Paul Krill

Web services is a maturing technology and IT shops need to recognize its benefits now, rather than holding off until ongoing standardization efforts conclude, said Bob Sutor, IBM Corp. director of Web services technology at the company on Wednesday.

Ixiasoft Inc. is integrating its XML searching capabilities into Microsoft Corp. Content Management Server 2002, Ixiasoft officials announced in February. The company also is announcing an upgraded version of its Textml Server content server, featuring WebDAV support.

Royalty-free industry specifications are needed to enable Web services to fulfill its potential as a mechanism for business process integration on a massive scale, Sun Microsystems Inc. officials stressed on Thursday.

Mobile application development is receiving a boost from companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. this week, and also is getting added support on the Bluetooth wireless platform.

Macromedia Inc. last week added to its Studio MX Suite, its Contribute tool for adding content to Web sites and a new version of the Freehand design tool.

The Web Services Reliability specification, announced by Sun Microsystems Inc., Oracle Corp., and Fujitsu Ltd. in January, is being placed under the jurisdiction of OASIS, which will consider the proposal for promotion as an industry standard, according to Oracle and Sun officials on Friday.

Microsoft Corp. at the VSLive show in San Francisco previewed several upcoming development tools, including an incremental release of its development environment, Visual Studio .Net 2003.

Nokia Corp. last month began offering a free, Java-based toolkit for developing mobile applications on the Linux platform, for deployment on Nokia mobile phones.