Kev's Development Toolbox

August 1, 2006

Feature summary of Sun’s Java App Server Platform Edition 9

Sun have an article on their site summarizing all the new features included in their (long titled) Sun Java App Server Platform Edition 9, which is built on the Glassfish community project to build a Java EE 5 server.

The main technologies in EE5 include:

Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.0, including a new Persistence API
JavaServer Faces 1.2 Technology
Web Services Metadata for the Java Platform 1.0
Java API for XML-Based Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.0
Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) 2.0
Streaming API for XML (StAX) 1.0

July 31, 2006

Google’s big announcement last week…

Google’s anticipated but surprising annoucement last week was that they have launched an Open Source project hosting service.

There are already a number of projects hosted, so worth checking out if you’re looking for some dev APIs for a given task. The project so far seem more like tools and APIs for developers than end-user products, so this may turn out to be a useful resource. A major competitor to SourceForge perhaps?

July 31, 2006

Who said Linux isn’t ready for prime time? Boeing to use for Sub-hunter systems

Boeing will be using Linux to run the surveilance and other mission computing tasks aboard modifed 737s which are sold to the US Navy for locating and tracking submarines.

The Linux distro comes from Wind River Systems, which specializes in embedded systems development and tools.

July 29, 2006

eWeek awards Ubuntu Linux ‘Analysts Choice’ award

eWeek has reviewed Ubuntu Linux 6.06LTS and awarded it’s ‘Analyst’s Choice’ award, for being easy to install and use, the current best Linux distro in terms of usability, and has the best software update and install mechanism of any other linux distro so far.

Having used Ubuntu on my laptop for the past couple of months, I have to say I agree. In particular their software update mechanism is superb, if not a little like Windows Update, but it does the job of keeping everything up to date – one less thing to worry about.