Kev's Development Toolbox

July 3, 2006

RedHat sued for JBoss Hibernate ORM technology

Firestar software are suing RedHat, the owner of JBoss and the Hibernate ORM technology, for infringing on it’s patent regarding Object Relational Mapping technology.

Analysts are speculating why they chose to single out RedHat, and why this point in time – ORM solutions have been around for a number of years. They could have chosen to go after Oracle for Toplink, a ORM solution they acquired from WebGain, or any one of a number of implementations of the now standardized JSR220 EJB3.0 Java Persistence API, which is based on Hibernate.

July 3, 2006

Sun CEO Schwartz to reveal how much it makes from Java

CEO of Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, has stated that he will soon reveal how much Sun makes from selling Java related services. It has long been thought that Sun has missed a golden oportunity with Java for making some serious cash, and assumed by giving away Java for free it makes money from companies buying it’s hardware on which they run Java based systems. Schwartz did not give a date but will reveal the information soon.

July 3, 2006

Another exec leaves Microsoft for Google

At this rate within a couple more years Balmer won’t have any execs left working for him at Microsoft – another one just left to join, you guessed it, Google.

Vic Gundotra, a 15 year veteran and ‘platform evangelist’ has left Microsoft to join Google. Gundotra is the second senior exec to leave in the last month – Martin Taylor, who had been working closely with Balmer and with the company for 13 years, was responsible for promoting the Windows Live platform (Microsoft’s online hosted app service, still a work in progress) and marketing Microsoft to beat the pressure from Google.

June 30, 2006

Apache Derby to be bundled in 6.0 SDK

There has been a lot of noise about this recent announcement – Sun have decided, apparently of their own accord without any buy-in from the JCP committee for Java the 6.0 JSR, that they will bundle the Apache Derby database engine in the 6.0 SDK.

This seems like an odd decision, as many have been commenting, and has recieved a lot of negative press so far. As far as I can tell this is only an addition to the SDK and will not be bundled in the JRE. This is good so it won’t be included in an already large download for the JRE, but it means that if a developer chooses to use Derby ‘because it’s there’ they can’t rely on it being available on their target platform. So what benefit has this added? If it is only targetted at developers, I am sure (I sincerely hope) that if a developer is capable of downloading and installing the SDK or their favorite IDE that they are more than capable of downloading any one of a number of freely available open source databases?