It’s been a long time since Sun and Microsoft announced their partnership. First resulting are now appearing furing the JavaONE conference.
Beside the traditional web services interoperability, made possible through the use of JAX-WS (formerly called JAX-RPC) and Indigo, I saw a mich more impressive demo : server management through WS-Management
If you are not familiar with Sun hardware, you must know that our machines have a BIOS allowing some basic maintenance and diagnostic tasks as soon as the machine is powered up, before any OS is started.
That being said, WS-Management allows to remotely manage heterogenous hardware using standardized web services interfaces and calls. Using Microsoft’s Operation Manager 2005 GUI, the demo showed how remotely diagnose Sun’s server, stop them, restart them … all this using web services calls.
Very impressive ! I can ensure Sun and Microsoft are serious when talking interoperability.

Waow, what a news !
When this acquisition will complete, it will become for Sun a major move in software area.
Quoting John Loiacono (VP of Software) : “This exciting investment will position Sun to capitalize on our investments in Java and Sun’s Java Enterprise System (Java ES) and propel us into a leadership position in the next big wave of IT spend business systems integration and composite applications development based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)”
Boys, Sun is serious when talking about SOA strategy.
Check the official announcement for more details.

Seven years after its first submission, JSR-001 is becoming a full class Java citizen though the first release of Sun’s Java Real-Time System.
This implementation is based on Sun’s lab research project Mackinac

Netbeans Software Day jumpstarted the JavaONE conference this year. More than 800 attendees gathered in a hotel one block away the Moscone Convention Center. Very impressive for a Sunday afternoon …
Beside traditional demos and social drink event, we had great keynote speakers : James Gosling, Jonathan Schwartz and Tim Bray amongst others.
Netbeans 4.x rocks and future versions will continue to improve the tool. Competition is good, Netbeans is the prove of that. Netbeans would have not evolve so good and so fast without the pressure put by IBM’s Eclipse.
New stuffs to follow in upcoming versions : Matisse, a next-gen GUI builder with powerful Layout Manager. Probably nothing new in the GUI world here, Matisse is largely inspired from Mac OS development tool (Builder), itself inherited from the NeXt era. Nothing new in GUI world but revolutionary in Java GUI world, the demo are very impressive ! No firm date announced yet, stay tuned for more.
Another welcome addition is the developer collaboration tool : allowing developers to collaboratively and remotely chat and modify code. This feature has its root in Java Studio Enterprise and is now backported and opensourced for the Netbeans community !
Based on Netbeans 4.1 : Java Studio Creator 2 was demonstrated in early access version. Beside the fact that it now build on top of Netbeans 4.1, it brings some interesting new features like CSS support, theme-able interfaces, JSR-168 portlet support, file upload facility and a brand new JSF components library, etc …
Netbeans is about community, don’t miss the occasion to be part of it.

I know the subject has been discussed over and over again, but not everybody got the message (yet) and, I must admin, this is very common question I have when facing Java web developers : do I need to migrate of Struts to JSF ? How to make the two frameworks cohabit ? The best is to take the message directly from the source. My collegue Craig answers these questions in a chat with TSS.

Sun announced a couple of days ago a new license for the Java Development Kit : the Java Internal Use License, aka JIUL, to be pronounced “JEWEL”.

This license will authorize organizations to modify the JDK as long as the changes are kept for internal use only. The definition of “Internal Use” is part of JIUL FAQ

JDK 5.0 Update 3 is the first technology to be available under the JIUL.

The source code of the Java Standard Edition platform, release 5 (aka “Tiger“) and release 6 (aka “Mustang“) where previously available under the terms of the Java Research License only.

Netbeans 4.1 rocks ! It’s time to forget the old Netbeans 3.x series and discover this brand new 4.1 release. Netbeans development team has listen to user feedback and dramatically improved usability with a new windowing system, a new ant-based project system, support for J2SE 5.0 and J2EE 1.4 (EJB, Servlets/JSP and Web Services) Sun Microsystems Belgium and Luxembourg organized a special Netbeans day, an unique occasion for developer to discover this new version.