Has Java lost its sparkle? (Did it ever have one?!) Ladies and Gentlemen take your corners please...

The European Commission has issued a ringing endorsement of open source software, producing a confidence-boost for businesses considering the deployment of Linux and other free software.

It isn't easy to write code for Cell, with its central processing core and eight accompanying special-purpose engines. Octopiler, which IBM Research plans to outline at a tutorial next month, aims to change all that. The software development tool converts a single, human-written program into several different programs that run simultaneously on Cell's various cores.

"Programming Cell is relatively hard," said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff, in particular because development tools must must divide software into threads running among different cores and keep those programs synchronized as they run. "Certainly a higher-level, more abstracted model makes programming a lot easier."

When we set out about a year ago to build the Yahoo! User Interface Library, we had a specific set of challenges to address. First and foremost, we wanted to enable our front-end engineers to spend more time working on advanced, product-specific features and less time doing cross-browser tuning of generic interactions like drag and drop.

You can now get your hands on a test version of the next major release of Java. The beta of Java Standard Edition 6, also known as Mustang, includes changes to the way it handles Web services, should deliver better look and feel and tighter security. Mark Reinhold of Sun announced the availability of the Java SE 6 beta on Wednesday.

"In contrast to the source and binary snapshots that we've been shipping for over a year, the formal beta release has been through many weeks of intensive testing — and a tiny little bit of last-minute bug-fixing — in order to produce a release that's somewhat more polished," said Reinhold. "If you've chosen to avoid the riskier snapshot builds then now is the perfect time to have a look at Mustang, make sure your existing code still compiles and runs, and try out the new features," he added.

IBM and several other software companies have proposed an open source project to simplify development tools for AJAX-style Web development. Called The AJAX Toolkit Framework, the proposed open source project will be based on IBM-donated code designed to let software developers use the Eclipse development tool to write Web applications using AJAX. As previously reported, the project has the backing of several software companies, including IBM, Google, BEA Systems, Red Hat, Borland Software, Novell, Oracle, Yahoo, PHP tool maker Zend Technologies, email company Zimbra, and phone-software company Openwave Systems. The Eclipse Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation and the Dojo Foundation also intend to participate in the project.

Microsoft is greenlighting development and rollout of applications based on beta code contained in the WinFX programming framework and architecture.

Some sound advice from one blogger:

"A gentle warning to young or up-and-coming IT professionals: keep your professional identity a secret! Guard your privacy like a superhero, because before you can say "what do you mean reboot?", you'll be the neighborhood troubleshooter, constantly on call to save the day."