Paul Krill

IBM Corp. and several other vendors on Tuesday unveiled three specifications intended to converge Web services and grid computing.

Innoopract Informationssysteme GmbH announced on Monday that it is shipping its World Wide Web Windowing Toolkit (W4T) Eclipse Plug-In, which provides a visual method for Java developers to build interfaces to Web applications.

Web sites featuring resources for developers on the Java and .Net platforms are being unveiled Tuesday in separate announcements.

Microsoft Corp., BEA Systems Inc. and Tibco Software Inc. on Wednesday published a specification, WS-Eventing, which is intended to provide a common way of communicating events within and between Web services.

Macromedia Inc. on Monday announced Macromedia Director MX 2004, an upgraded version of the multimedia authoring tool that adds support for JavaScript, Flash MX 2004 content, and DVD-Video.

Tapping a familiar theme of late, BEA Systems Inc. and Compuware Corp. on Thursday will forge an alliance intended to make it easier to develop Java applications.

Open source software, in which developers get access to source code, still is not being used by the masses but is on the cusp of a much broader acceptance, said Brian Behlendorf, founder of Apache, during a speech at a Software Development Forum conference in Burlingame, Calif. late last week.

Sun Microsystems Inc. and the netbeans.org tools organization on Thursday released a road map for the open source NetBeans tools technology, outlining advances to extend development for the Web and Web services.