Paul Krill

Oracle Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian during a JavaOne presentation on Tuesday evening outlined Oracle's vision and solutions for building and maintaining service-oriented architectures (SOAs). The company's "new application blueprint" features JavaServer Faces (JSF) for the user interface, BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) for business processes, and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.0 for developing business logic.

Sun Microsystems Inc. on Tuesday is releasing a slate of technologies as part of OpenSolaris, the open source version of the Solaris 10 operating system. Technologies including the kernel and networking software will be available for free usage under Sun's Community Development and Distribution Licence, said Tom Goguen, vice president for platform software at Sun.

Unification of business needs and software development is critical for enterprises, according to IBM Corp. executives speaking at the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2005 in Las Vegas late last month. The officials stressed a team-based, process-oriented strategy for development.

BEA Systems, whose annual revenues have been mired in the US$1 billion range for several years, is forging ahead with efforts to grow through provision of application services infrastructure and SOA. Toward this end, at press time the company said that on June 9 it was planning to herald Project Free Flow, so-called because it is intended to enable free flow of information across business processes, said Bill Roth, vice-president of product marketing at BEA and a former Sun Microsystems executive.

Oracle last month announced it is rebranding its middleware line, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and laying out a road map for when these products will be certified to work with newly acquired PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards applications.

Eclipse will have to deal with its own success and the challenges that success presents, said Lee Nackman, a CTO and vice-president at IBM Rational Software who was involved in founding the open source platform. Speaking at the EclipseCon 2005 conference earlier this month in Burlingame, Calif., Nackman stressed that growth presents challenges.

Although issues pertaining to IP (intellectual property) and patents have smaller development houses worried, patents actually can benefit small companies, stressed a panelist at the VSLive conference here on Wednesday. Advocates and opponents of patent procedures for software techniques had their say during a panel session entitled, "Innovation and IP." Panelists had a heated discussion with much input from the audience.

Microsoft Corp. at the VSLive Conference here in San Francisco this week is touting PC clients and its upcoming Visual Studio 2005 Team System development platform. Although Web-based clients have been in vogue of late, Microsoft remains a believer in the Windows PC clients that have been the company's staple. Saying IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. lately have been endorsing traditional client-based systems, Microsoft's BJ Holtgrewe, senior product manager for Visual Studio Tools for Office, stressed at the conference on Monday that Microsoft has remained a believer. "I'd like to say to those two companies, welcome to the party. It's a party that we've never left," he said.