Blackmoor Vituperative

Adobe Systems has announced the first public alpha release of Apollo, its cross-operating system run-time for Web developers.

The technology is available on the Adobe Labs site.

So… is this good, or evil? I hate to say it, but it sounds to me that Adobe wants to do what Macromedia wanted to do and nearly succeeded in doing: subverting the Internet and turning it into their proprietary product. But I will have to do more research before I make up my mind.

In quite a few design brainstorming sessions, the debate between Spring and EJB results in a deadlock. There are developers who are damn passionate about Spring and hate EJBs. Let’s have a look at the main important differences between the two….

(from TechRepublic, Spring vs. EJB)

Are you looking to simplify AJAX code? Bruce Perry has some help in “Prototype: Easing AJAX’s Pain,” which introduces the “Prototype” library. Prototype introduces a number of development-easing shortcuts for JavaScript authors. Further, “Prototype also wraps the functionality of XMLHttpRequest with its own Ajax.Request and related objects, so that you don’t have to bother with writing code for instantiating this object for various browsers.”

Chris Hardin has written a really good (if brief) introduction to Maven 2.0. Check it out.

Interesting news:

Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor, announced on April 10 that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire open-source Java middleware company JBoss.

JBoss has been rumored to be on the acquisition block for months. Earlier this year there was much speculation that Oracle was going to acquire the Atlanta-based JBoss, but JBoss CEO Marc Fleury said he had no immediate plans to sell the company.

Red Hat will pay at least $350 million for JBoss. That will be made up of 40 percent cash and 60 percent Red Hat stock. An additional $70 million may be paid depending upon JBoss’ financial performance. Oracle had been alleged to have been looking to pay from $300 million to $480 million for JBoss.

The deal is expected to close in May. If completed as planned it will add to Red Hat’s earnings next year.

In early Monday morning trading, the market enthusiastically greeted the proposed deal with a jump of almost 10 percent on extremely high volume.

(from eWeek, Red Hat to aquire JBoss)

Also worth reading:

Oracle refuses to confirm or deny that it spent the past few months working through the details of acquiring JBoss. But the rumor mill has suggested that Oracle uncovered code ownership issues when doing due diligence in preparation for an acquisition.

With Oracle refusing to comment, there’s no way to confirm that premise. But if it were in fact true that the deal proved too risky for Oracle, why would it be OK for Red Hat to buy JBoss?

(from eWeek, If Legal Questions Killed an Oracle-JBoss Deal, Why Not Red Hat-JBoss?)

eWeek has a head-to-head review of Apache Jetspeed-2 and JBoss Portal. The last time I was reviewing open source, standards-based Java portals (which was a little less than two years ago), neither of these was ready for prime time. At that time, the two main contenders (in my opinion) were Liferay and Exo. At the time, I selected Liferay for the project I was working on, because its security model and architecture was more compatible with my project.

It looks like Liferay and Exo are still going strong, but if I were evaluating Java portals again today, I’d probably take a good hard look at Jetspeed-2. It supports portlets written in other languages, which helps transition legacy systems into the portal framework, and it plays well with other Apache products most of us are already using.

One portal system I have not examined at all is Plone, although I keep hearing nice things about it. The next time I need to evaluate open source, standards based Java portals, I guess I will have to add that to the list, as well.

Why is it good to open source OpenSolaris and OpenOffice and bad to open source Java? Peter Yared, formerly of Sun and now CEO of ActiveGrid, poses that question in an open letter to Sun.

Dana Gardner follows up with what he thinks is the answer: IBM.

Sun Microsystems issued a patch Tuesday to address seven “highly critical” flaws in its Java Runtime Environment that could allow a malicious attacker to gain remote control over a user’s system. Read the complete story here.

Thinking In Java, 4th Edition, by Bruce Eckel, should be in bookstores some time in the next week. You can pre-order the book now. You can also check out Eckel’s site to download the source code.

Sun Microsystems has fixed five security bugs in Java that expose computers running Windows, Linux and Solaris to hacker attack.

The flaws are “highly critical,” according to an advisory from Secunia posted Tuesday. Vulnerabilities that get that ranking–one notch below “extremely critical,” the security monitoring company’s most severe rating — typically open the door to a remote intruder and to full compromise of the system.

All the flaws affect the Java Runtime Environment, or JRE, in computers loaded with Microsoft Windows, Linux or Sun’s own Solaris operating system. This is the software many computer owners have on their system to run Java applications. The bugs could allow an intruder to use a Java application to inappropriately read and write files, or to run code on a victim’s computer, Sun said in three separate security advisories released late Monday.

(from TechRepublic, Sun plugs serious holes in Java

Go to the Sun Java web site, download the current Java runtime environment (or the SDK, if you are a programmer), and install it.