment with a lot of success. But he won't do it, because he is in denial.' DeFrank saved his thoughts on the upcoming election in a separate speech, which he gavae the next day. 'If Obama wins, he will win by a landslide margin. If McCain wins, it will be a very small margin.' thinks DeFrank.

If VMware Is "Virtualization 1.0" Is Microsoft the Avatar Of "Virtualization 2.0"?

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Well, Egenera - which has no market cap at all because it hasn't gone public yet - claims it is. IDC, which coined the term, defines 'Virtualization 2.0' as the next step beyond server virtualization replete with faster provisioning, high availability, disaster recovery, resource balancing and ultimately policy-based automation. Egenera says IDC is speaking its name.

SOA World Expo - Web Services Using Apache CXF

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Since its emergence, Web Service technology has gone a long way towards perfecting itself and finding its right application in the real world. With the maturity of the specifications, Web Service technology, with its power of interoperability, is now the major enabling technology of SOA, which is being adopted by more and more enterprises to build their application integration infrastructure.

Terracotta Extends Value of Java Clustering Solution

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:04:00 EDT

Terracotta has announced the latest version of their open source Java clustering solution, Terracotta version 2.7. The new version builds on the adoption of Terracotta in specific vertical markets and applications such as reservation systems, online gaming, and information portals. In addition, it offers extended support for the Spring framework and Glassfish application server, and delivers enhanced scalability, performance, and operational visibility.

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit to Ship with Open Source jQuery

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 03:00:00 EDT

Microsoft said, “Going forward we’ll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new AJAX server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well.”

RIA Conference Keynotes: Adobe & Microsoft

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 13:00:00 EDT

Join Scott Guthrie as he discusses Microsoft’s commitment to web standards development, Rich Internet Applications and how Microsoft is contributing to help move the web forward. Join Adobe’s Kevin Lynch as he demonstrates how Flash and HTML come together to make the most engaging, effective user experiences across operating systems and browsers.

Cloud Computing Journal - Top 20 Open Source Packages

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The Open Source Census, the catch-as-catch-can opt-in attempt to discern trends in open source adoption that OpenLogic started, has collected six months worth of data on some 300,000 installations on about 2,000 machines and from this very narrow and probably unrepresentative slice of life has deduced that government and the financial sector are the biggest users of open source “per machine scanned,” Europe is ahead of the United States, OpenOffice is 3:1 more common on personal PCs than on company machines and that there’s a reasonable amount of open source software being used on Windows.

Perspectives on the Value of Open Source

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:15:00 EDT

Recently, I have had the opportunity to work with a number of clients on their strategy to leverage the advantages that open source can achieve across their IT organizations. I found the major motivator and attention getter for open source adoption is the promise to cut costs; but increasingly, interests now include ways open source can provide control and enable agility.

InterSystems Introduces DeepSee

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:00:00 EDT

Responding to the growing demand for business intelligence (BI) capabilities that enable real-time decision-making for operational business processes, InterSystems Corporation has announced InterSystems DeepSee embedded real-time BI software. DeepSee aims to broaden the use of BI to decision makers at all organization levels driving more effective day-to-day execution across the enterprise.

Yahoo's Zimbra Reaches Out to Microsoft

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:00:00 EDT

Zimbra, Yahoo's open source messaging and collaboration software company whose fate was unclear if Microsoft had bought Yahoo, says it's got a new open extension framework for its Collaboration Suite (ZCS) that will enable two-way interoperability with Microsoft Exchange. It expects the move to encourage large enterprises and academic institutions to explore Zimbra more.

Server Virtualization: Open-E Data Certified with Virtual Iron

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:15:00 EDT

"The server virtualization market is red hot and gaining rapid adoption as organizations strive to achieve physical server consolidation, maximize resource utilization and deploy disaster recovery solutions," said Mark Bowker, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Open-E has announced that Open-E Data Storage Server (DSS) has been certified for use with Virtual Iron’s server virtualization software.

Bluenog Has Rolled Out ICE 4.0

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Bluenog – a nog being a peg that holds a structure together – has rolled out ICE 4.0, or Integrated Collaborative Environment, calling it the industry’s first pre-integrated suite of enterprise content management, RIA portal development environment and business intelligence reportedly suited to non-technical users.

IBM's Got Its Head in the Clouds

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:00:00 EDT

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.

Greenplum Combines SQL & MapReduce

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:15:00 EDT

Greenplum, the grandest of the open source-based databases, whose massively parallel shared-nothing architecture supports petabyte data warehousing on cost-effective general-purpose hardware and promises linear scalability on thousands of processors, has pushed out its latest cut, rev 3.2, making it the first commercial database, the company says, to include MapReduce, the parallel computing technique pioneered by Goggle and copied by Yahoo’s Hadoop for analyzing the web.

Infobright Launches Open Source Data Warehouse Offerings

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:30:00 EDT

Infobright has announced availability of its new open source data warehouse software, Infobright Community Edition (ICE). This enterprise-class, self-managing solution is an alternative to high-cost, high-maintenance data warehouse products. Infobright is also launching www.infobright.org, the new community home and development portal for open source enthusiasts with corporate data warehouse needs.

Upstart Seeks To Overthrow OpenOffice

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:30:00 EDT

Softmaker Software GmbH, a German Office wannabe, has taken out after open source darling OpenOffice, saying it’s not good enough to score against Microsoft and proposing its own widgetry as a substitute. The company has just put out a public beta of its Software Office 2008 for Linux, which includes what it calls a Word-compatible word processor, TextMaker, an Excel-compatible spreadsheet, PlanMaker, and a new PowerPoint alternative, Presentations.

Bluenog Introduces Integrated Suite of Enterprise CMS, Portal, and BI Software

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:35:00 EDT

Bluenog announced the availability of Bluenog ICE 4.0, the integrated suite of content management (ECM or CMS), portal, and business intelligence (BI) software. Bluenog ICE is an “Integrated Collaborative Environment” that leverages Web 2.0 technologies. The suite’s tight integration eliminates application silos, reduces total cost of ownership, and accelerates application development. Ready integration with third-party software, including other vendors’ ECM, portal, and BI offerings, further reduces cost and increases deployment flexibility. Bluenog ICE is based on open source software, and customers receive the suite’s source code.

Sun Boosts Its Virtualization Portfolio with Free Open Source Hypervisor

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:00:00 EDT

With a ranking Microsoft ideologue dancing attendance, Sun Wednesday trotted out and open sourced xVM Server, its promised Xen-based bare-metal hypervisor, and xVM Ops Center 2.0, its management update. It will sell support, including patches and updates, at prices ranging from $500 to $3,000 per physical server a year for the server (figure four-socket increments) and $100-$350 per managed server for Ops Center, provided you buy a required $10,000 Satellite Server annual subscription.

Red Hat Pits Itself Against VMware

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:00:00 EDT

Watching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envyWatching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envy - so green in fact that it's gonna try taking VMware on by pushing the Xen virtualization integrated in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat's new goal is to underpin 50% of the world's servers by 2015. And since virtualization is projected to take over the world by then that's a lot of Xen virtualization - and there's no extra cost in it like there is with VMware since it's bundled with RHEL. (Red Hat's telling people they'll save $20,000-$30,000 a server.) Red Hat claims it's got its first 18,000 virtualized servers - although it's a little fuzzy about whether those 18,000 are actually in production - anyway, it's confident they'll get there eventually after all the testing and evaluating is done.

Using Spring as an Object Container

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:15:00 EDT

When you work with open source ESBs, you can use other tools and frameworks to help you solve common problems. Spring is one of the tools that extends the basic functionality of the ESBs Mule and ServiceMix and makes solving integration problems a lot easier. Spring is a component framework that makes it easy to work with Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs).

Cloud Computing and Open Source

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 23:00:00 EDT

The web moved from static HTML pages to Web 2.0. Software is increasing moving away from the delivery to the “hosted” model. Computing resource acquisitions is moving from buying to renting. This has given rise to new paradigms of delivering software such as Software-as-a-Service or SaaS and Cloud Computing. Open source software has been one of the key enablers of these new revolution alongwith open standards (HTML, HTTP, CSS, XML etc). Whether it is Linux or Apache or Firefox or Python.

Sun Microsystems Strikes Multi-Million Dollar Deal with ERP Software Company

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:45:00 EDT

Sun Microsystems has announced the addition of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendor Stésud to a growing list of customers that have adopted and deployed Sun's open source MySQL database and GlassFish application server software. This Belgium-based enterprise company joins Australian online travel pioneer Wotif.com and hundreds of other companies that now rely on MySQL and GlassFish as a lower-cost, higher-performance alternative to traditional database and application server software.

Alfresco Selected to Power Acrobat.com Content Services

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:45:00 EDT

Alfresco Software announced that Adobe has implemented Alfresco’s document sharing and collaboration capabilities as part of the file sharing features in Acrobat.com. Adobe chose Alfresco as its content repository for its clustered high-availability, security, and highly capable technical support. By working with Alfresco, Acrobat.com will be able to deliver content services that support millions of documents and terabytes of data.

Open Systems Announces Certification of TRAVERSE v10.5

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:43:00 EDT

Open Systems has announced that TRAVERSE v10.5 has been certified to run on Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 database server. SQL Server 2008 promises a dynamic platform for business-critical applications and enterprise-class data management, and is available in seven editions, ranging from compact, free versions to comprehensive enterprise solutions.

Open Source RIA Framework qooxdoo 0.8 Released

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:36:00 EDT

qooxdoo is a comprehensive and innovative AJAX application framework. Leveraging object-oriented JavaScript allows developers to build cross-browser applications. No HTML, CSS or DOM knowledge is needed. It includes a platform-independent development tool chain, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and an advanced client-server communication layer. It is open source under an LGPL/EPL dual license.

The Role of Event-Driven Architecture in Business Applications

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:45:00 EDT

Three-letter acronyms (TLAs) are hardly new in Information Technology: EAI, ESB, SOA, BPM, BAM, ETL, MDM; the list goes on and on. This article is about yet another three-letter acronym, EDA, which stands for Event-Driven Architecture. EDA is not a brand new technology, but rather a proven paradigm in system-level programs, war and military simulator applications, gaming, and other areas. EDA has started to shape how general-purpose business applications are architected.

Successful Open Source Security Is Knowing What to Secure

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:23:00 EDT

Imagine the CIO of a consumer bank who thinks he is running 50 Oracle databases, but now finds out that in fact he has 100 databases installed behind his firewall. He doesn't have any idea where the other 50 came from. He doesn’t know the name of the vendor(s) supporting them. And he doesn’t have anyone on his IT team assigned to managing them. This scenario would be totally unacceptable to anyone.

Exploring Governance in the World of Open Source

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:10:00 EDT

I was shocked. We were in the brainstorming phase of developing a new collaboration portal and the possibilities were flying. It was exciting to see people from many disciplines enthusiastic about working together more effectively through improved communication, document management, and tools for capturing business processes.

OS Hot Trends: Collaboration, SaaS and Overseas Expansion

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:07:00 EDT

In our first annual survey of our membership and other open source software and services companies, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) found much optimism despite a murky economy, and a surprisingly high level of collaboration by open source software and services companies.

Cloud Computing Expo - Talend Moves into the Data Clean-Up Biz

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:07:00 EDT

Talend, the open source company with the SaaS data integration software, is now moving into the data clean-up business with a software module that identifies stuff like duplicated records and incorrect street addresses by comparing them against reference data from places like the US Postal Service.

Open Source Is No "Get-Rich-Quick Scheme" But If You Get It Right...

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Money is being made with Open Source. Some make spectacular money by exploiting Open Source (Google, Apple) and some things wouldn't even exist without it (Internet, Software as a Service, Cloud Computing) - so it really boils down to finding the right business model.

ELASTRA Delivers Cloud Portability With Support for Open Source Eucalyptus Platform

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:44:00 EDT

ELASTRA announced Elastra Cloud Server support for the Eucalyptus platform. ELASTRA’s products are designed for portability across compute clouds and currently provide support for the Amazon EC2 and S3 compute and storage environments. Because Eucalyptus exposes its virtual machines through an EC2-compatible API, ELASTRA’s portability to Eucalyptus was a straightforward addition to its platform offering.

Jitterbit 2.0 Delivers New Enterprise Capabilities, Scalability and Manageability

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Jitterbit has announced the availability of Jitterbit 2.0 Enterprise, which includes new capabilities, scalability and management tools. With this new release, organizations have the ability to solve integration challenges between legacy, enterprise, and on-demand applications and data.

LinMin API Adds Bare Metal Provisioning All Around

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:45:00 EDT

A new API is supposed to integrate LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.2 into environments that haven’t been able to do bare metal provisioning of Windows, Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora or Asianux on physical systems or virtual machines before. The rev also features single-command installation.

Appeals Court Overturns Injunction-Denying Open Source Ruling

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 06:00:00 EDT

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Wednesday overturned a year-old San Francisco district court decision that deprived the aggrieved plaintiff in a dispute over open source software governed by the Artistic License of the right to sue for copyright infringement and get an injunction against the defendant.

Google’s Now in the Encryption Business

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:11:00 EDT

Google has waded into the encryption business with an open source cross-platform toolkit called Keyczar that’s supposed to make it easier for ISVs to put cryptography in their applications. It says Keyczar supports both encryption and authentication with both symmetric and asymmetric keys as well as Java and Python implementations, promising C++ soon.

AJAX RIA Toolset for IBM WebSphere Platform Released

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:15:00 EDT

The AJAX for IBM WebSphere Platform Early Program is an optionally installable product extension for IBM WebSphere Application Server Version 6.1 and WebSphere Application Server Community Edition that offers targeted, incremental new features that can make Web applications running on WebSphere Application Server easier to use.