Sun Microsystems, one of the world’s largest server and software makers, finds itself in an awkward position: It might soon have enough cash to buy all of its stock and go private.

This is with great pleasure that the Groovy development team and G2One announce the joint release of both Groovy 1.5.7 -- current stable and maintenance branch -- and Groovy 1.6-beta-2 -- the upcoming major release.

This article will explain how to create a simple end-to-end Web application using the JPA, AJAX, and Dojo tools available in IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software Version 7.5.

Apple has patented the OS X Dock, nearly a decade after the operating system made its public debut with a new slant on the taskbar. The late arrival isn't due to a lack of initiative, however. Apple applied for the patent December 20, 1999, and it was approved by the US Patent Office only yesterday.

David Axmark, a cofounder and former lead engineer for MySQL, has resigned from Sun Microsystems a few weeks after another cofounder said he may also leave the company.

new Flash CS4 software release Tutorials you may not know about ?

Guillaume Laforge has posted on the Groovy lists that snapshot packages of the upcoming 1.5.7 and 1.6-beta-2 versions are up for grabs.

The open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET is due to hit its second release today, with many .NET 3.5 features and a few notable exceptions. Mono 2.0 will be announced today a year and a half later than expected but - thanks to that delay - it features an open-source version of C# 3.0 and Language Integrated Query (LINQ).

The other day we reported findings from the Open Source Census--a global effort to track the number of installations of open source packages on computers. Among the top-level findings were that open source is seeing broad adoption in Europe and in finance.

I ended up giving 9 talks and was on 2 panels in 3 days - completely exhausting. We were able to get video of a bunch of the jQuery Conference so we should be posting it soon. It was great getting to see the whole jQuery team again. We talked a lot, did a lot of planning, and are ready to tackle the work in front of us.

There is a steady stream of interesting Eclipse related jobs on the eclipse.employment newsgroup. Take today, Diesel Games is looking for an RCP Developer. I gotta believe working for a games company must be a lot of fun. It seems Diesel Games is still developing their product but when it is done, I hope they show it off at places like EclipseCon.

We liked the functionality of WordPress, but not its PHPness. So we automatically migrated it and obtained a pure Java open-source blogging engine.

Recently, I had the chance to sit down with Sun’s Jacob Lehrbaum. We start out discussing the larger context that RIA technologies are finding themselves in and then narrow down to JavaFX in particular. On that topic I ask Jacob to clear up the what and how questions around JavaFX and open source, we discuss how the JavaFX Preview release has been fairing, and then get into some of the future road-map for JavaFX.

Adobe's new Pixel Bender technology in Flash Player 10 is great because it allows totally custom realtime graphics filters and fast parallel computation. But the specialized Pixel Bender language means the learning curve can be high. Conduit is a visual tool that makes it easy to take advantage of Pixel Bender without writing code.

Google's Darin Fisher, a software engineer on the Chrome project, talks about how the Web browser was developed and tested. As you might suspect, agility, speed, and testing were all critical.

On October 1, Amazon announced that it plans to offer developers this fall the ability to run Windows Server or SQL Server via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). According to the Amazon Web Services site, “the ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability.”

We’ve recently introduced the concept of a Feature Pack (FP). A Feature Pack will contain one or more new features / APIs or significant upgrades to existing features / APIs. The level of change is more in line with what we’d release in a major or minor release. Feature Packs are optional - if you don’t need the feature (yet) you can safely ignore it.

Apple Drops iPhone Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA)

Seapine Software quality-ready survey results show that many organizations lack automation

Microsoft has announced new application server technology, codenamed “Dublin,” that will surface in Windows Server. The company also announced enhancements to its Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) technology. Microsoft’s Dynamics applications will be first to use the new technology, while independent software vendors (ISVs) such as Amberpoint also have pledged to use the new Microsoft technology that will be unveiled at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in late October.

Once a high-flying tech hub, Bangalore is seeing more sober days in the wake of the credit crisis.

Amazon today announced that later this year, Windows Server woud be available on EC2. No details on cost and licensing etc. but this is major. Up until now, that portion of the business world who were pure MS shops (a very large percentage especially amongst SMEs) were excluded from taking advantage of Amazon’s amazing (and getting more amazing everyday) EC2 platform.

We've written about GIMP, the outstanding open source graphics program originally developed at U.C. Berkeley, several times before. The application has had a robust community of developers behind it for years, and now a new version 2.6 is downloadable. Here's what's under the hood in the update, including a whole slew of interface enhancements.

About 488 programmers from North America, Central America, and South America made it to the semifinal round of competition in the Code Jam 2008 contest, which was held at Google's offices here and in Mountain View, Calif., Seattle, and Brazil.

Adobe reported that there have been more than 25 million installations of applications deployed on Adobe AIR in the first six months since its release. Numerous Fortune 500 companies, in addition to start-ups across a variety of industries, have deployed hundreds of AIR applications to engage with customers, partners, and employees in new and compelling ways.