A browser plug-in for JavaFX will be featured in the Java SE (Standard Edition) 6 Update 10 release due this fall. Both Adobe, with its Flash platform, and Microsoft, with Silverlight, are offering plug-in platforms for rich Internet applications. But Sun plans to provide the industry-leading rich client with JavaFX, said Param Singh, Sun senior director of Java marketing. The Java runtime helps make this possible, he stressed during an interview at the JavaOne conference on Thursday afternoon. "The Java runtime is on over 900 million desktops today," Singh said. Every month, there are 40 million downloads of updates to the Java runtime, he said. Additionally, there are more than 2.2 mobile phones with Java on them, not to mention Java's presence in 100 percent of Blu-ray devices, said Singh. "The notion is, we will take JavaFX where the Java runtime is available," Singh said. Sun's JavaFX plug-in will enable deployment of applications that can work either in or outside of the browser, Singh said. This ability to run applications inside or outside of a browser is similar to what Adobe is offering with its AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) software.

Very large collection of links to Groklaw articles dealing with Sun and Solaris, with article titles and dates, arranged chronologically. With the Microsoft cloud running atop Solaris, this is likely to be a useful research tool to access relevant historical information.

Version 0.01 of the Universally Accessible and Interoperable Specification has been released. The draft sets for criteria derived from competition law for evaluating the suitability of data formats and communications protocols in the ICT sector.

While proponents of ICT modernization might hope that other candidates would embrace and extend the relevant Obama pledges, thus far none have done so. But what is still missing from the Obama campaign's to-do list is specific criteria for evaluation of file formats and communications protocols to achieve the goals announced. This document is intended to suggest such criteria and to provide a set of principles useful for other governments concerned with revamping their information infrastructure to foster greater interoperability, accessibility, and competition in the software market in a manner consistent with antitrust law in the U.S. and the European Union as well as with international law applicable to all Member nations of the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade and the Agreement on Government Procurement. Consistency with the laws of other nations is an ultimate goal.

But Sun CTO Bob Brewin emphasized in an interview that JavaFX Script features a new set of capabilities such as allowing development of applications that can be moved outside the browser. JavaFX Script also is designed for content authors, not necessarily developers alone. ... With JavaFX and the Java 6 Update 10 release, also called Consumer JRE (Java Runtime Environment), developers can deploy applications to browsers and have applets dragged out onto the desktop. Brewin also filled in details about Sun's cloud services effort, called Project Hydrazine. It is to feature an infrastructure enabling developers to run services on the Web such as mapping, location, calendaring, and e-mail services. Due next year, Hydrazine is to be part of Sun's network.com grid infrastructure. Also part of Hydrazine is Project Insight, which will measure who is visiting Web sites. Developers will be able to find who is using their service and perhaps could deliver targeted advertising. Hydrazine combines attributes offered in Microsoft's Live Mesh data folder-sharing service, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Web-based service and Google Analytics, Brewin said.

(Use page search) Obama will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices. ... The CTO will also ensure technological interoperability of key government functions. For example, the Chief Technology Officer will oversee the development of a national, interoperable wireless network for local, state and federal first responders as the 9/11 commission recommended. This will ensure that fire officials, police officers and EMTs from different jurisdictions have the ability to communicate with each other during a crisis and we do not have a repeat of the failure to deliver critical public services that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. ...

Ask a dozen people what "cloud computing" means and you'll get a dozen different answers, all pointing to the network. Rob Boothby of Joyent interviewed more than a dozen technology wonks, including Steve Gillmor, Matt Mullenweg, Tim O'Reilly, Kevin Marks, Rafe Needleman, Stowe Boyd, Brian Solis and myself, at the Web 2.0 Expo, to answer the question, "What is Cloud Computing ?" Check out the responses in this video:

As part of Sun's effort to enable consumers to innovate, Green introduced JavaFX, a rich Internet application environment set to compete with Adobe Systems' AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight.

Sun Microsystems officially launched OpenSolaris (OS) today. Available pre-built as a combo live/install CD. ... OpenSolaris is licensed under Sun's CDDL license, accepted as an "open source" license by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), despite incompatibilities with many other open source licenses, such as the GPL. ... In the past, Sun has talked about using the GPL3 for OpenSolaris. Linux creator Linus Torvalds has notably said he might reconsider advocating a GPL3 release of Linux, should Sun follow through.

IBM) today announced it is creating an alliance program for independent hardware and software vendors to support industry standards for new enterprise data centers, which are dramatically more energy efficient, virtualized, and resilient. The new alliance with top IT companies around the world will enable clients to evolve to new enterprise data centers while offering the widest possible choice of open technologies. The importance of interoperability and open standards for new enterprise data centers -- including those for energy management, virtualization, networking, security, and service management, among others -- is a focal point of this program.

Companies building websites should beware of proprietary rich-media technologies like Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight, the founder of Mozilla Europe has warned. Speaking at the Internet World conference in London on Tuesday, Tristan Nitot claimed such applications threaten the open nature of the internet because the companies behind them could "have an agenda". While he conceded that Flash was currently necessary for consistently displaying content such as video, he suggested that the upcoming revision of the HTML specification would make it unnecessary to use proprietary technology.

Service Component Architecture (SCA), an SOA specification for transforming IT assets into reusable services, was hailed Tuesday as a way to build services with lower barriers to adoption and link SOA to Web 2.0. ... SCA provides an executable model for assembling services and supports multiple languages such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services), Java and PHP scripts, said Edwards. "It's simplified because it has this principle of removing middleware APIs," said Edwards. ... There are multiple implementations of SCO and SDO, said Edwards. Official 1.0 versions of SDO and SCA from OASIS are expected by the end of the year.

Spolsky isn't impressed by MS Live, says Live is just another iteration of technology that has never captured any market uptake.

Robert Scoble has his first impression of Live Mesh up and has supplemented it with lots of links to other reviewer's impressions.

http://scobleizer.com/2008/04/22/ray-ozzie-delivers-with-live-mesh/