Java

There has been a lot of activity in the Java world of late. Since Oracle bought Sun, there has been a lot of concern from the Java community as to which direction Oracle would take Java. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), who manage a large number of popular open source Java projects, have objected to the way that Oracle are treating the Java Community Process (JCP) committee, which they claim makes the committee powerless.

IT World: 'Apache declares war on Oracle over Java'
Info World: 'The coming war over the future of Java'

One big change that Oracle want to introduce with the next version of Java is to have two versions of the Java runtime, the JVM. There would be the community edition, that is handled in a similar way to the existing JVM and is available free-of-charge, and there would be a 'premium' edition that has extra features. There has always been a strong sense of openness within the Java community (even if the platform itself wasn't actually 'open' until fairly recently) which has contributed to the number of libraries and applications written using Java, a lot of them hosted by the ASF. It is going to be interesting to see how the release of two different versions of the Java runtime changes the dynamics within the Java community.

The Register: 'Oracle cooks up free and premium JDKs'

Attachmate buys Novell

This might not typically be something of note: one technology company buys another technology. However, it is interesting because Novell own the UNIX copyrights and after Attachmate bought Novell, it sold a large set of patents to a consortium that includes Microsoft. It has been confirmed that this IP sale didn't include the UNIX copyrights, but this had been a concern in the community at the time the acquisition was announced, as the UNIX copyrights were used as the basis for SCO suing IBM a few years ago over UNIX code apparently appearing in the source code of Linux. Rumours at the time suggested that Microsoft was bank-rolling the SCO law suit, so it would have been an odd situation had Microsoft ended up owning the UNIX copyrights.

Ars Technica: 'Attachmate says openSUSE lives, UNIX copyrights not sold to MS'

IE 9 and Firefox 4

Microsoft have said that they have almost finished development on the next version of Internet Explorer. Although they haven't announced a final release date, they expect to issue a Release Candidate version of IE9 fairly soon. The Register article: 'IE9 almost ready' 

In the meantime, it looks like the next version of Firefox will be delayed and not released this month, as initially expected: The Register: Firefox 4 slips

Good progress has been made, apparently, on improving the performance of the new version of Firefox: 'Firefox regains speed mojo', but it's still not as fast as Chrome on some very important sites: http://matt.west.co.tt/spectrum/jsspeccy/

Azure Updates

Microsoft's annual Professional Developer Conference (PDC) happened at the end of October/start of November and some interesting announcements were made with about their plans for the Azure platform.

You can read about them here: MSDN Blog

Lots of interesting features coming soon, but the item that stood out for me was the fact that some time next year, applications hosted on Azure will be able to use SQL Server-based reporting against their SQL Azure database. This is really one of those "can't they do that already?" features in my view. Yes, of course, using custom code or a third-party library, an Azure application can produce reports now, and SQL Azure databases can be accessible outside of the Azure platform, but these aren't really optimal solutions. I really welcome the release of SQL Azure Reporting, but it should have been available much earlier. How many business applications do you know that don't have any reporting in them?

Now, if they could just make SQL Azure transparently scalable, rather than relying on lots of manually implemented data partitioning code, that would really set up Azure as the cloud platform to beat.

Windows Phone 7

What? No mention of Windows Phone 7? Really? ....Oh, go on then.
It turns out that sales of Microsoft's new phones weren't quite as stellar as Microsoft had hoped: Information Week: Are Windows Phone 7 sales slow

Perhaps their funeral procession for the iPhone was a little premature.
On the other hand, sales of the new Kinect for the Xbox 360 have been very impressive. It does show that Microsoft can produce and market consumer devices successfully.

Ars Technica: Kinect sells 2.5M in 25 days, consumers are the controller