Rather than develop Flash enabled sites with Macromedia’s design tools, Macromedia Flex will enable Java developers to create and control Flash front-end content from a J2EE application server.
The Flex server software is expected to ship 2004.
Sun considering move to join Eclipse community
Various news items and blogs this week have commented on the fact that Sun may be considering joining the Eclipse group in order to either have a say in the development of the project, or gain usage of the project for their own tools.
As Sun’s main platform for Java development is currently based on the NetBeans Open Source project, there is some speculation that Sun possibly has more of an interest in adopting Eclipse instead.
Eclipse, backed by IBM, currently has wide support for plug-ins and add-ons, and this is possibly what Sun is looking for to enhance their own IDE offerings.
The interesting point that is causing a lot of speculation is the SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) implementation in Eclipse that is used as a replacement to AWT and Swing – this is implemented using platform native code for efficiency, and so goes against Sun’s goals of ‘write once, run anywhere’.
Linus Torvalds subpoenaed in SCO/IBM case
Torvalds has been subpoenaed to appear in court in the SCO suit against IBM.
Torvalds current employer, the Open Source Development Lab have said they will pay his legal fees.
Enterprise version of Debian Linux to be released to compete with RedHat Enterprise
RedHat recently announced that they will be dropping their free distribution of RedHat Linux instead to focus on their commercial Enterprise edition versions of RedHat Linux.