Paul Krill

Incremental updates to the latest Windows and Java technologies have been made available recently, with Microsoft Corp. offering a new preview of its upcoming Longhorn server platform and Sun Microsystems Inc. adding a fix for daylight saving to Java

Without further adieu, an industry-wide specification for orchestrating Web services in business processes was formally adopted by OASIS earlier this month, nearly five years after the proposal first debuted

Building on its Jazz strategy for collaboratively building software, IBM Rational will offer versions of its products geared toward global cooperative development with an eye toward boosting SOA in 2007.

Tibco Software has upgraded its BusinessWorks enterprise service bus (ESB) to leverage the Web Services BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) 2.0 specification.

Zend Technologies recently unveiled a public beta program for Zend Core 2.0, which extends the company's PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) platform to Microsoft Windows.

CodeGear, Borland Software

Look out, Java. Ruby on Rails is staking out your turf. (Ruby on Rails is an open-source Web framework based on Ruby a trendy, object-oriented scripting language). And although Ruby on Rails programs run slower than Java systems, Ruby is much easier for programmers to use. But all is not lost for Java, which still enjoys advantages in areas such as security.

Microsoft further embraced dynamic scripting, revealing AJAX-friendly enhancements planned for the upcoming Visual Studio