Kev's Development Toolbox

IBM have announced version 6.0 of their flagship application server, Websphere.

The next release is stated to have improvements across the board, and doesn’t include any one major new change, but rather offers improvements in Web Service support and SOA support.

New versions of WebSphere Studio Site Developer and WebSphere Studio Application Developer are also scheduled to be available by the end of this year. The products will be renamed Rational Web Developer for WebSphere Software and Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software.

JBoss have released a preview release of the new EJB3.0 spec running on JBoss4.0.

Further info on their site.

J2SE 5.0 (Tiger) was officially launched last week, with a ceromony held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

Despite no major releases of Internet Explorer since 2001, Microsoft is still working on improvments to IE to be integrated with the next major release of Windows, codenamed Lognhorn.

Microsoft already anounced a couple of years ago that they will not be releasing future releases of IE as a standalone product, so the new features will only be available to those who upgrade to Longhorn.

Already there is a growing trend to switch to alternative erb browsers, namely Mozilla’s Firefox, and Safari on the Mac, which have more upto date support for current web standards such as CSS, an area in which IE is beginning to lag behind.