At Java One this week Sun has been selling its year-old-but-still-upcoming - and definitely late-to-the-party - Adobe AIR- and Microsoft Silverlight-competitive JavaFX Rich Client environment as a potential revenue-generator capable of putting ads on mobile applications and JavaFX Script, its newfangled high-performance GUI declarative scripting language, as the way to build consumer next-generation RIAs for desktops, mobiles, TV and other consumer devices.

Software Research has announced the availability of major new specialized commands in its Patented eValid Website Test & Analysis Suite. eValid has introduced a set of AJAX Playback Synchronization on DOM Element commands that provide direct control of test script playback synchronization by interaction with the current DOM of an AJAX page. This new eValid capability allows testers to address AJAX applications -- which by nature are 'asynchronous' -- in a reliable way. Once the playback synchronization is determined, eValid test scripts play back reliably, independent of how long the internal AJAX operations require.

SoftBrands announced an extension of its partnership with SAP. The companies will jointly pursue opportunities for affiliates and smaller sites of large enterprises. The goal and commitment is to pursue an SAP-centric solution at the plant level for large enterprises. SoftBrands is one of the first partners to work with SAP on a joint market approach and strategy for this market segment.

Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software is a software and solutions company specializing in secure operating systems, virtualization technology, and software development tools. Green Hills products are used in a wide range of embedded, mobile, desktop, and server computer systems, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter avionics, Boeing 787 flight controls, mobile devices, multi-level secure workstations, medical devices, financial transaction systems, and automotive electronics. Green Hills Software's INTEGRITY operating system or virtualization technology was accepted into a Common Criteria Security evaluation at EAL 6+ - the level required to protect assets from hostile and well-funded attackers. Green Hills' INTEGRITY PC technology combines the secure kernel with a novel virtualization architecture, called Padded Cell. Using INTEGRITY PC, IT organizations and equipment manufacturers deploy computer systems that provide high levels of security while supporting common environments such as Windows and Linux.

Interest from the international arena for CeBIT Bilisim Eurasia is on the increase every year. CeBIT Bilisim Eurasia, serving as a gateway between East and West is enriching its content every year in line with the global trends. In 2007 the show hosted 140,000 local and international visitors and 1,852 press members and it is expected to attract a myriad of professional visitors this year. CeBIT Bilisim Eurasia hosts delegations from international non-governmental organizations in ICT sector from the Eurasian countries such as Egypt, Ukraine, India among others. It is, thereby, poised to offer a complete job development platform.

Kaazing Corporation and Sun Microsystems announced an alliance to deliver the scalable and advanced real-time Web 2.0 platform. The integration between Kaazing's real-time Rich Internet Application (RIA) solution, Enterprise Comet, and Sun Microsystems' open source Java EE application server, Glassfish, enables customers to create and deploy scalable mission-critical real-time solutions such as trading systems, betting and gambling applications, and interactive sports and news broadcasts, to the Web.

Babya announced the upcoming release of Virtual Application Platinum. Babya Virtual Application Platinum is a software virtualization solution designed for applications-such as small utilities. It can handle the virtualization of multiple applications.

ScaleMP announced details of its channel partner program. The program, designed to assist channel partners in providing server solutions for their customers' high-end computing needs, offers resellers and system integrators the necessary tools to bring the recently launched ScaleMP vSMP Foundation Standalone to their customer base. vSMP Foundation Standalone is based on the Versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture, which aggregates two dual-socket industry-standard x86 servers into a powerful four-socket shared memory system.

Composite Software provides a virtual approach to data integration. Hundreds of enterprises including five of the top six U.S. investment banks as well several Government agencies, such as the Office of Secretary of Defense and Intelligence, and software vendors including Cognos, Informatica and BMC, rely on the Composite Information Server to virtualize, abstract and federate data from multiple, disparate sources and deliver this real-time information to their applications. Composite Software's technology fulfills real-time information requirements, enabling enterprises to respond faster to business requests, reduce their data integration costs, and keep pace with ever-changing business needs.

EDS announced the signing of a comprehensive agreement with Microsoft around EDS airline reservations, flight operations and service oriented architecture products. With the announcement, EDS will use selected Microsoft tools, software and resources in the modernization and operations of its airline service oriented architecture (SOA) products. Microsoft will provide architecture specialists, advanced 24-hour support, a new model for software licensing, additional investment into the products and access to new customer channel management tools to form a truly unique go-to-market relationship. The agreement is for a duration of eight years.

Flickr, Viddler, Qik, Pownce and Revision3 are the first services to support oEmbed, an easy way to allow embeding media from a certain URL in a third party site. From the oEmbed site: oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to [...]

John Resig has completed 7 months of work to produce a port of Processing, the "programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design communities", which aims to teach the basics of computer programming in a visual context, and to serve as the foundation for electronic sketchbooks. One of [...]

Last, but never least, is Alex Russell of the Dojo Toolkit and SitePen. In Alex's five minutes of video footage for our JavaOne talk, he explained how Dojo enables you to built fantastic, responsive applications for everyone. The everyone piece revolves around accessibility too, which is core to Dojo thanks to work from Becky Gibson [...]

I have talked before about the desire for a Notification API on the Web. As a Mac user, I would love to see Growl from JavaScript, and there have been libraries written from as far back as protoGrowl. The difference is between a JavaScript API that does notifications on the desktop, versus trying to get [...]

If you 'aint got a URL scheme, you are a nobody. That is what I thought when I saw fx:// on the first day of JavaOne. The newest one of these that I have seen is mountpoint:// which is part of an Opera proposal for a File I/O API in the browser. You know me, extending [...]

The Gears community is discussing a Geo Location API, which Aaron Boodman mentioned "was recently proposed to the W3C WebAPI group." Aza Raskin just posted today about Geolocation in Firefox and Beyond which covers his thoughts on an API. I thought it would be fun to look at the proposed APIs: Gears Examples PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   var geo = google.gears.factory.create('beta.geolocation');   // [...]

Ben and I gave a presentation at JavaOne on what's new with Ajax. Since this was JavaOne, we skewed a little more than we normally would to Java topics, and one of them was using the new Java Plugin, that has great new features such as being able to take a running applet out of [...]

I've been talking about progressive enhancement here before and got a lot of flak in comments about it. It seemed that there was a general misunderstanding of progressive enhancement and unobtrusive scripting as a "passing fad" or "backward facing rather than being innovative". I was asked by a design agency in London to go there [...]

John Resig got in front of the camera, and the projector, as he gives us his thoughts on the state, and future of Ajax. He starts out by discussing jQuery Core, and the features in the near term (1.2.4), short term (1.3) and beyond. He then delves into the UI side of the house with jQuery [...]