Stories by Paul Krill

As Oracle has been prone to do for the past nine months, company officials Tuesday pledged a strong commitment to Java technology. They even offered glimpses of a modular future for the platform.

Red Hat rolled out on Monday updates to its SOA platform and development tools in the company's JBoss middleware product line at the EclipseCon 2010 conference.

Oracle's commitment to Java and the ubiquity of the technology were stressed Wednesday by Java founder James Gosling in a presentation that also centered on the recently released Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 6 specification.

Potentially toughening the competitive landscape for its own Silverlight rich Internet application platform, Microsoft will expand support for the HTML5 specification in its Internet Explorer 9 browser, under a plan revealed Tuesday.

Honing in on the need for more security in application development, IBM Rational is planning an enterprise-level  product that features two separately acquired technologies for security testing and code scanning.

Microsoft's to-do list in the software development space includes continued or new investments in multiple areas, including cloud computing, the Web, parallel computing, devices, and agile and distributed development, a company executive said in a blog entry on Tuesday.

Oracle's plan to merge the Sun HotSpot Java Virtual Machine with the JRockit JVM is still evolving, but a single JVM based on both technologies is expected in 18 months to two years, an Oracle official said during a Webcast this week.

CodePlex Foundation, a Microsoft-backed open source projects initiative, has accepted its first non-Microsoft project, the foundation said on Wednesday.

In the wake of its merger with Sun Microsystems, Oracle is discontinuing access to Project Kenai, which was developed by Sun as an open source project-hosting site.

Windows Azure, Microsoft's public cloud computing platform, became generally available in 21 countries on Monday, Microsoft bloggers said. SQL Azure, offering cloud-based relational database capabilities, also became available.

Software developers already building applications for Apple's wildly popular iPhone are gearing up for the new Apple tablet device, anticipating new opportunities for their software as well as tweaks they will have to make to their code.

Oracle's plans for Java and the proposed Sun Cloud public computing platform became clearer Wednesday, with Oracle executives giving another big thumbs-up to Java but a thumbs-down to Sun Cloud.

Software developers already building applications for Apple's wildly popular iPhone are gearing up for the new Apple tablet device announced today, anticipating new opportunities for their software as well as tweaks they will have to make to their code.

Oracle has presented an overview of its ambitions for its newly acquired Sun products, focusing on integrated systems offering everything from the application to the database, servers and storage.

Agile software development processes, in which software is built in short iterations rather than mapped out fully in advance, have joined the mainstream of development approaches, according to a Forrester Research report released this week.