Paul Krill

The days of selling software through the traditional commercial model are numbered, as open source is becoming the paradigm of choice, said Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, at the EclipseCon 2006 conference last month.

Agile software development, which aims to offer a much quicker style of delivering software than traditional methods, has not yet met its promise, Steve McConnell, author and chief software engineer at Construx Software Builders, told the the SD West 2006 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this month.

Tim Bray is director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, but is perhaps best known as a co-inventor of XML. He also has launched one of the first public Web search engines, Open Text Index, and founded Antarctica Systems, specializing in visualization-based business analytics.Paul Krill spoke with Bray at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco last month about topics ranging from the open source business case to, of course, XML.

Two trendy software development technologies, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and agile programming, were advanced last month with rollouts from Tibco Software and Rally Software.

Oracle Corp., with the new version of its free JDeveloper Java development tool, is looking to compete with the Eclipse open-source juggernaut. The company is also shipping an upgrade to its application server, bundled with a rules engine and an ESB (enterprise service bus).

Microsoft

Looking to bolster the development of Web and enterprise J2EE applications in the open-source arena, the Eclipse Foundation has released Version 1.0 of its Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP).

ActiveState is looking to accommodate the burgeoning interest in the open-source Ruby programming language by supporting it in the company