Nexaweb announced availability of the latest version of Nexaweb Studio. Nexaweb Studio 3.0 is an Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that offers enterprise Web developers, AJAX, J2EE?/Java? developers and software engineers a standards-based, visual design environment for creating EW2.0 applications.

Most businesses have an urgent need for up-to-date, accurate information based on data from multiple data sources. It would be much easier if all your data were stored in one database so it can be queried as a whole, but this is rarely practical. In the real world, data integration is required. You need a simple, efficient way to query data found in various data sources.

DataDirect Technologies, a Progress Software company, announced the launch of XQuery.com (www.xquery.com). The Web site provides software developers and IT architects with a comprehensive resource for navigating the complexity of today?s application architectures via the power of XQuery ? the XML Query Language under development by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

It's been over three years since the JDBC Expert Group held its first meeting to gather requirements, requests, and pipe dreams for the JDBC 4.0 specification. In that meeting, we discussed a wide variety of topics, including performance enhancements, clarifications on the existing JDBC 3.0 specification, and Ease of Development features. Unbelievably, everything but the kitchen sink ended up making it into the release. In this article, we'll look at several key features that made the enhancement list for JDBC 4.0, and we'll discuss why those features are important.

Cape Clear(R) Software, the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Platform leader delivering on the promise of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Systar, (Euronext Paris ISIN: FR0000052854-SAR), the leading provider of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) solutions, today announced a strategic partnership to deliver the first BAM solution that is fully integrated into an ESB Platform, enabling real-time SOA and business performance monitoring across all major applications and platforms. Cape Clear will embed Systar's market-leading BAM solution and resell it as a tightly integrated new module of its ESB Platform. The combined solution will help customers improve operational insight, predictability and responsiveness by raising awareness about important IT and business issues earlier.

Berkeley DB XML (BDB XML) is a popular native XML database. It can be accessed through the shell or within another program. This month I will show you how to use BDB XML in Java. BDB XML has similar APIs for all supported languages such as Java and C++, therefore the ideas presented in this article apply to all supported languages. I have been closely following BDB XML from the very first release, and there have been tremendous improvements in this product.

Based on the fact that the first working draft of the design principles for XML were published on 14 November 1996, XML guru Uche Ogbuji declared this week XML's 10th Birthday. Although the actual W3C Recommendation Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 wasn't published till 10 February 1998, work on XML definitely started - Ogbuji recounts - around 1996, rooted in almost thirty years of SGML.

Microsoft has added its Office XML File Formats its Open Specification Promise (OSP) not to enforce its patents no matter who uses it and what their business model is. It started the OSP in September with a variety of web protocols like SOAP that it wanted broadly used and tucked its Sender ID e-mail authentication protocol under its umbrella last week.

Instantiations, Inc., a leading provider of advanced software development solutions, today announced the release of GWT Designer(TM) 1.0, the first comprehensive tool for creating Ajax Web applications using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Shorthand for asynchronous JavaScript and XML, Ajax is increasingly popular as a way to code rich Internet applications. GWT Designer is built on WindowBuilder Pro, the company's market-leading Eclipse tool for creating Java graphical user- interface (GUIs) applications for Microsoft Windows, Linux, Macintosh and other operating systems.

There's no doubt that the computing era of Service Oriented Architecture is upon us. Everyone has caught SOA fever (is it S-O-A or SO-AH?) and most Fortune 500s are considering or have already implemented their first set of services.

Furthering its commitment to developers, customer choice and open, flexible IT environments, Oracle today announced expanded support of open standards for building, deploying, managing and securing service-oriented applications with Oracle(R) Fusion Middleware. Building on more than 25 years of open standards leadership, Oracle is now a key contributor to hundreds of new technology standards and is expanding its leadership on a number of emerging standards spanning Java, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web 2.0 and Security.

SYS-CON Events (www.events.sys-con.com) announced today that the first international 'AJAXWorld(TM) Conference & Expo' (www.ajaxworldexpo.com), taking place on October 3-4, 2006, at theSanta Clara Convention Center, California, will offer AJAXWorld University - Developer Bootcamp program. The AJAX Developer Bootcamp will take placeon Monday, October 2, 2006, one day before the conference opens.

DataDirect Technologies, an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS), today announced that an independent report from ZapThink on DataDirect XQueryTM version 2.0 concludes that the performance challenges imposed by very large XML messages potentially threatens the viability of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementations, and that DataDirect XQuery version 2.0 is robust enough to overcome these challenges when working with such messages.

Looking at the uncertainty and volatility of market conditions today, enterprises are depending on new cutting-edge technology to have an edge over their fierce competitors. At the same time, they try extracting more value from their existing IT investments. Adding to these disparate applications and technologies are the acquisitions and mergers that inherently bring in different sets of applications.

ThinkFree, Inc., developer of the first online office productivity suite, today debuted the beta version of its Ajax Edition software at the 2006 DEMOfall conference.

XML is a simple, flexible text format initially designed for large-scale electronic publishing. It is flexible, open, and human-readable, and can be learned easily. XML can also be generated, parsed, analyzed, and transformed easily. It's no wonder that XML has been widely used for server-side computing: J2EE, .NET, and Web services.

W3C published new editions of the XML 1.0/1.1 and Namespaces in XML 1.0/1.1 specifications for data exchange that include corrections for all known errata. W3C said that the strong foundation provided by the stability of these core XML specifications underlies the steady increase in W3C-defined technologies for querying, transforming, displaying, encrypting, and optimizing XML.

GT Software, Inc. will host the next Integration Consortium Atlanta Chapter meeting on September 21 in Atlanta. Guest speaking that evening will be Steve Benfield, CTO of Agentis Software.

Canoo announced the release of ULC XML, a tool that allows developers to create UltraLightClient user interfaces from XML files. ULC XML is a free and open-source tool for Canoo?s Java RIA library. It is available for download at the ULC XML project site.

Bluestream Database Software Corporation has announced the general availability of XDocs 1.0, an XML content management system.XDocs 1.0 XML CMS is ideal for budget conscious organizations seeking solutions in technical publication, content management, web content management and E-Learning.

Washington Group International, a leading provider of engineering, construction and management solutions to businesses and governments worldwide, is using Oracle(R) Fusion Middleware as the foundation for its service-oriented architecture (SOA). With Oracle, Washington Group is better aligning its IT infrastructure with its business goals by integrating applications, eliminating redundant data entry and coding and discovering new avenues to unify business processes across multiple lines of business.

webMethods, Inc. , a leading business integration and optimization software company, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Infravio, Inc. for approximately $38 million in cash. The deal is expected to close during the month of September 2006 and it is anticipated to be accretive to webMethods' earnings per share (EPS) beginning with the quarter ending March 31, 2007.

SOA Leaders, the world's largest peer-to-peercommunity of end-user SOA implementers, today announced that it has madeseveral additions and enhancements to its offerings to better serve membersworldwide. SOA Leaders has added a new members-only online forum, whereend-users and those forming an SOA strategy can collaborate and share ideasamong more than 1,000 participants.

Samisa Abeysinghe, pioneer of the the Apache Axis2/C effort, architect of the core of the Apache Axis2/C Web services engine, and an AJAXWorld Conference 2006 speaker, has announced the release of Apache Axis2/C version 0.93.

Since its inception, XML has been criticized for the overhead it introduces into the enterprise infrastructure. Business data encoded in XML takes five to 10 times more bandwidth to transmit in the network and proportionally more disk space to store.

SYSPRO, a leading producer of enterprise software for SMB manufacturers and distributors, has announced that SYSPRO CyberStore, a next generation e-commerce application, further extends the concept of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) to the application of B2B and B2C trading.

Companies and organizations seeking to integrate their mainframe computers, software and expertise into a service- oriented architecture (SOA) have a powerful design advantage with the release of Version 3.2 of Ivory(R) Service Architect from GT Software, Inc., a leading provider of rapid SOA development software for mainframe systems.

W3C published new editions of the XML 1.0/1.1 and Namespaces in XML 1.0/1.1 specifications for data exchange that include corrections for all known errata. W3C said that the strong foundation provided by the stability of these core XML specifications underlies the steady increase in W3C-defined technologies for querying, transforming, displaying, encrypting, and optimizing XML.

The quest for agility has spurred the recent rise of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the face of modern IT integration architecture is changing. Technology stovepipes of the past are now being connected by Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology, which provides the backbone for the networking, communication, mediation, and service container management needed to support an SOA. Every integration software vendor provides some form of ESB in its products and the ESB has risen to the status of a de facto standard for SOA integrating. But what's the next step in the evolution of the IT integration fabric?

Jonathan Robie, a co-inventor of XQuery, believes the innovative XML query language is a critical tool to help software developers and systems integrators efficiently integrate data from a variety of sources to create the XML needed for Web development. Robie is a technology leader at DataDirect Technologies, the unparalleled leader in data connectivity and mainframe integration and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS), and is a member of the XQuery Working Group.

The companies say they are now going to explore the idea of developing a library of core models to describe generic resources such as network elements, operating systems, storage devices, desktops, servers, web servers and a directory service so vendors could establish the generic nature of and relationship between every component of a specific IT service without knowing the objects that make up the service.

The new version of LGX Info demonstrates LogiXML's commitment to industry standards and pure web-based operation with expanded AJAX support. Incorporating the new AJAX integration features, the new release allows portions of a page to be updated based on use actions. This approach is completely consistent with the pure web based approach of all LGX products.

Netscape.com, an online social media website, hasbeen hacked through a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in theirrecently launched news service. It is alleged that the attack was launchedby fans of Digg.com, a competing social networking website. The hackersused the XSS vulnerability to inject their own JavaScript code into thehomepage and other pages on the site.

Vordel announced today that its Web Services security products are available through the CentraSite Community, recently founded by Software AG and Fujitsu. The inclusion of Web Services security into the CentraSite Community, as well as Software AG's crossvision? SOA suite, creates a secure framework for enterprise customers to deploy SOA across the enterprise and through the firewall to partners and customers.

It's sometimes funny to write about service-oriented architecture. One of the things I say often and believe is that you can't buy a service-oriented architecture. SOA is not just technology, it's philosophy, organizational change, and business transformation. There's no place to buy that kind of dramatic, deeply impacting change.

Software AG and Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation announced the CentraSite Community, an initiative that brings both alliance partners and customers together to create a complete service-oriented architecture (SOA) ecosystem. Formed to help organizations successfully design, implement, manage, govern and optimize an SOA, the CentraSite Community will foster business agility by providing customers with partners pre-integrated SOA assets stored in CentraSite, a standards-based SOA registry and repository. Jointly developed by Fujitsu and Software AG, CentraSite represents the foundation of this Community. In a separate release today, Fujitsu and Software AG also announced the general availability of CentraSite Version 2.1.

Nine of every 10 companies are adopting or have adopted service-oriented architectures and will exit 2006 with SOA planning, design, and programming experience, according to a new AberdeenGroup benchmark report, 'Enterprise Service Bus and SOA Middleware.'

Parasoft Corporation, a provider of Automated Error Prevention solutions for software development announced the release of WebKing 5.5. an automated testing suite that provides comprehensive testing and analysis of Web applications, ensuring they meet the content, reliability and performance goals necessary to support online business requirements. WebKing addresses four key areas of test and analysis: Web site risk analysis, functional testing, load and performance testing.

Microsoft announced the creation of the Open XML Translator project. The project, developed with partners, will create tools to build a technical bridge between the Microsoft Office Open XML Formats and the OpenDocument Format (ODF). This work is in response to government requests for interoperability with ODF because they work with constituent groups that use that format.

Putting support for XML processing in ColdFusion 6.0 was regarded as a major feature upgrade. With the switch to Java, ColdFusion could leverage the existing Java functions in Jakarta Commons and add support for things like Web Services (Axis). However, binding itself to Java also bound ColdFusion to the limitations of the Java feature set.