Java News & Articles

Adobe keeps pushing Reader, making it more attractive and secure for business users. This week alone, it has addressed some of the security issues around PDFs as well as extending the functionality of EchoSign so that users will be able to receive and send documents for electronic signature within the application itself.

As widely discussed last month, Flash has already been squeezed out of the front end of the mobile experience. Now here comes Silverlight to try to fix its place among developers' favorite framework tools, but will its place at the front of sites be relevant for long?

Search is an integral component of any enterprise content management system. Whether you run content mainly for external clients, or as an internal knowledge base, finding the right information at the right time will usually spell the difference between success and difficulty in search -- hence the importance of an up-to-date enterprise search engine. The Apache Lucene Project Management Committee has announced the latest Lucene/Solr release, which will ensure searches are on the mark, with optimized indexing and search, as well as bug fixes.

The economy may be swirling around the drain, but revenues are rosy for Liferay (news, site), a provider of open source portal and enterprise collaboration software. The company announced 50 percent growth in revenue for its core business in the last twelve months.

IBM (news, site) announced that the features in the latest release of its Java application server, WebSphere Application Server (WAS) V8.0, along with improved performance, have positioned the company as a continued leader in the middleware integration space.

Java platform-as-a-service (PaaS) CloudBees (news, site) is trying to position itself as a holistic solution for cloud-based Java application development and deployment. Today the company announced its new partner network that extends the Java PaaS to support more services for developers.

eXo (news, site), well-known for its Java portal and user experience technologies, has announced it is adding Ruby and Git to its eXo Cloud IDE. The inclusion of Git will enable direct deployment to Red Hat's new OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

Open source portal provider Liferay (news, site) has announced a partnership with MuleSoft, maker of open source Mule ESB and MuleSoft TCat Server, a value-added distribution of Apache Tomcat. Liferay is now offering a Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition (EE) bundle with Tcat Server pre-installed and the all-important end-to-end support from one company. The move positions Liferay as an attractive lightweight, open source, middleware platform alternative to expensive enterprise solutions.

Hot on the heels of other recent platform-as-a-service launches, VMware (news, site) has announced its own PaaS offering, called Cloud Foundry. The open-source cloud platform aims to give developers the means to create applications on public, private and private clouds without having to worry about the underlying architecture.

Snowbound (news, site) offers a way for Android users to view those vital office docs without leaping through executive hoops.

Oracle (news, site) is planning big things for Java EE7 with cloud- and REST-based services high on the agenda.

European firm, e-Spirit (news, site), creates a central system for integrating almost any app into its content management system.

Scala is not among the most popular programming languages but soon this could change. With a EUR 2.3 million grant from the European Research Council (ERC), the Scala team will double their efforts to produce a parallel programming language for wider use.

As year moves toward a conclusion, it is time for a moment of reflection. Don’t worry this won’t involve any ghosts waking you from your eggnog fueled holiday slumber. We simply look back at the top five events of 2010 that were most meaningful in open source and will continue to influence the market in 2011 and beyond.

Google (news, site) is showing the Eclipse Foundation (news, site) a bit of holiday goodwill. The Internet giant has made a donation -- in the form of source code and intellectual property -- valued at more than US$ 5 million dollars. The move is good news for the open source Java community, which hasn’t had a lot to cheer about lately.