Paul Krill

The NetBeans open source platform championed by Sun Microsystems has less industry support than rival Eclipse, which enjoys the backing of vendors such as IBM and Oracle. But Sun late last month launched an effort to boost NetBeans and is seeking new endorsements.

Microsoft on Tuesday further embraced dynamic scripting, revealing AJAX-friendly (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) enhancements planned for the upcoming Visual Studio "Orcas" tools platforms and a marriage of IronPython and ASP.Net.

Looking to bolster AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and development of Web 2.0 applications, the OpenAjax Alliance introduced a project that addresses AJAX interoperability issues. The OpenAjax Hub project involves developing a standard set of JavaScript functionality to tackle problems with interoperability arising when multiple AJAX libraries are used within the same Web page.

Microsoft earlier this month unveiled its official Atlas technology branding for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming on ASP.Net, and will make the software available earlier than planned. The company hopes to ship its Atlas technologies around the year-end, as opposed to next year.

Raising its profile in the SOA space, JBoss is readying upgrades to its jBPM (Java Business Process Management) software to support the 1.1 and 2.0 versions of BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). The open source software vendor also released a beta version of its ESB (enterprise service bus) last month.

With agile programming spreading to larger groups of developers, Rally Software Development last month introduced an enterprise-level version of its lifecycle management platform for agile software development. The product includes an on-premise deployment option.

Intel last month shipped three threading tools to enable developers to better take advantage of newfangled multicore processors.

Oracle will take its biggest plunge yet into SOA this month, with plans to unveil a developer's preview of Oracle SOA Suite 10g Release 3, which will wrap a conglomeration of Oracle Fusion middleware products into a single install for the first time.