Nexan unveils a "Beast" of a storage system and Microsoft opens it's Surface SDK to everyone. SAP and Microsoft also form a marketing alliance that might irritate Oracle.

The idea behind Taban is that an web application will simply use HTTP methods (GET, PUT and DELETE) to perform the usual CRUD operations required for persistence, but using JSON as the data exchange format. Taban is (will be) implemented as OSGi bundles and will call out to/depend on a number of OSGi services. db4o is to provide the default implementation of the database.