The pressure is on to keep pace with Web 2.0 entrants into the marketplace. Rewriting is expensive; adding AJAX widgets results in a complex, unmaintainable application. Both require you to hire scarce JavaScript developers. Google Web Toolkit -- the SDK that allows you to write AJAX interfaces in Java -- enables your Java developers to layer a desktop-like interface on top of your Web app. Learn to analyze the service profile of your application, to change HTML views into XML or JSON services, and to resist opening security holes by putting state and control flow logic into the client.

A standard from OASIS called Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is used so portlets can be decoupled from a portal. In part one (JDJ, Volume. 13, issue 3) of this article, we introduced the relevant standards and specifications and then demonstrated WSRP's capabilities by consuming a WebSphere Portal portlet in WebLogic Portal.

Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

On Tuesday evening Sun issued a fourth-quarter guidance range largely above analysts' estimates. The company pre-announced that revenue for its fiscal fourth quarter ended June was $3.725 billion to $3.8 billion, with gross margin in the 44-45% range. Sun expects non-GAAP profits of 25-35 cents a share. Some analysts nonetheless had been looking for $3.8 billion and 27 cents.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

JavaScript is one of the most interesting and misunderstood programming languages in common use today. Most developers will go their entire careers without realizing its full potential. It's not often that you get a language that supports the feature set that JavaScript does, while still being as widely deployed. This talk will spotlight some patterns surrounding JavaScript's most elegant features such as closures, lambdas, object and array literals, object prototypes, private members and dynamic scope resolution -- all without boring you to tears.

JavaScript is a language with more than its share of bad parts. It went from non-existence to global adoption in an alarmingly short period of time. It never had an interval in the lab when it could be tried out and polished. JavaScript has some extraordinarily good parts. In JavaScript there is a beautiful, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. The best nature of JavaScript was so effectively hidden that for many years the prevailing opinion of JavaScript was that it was an unsightly, incompetent abomination. This session will expose the goodness in JavaScript, an outstanding dynamic programming language. Within the language is an elegant subset that is vastly superior to the language as a whole, being more reliable, readable and maintainable.

JavaScript 2 is becoming increasingly important. Learn how to take advantage of JavaScript 2 while still running in today's browsers. Leverage your current JavaScript and HTML skills to build applications that run in Flash 7-9, DHTML and more with no code changes! OpenLaszlo 4.2 includes a new JavaScript 2-based compiler that translates JS2 syntax to a variety of formats, including JS 1.5, Actionscript 1 & 2 and Actionscript 3. When Firefox 4 is out, we'll be ready with native JavaScript 2.0 support! Come learn about this exciting new development, and about the new features designed to make developing complex apps easy, including cross-browser history and vector graphics support.

In this session that no developer who uses JavaScript or ActionScript will want to miss, delegates will learn how to: Overcome common hurdles and pitfalls of client-side only JavaScript development. Speed up development time by cutting out extra server-side code and processing scripts that are no longer necessary. Clean up your code base by reducing (or even eliminating) the number of languages needed to leverage to accomplish common tasks (i.e. Why bother with server-side PHP scripts to fetch database results when you can do it all in JavaScript on the server? Why mess with Curl to fetch content that your JavaScript code can grab in one line?) Selby will also get hands on with live demonstration of how to: Create JSON data services for your Ajax, Flash, Flex and Silverlight apps, Implement JavaScript RMI, Use your favorite AJAX libraries server-side. Manipulate the DOM server-side, Talk to databases, file systems, networks, and remote sites or services (cross-domain XHRs are now a possibility! The session will show Web developers how they can put their JavaScript skills to work on the server side using technologies like Mozilla Rhino and Aptana Jaxer, which embeds the entire Mozilla browser on the server side.

jQuery is a rapidly growing, popular JavaScript library. Its powerful and modular architecture, which emphasizes a simple yet heavily extensible API, has helped it to become one of the most popular Javascript Libraries. Because of its dead-simple plugin architecture, many even begin extending jQuery's core features within hours of first using it. This talk will demonstrate how the library works, and show you why so many users are able to build fully AJAX-enabled Websites in their first day using jQuery.

A fast-moving Comet is about to impact the Internet. When it hits, it will wipe away the architecture flaws we have lived with for the past 15 years and allow a new World Wide Web to evolve. This new Web will include applications that are instantly on and always on, applications that are truly multi-user, and applications that go far beyond today's 'click and wait' Web solutions.

Algorithmic trading continues to drive the quest for greater speed and lower latency in the capital markets sector with firms needing to re-architect their trading systems for low latency and high performance. This need is even more critical today as financial organizations strive to keep pace with new technology and remain competitive in the face of increasing competition.

'Java's always been a RIA platform - before the world really wanted one,' claimed Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz recently, as he reflected on the reinvention of the Java platform as represented by JavaFX. 'What's a rich internet application?' Schwartz wrote. 'It depends on your perspective,' he continued, adding 'From mine, it's any network connected application that persists in front of a user, typically outside a browser, that can operate when disconnected from the network.'

Quest Software announced the latest release of its Java profiler, JProbe 8.0, which is now offered as a plug-in to the Eclipse Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The release of this capability aligns with the increased adoption of the open source development. Launching JProbe in an Eclipse environment enables users to adopt continuous performance testing best practices.

Before Java I was a Smalltalk guy. I remember switching from one language to the other and the tipping point that you reach when you've mastered the new language and how many months it takes, not to mention the years, to do really good design and know-how, which patterns to apply and how to avoid mistakes, understand performance issues, and so forth.

Today, the world of software development is presented with a new challenge. To fully leverage this new class of multi-core hardware, software developers must change the way they create applications. By turning their focus to multi-threaded applications, developers will be able to take full advantage of multi-core devices and deliver software that meets the demands of the world. But this paradigm of multi-threaded software development adds a new wrinkle of complexity for those who care the utmost about software quality.

AccuRev and Rally announced a technology partnership that will integrate AccuRev software change and configuration management (SCCM) with Rally's Agile lifecycle management solutions. The combined solution will provide a platform to manage multiple Agile processes and ongoing customer feedback, while improving visibility and requirements traceability between defects, issues and tasks and the actual source code changes made to address them.

Genuitec announced the availability of MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 6.5; Java's most compelling IDE for end-to-end development. Integral to this release is Maven4MyEclipse, a '1-Click,' ready-to-run implementation of the Maven2 project management and build services for MyEclipse. Maven4MyEclipse streamlines enterprise Maven adoption by eliminating the hassle developers have come to associate with traditional Maven installations and project setup and configuration.

AccuRev announced a new AJAX-based Web Interface and a native integration with Microsoft Windows Explorer for its process-centric software change and configuration management (SCCM) solution. These new capabilities make it easy to integrate every knowledge worker into the development process and offer new ways to share information.

Recursion Software released a private beta version of their Voyager mobile platform, with powerful interoperability for Android, Microsoft .NET and Compact Framework (CF), all Java editions (JME CDC, JSE and JEE), and more than 15 embedded operating systems. The Voyager platform is a powerful cross-platform development environment that allows developers to write one code-set natively in either Java or .NET and publish the code to mobile or desktop nodes that can execute transactions at runtime regardless of the virtual machine they employ. This beta version is an important step towards write once, run everywhere for application messaging and communications.

Commercial open source software has arrived. There have been commercial sponsors of open source projects for a long time, but the recent spate of high-price (for open source, at least) acquisitions of companies with open source products at the core of their business has made a splash in the technology industry. In addition, Sun's convulsions into the open source world have left the Java landscape decisively in open source territory.

Java developers have had a nice ride the last few years. With ferocious competition in the Java tools space, the tools they use have been getting better and better. Where one tool innovates, such as with quick fixes, the competitors quickly duplicate and expand on that innovation. This has led to a fertile field of tools for Java developers to choose from.

2008 is going to be an important year for Rich Internet Applications. Most organizations are delivering or planning to deliver Rich Internet Applications; however, at the same time, most IT managers are facing a dilemma: which Rich Internet Application technology and platform to use? The number of different frameworks and libraries is too vast to even consider evaluating a fraction of them.

Scalent Systems announced support for Sun Logical Domains (LDoms) server virtualization and partitioning technology by Scalent V/OE Infrastructure Virtualization software. Sun's LDoms technology is available on its chip multi-threaded (CMT) systems with CoolThreads technology including the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers.

Savvion announced it will now be providing customers with human-centric process solutions through Savvion's BPM platform and the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). By combining Java CAPS and Savvion BusinessManager, Savvion delivers an environment that supports process automation from conception through enterprise-wide deployment, fostering collaboration between business users, IT architects and developers, regardless of geographic or organizational boundaries.

Sun Microsystems announced the availability of Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) 6, the latest version of its flagship service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business integration software. Sun also released a new master data management (MDM) suite, a high performance and unified solution that gives users a single view of their customer data and helps them more effectively manage customer relationships.

AdaCore announced availability of the GNAT Ada-Java Interfacing Suite (GNAT-AJIS), which allows developers to build applications using both languages. With GNAT-AJIS, programmers can combine Java applications compiled to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Ada code that has been compiled either natively or to the JVM. Application areas as diverse as financial services, communications, aerospace, defense, and academic research can all benefit from GNAT-AJIS.

Azul Systems announced that its Vega 3 Compute Appliance recorded world record results in the industry-standard SPECjbb2005 benchmark, further demonstrating the company's commitment to providing customers with the highest performing solutions for Java enterprise computing.

SOA is mostly associated to technologies such as BPEL, SCA and Web Services. But does SOA really imply these technologies? In this session we will show how you can use the service oriented approach while staying inside the Java world. jBPM is a powerful lightweight framework that can be used to orchestrate services in the broadest sense. It is highly extendable, very versatile and can be easily embedded in client and/or server applications. Attendees will learn how jBPM can be used in a pure workflow scenario as well as in a situation involving automated business steps.

Red Hat is beta testing its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as a solution on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It's a way to tickle enterprise adoption of its Java application server. EC2 offers developers, enterprises and startups a web-scale compute infrastructure with virtually unlimited capacity and pay-as-you-go pricing. And of course clouds right now are very chi-chi.

If you are planning to hit the job market, you may need to refresh some of the Java basic terms and techniques to prepare yourself for a technical interview. JDJ Enterprise Editor Yakov Fain here offers thirty of the core Java questions that you might expect during the interviews, 20 for mid-level developers and the final ten for senior-level developers. Why not try them and see how well you do?

Mike Neil is general manager for virtualization strategy in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. Mike is focused on the delivery of the Windows virtualization technology, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Virtual PC 2007. Mike also directs the technical enablement of Microsoft's broader vision for virtualization, to include virtualization management tools and virtualized desktop infrastructure. Prior to this role, Mike was responsible for Microsoft?s server and PC virtualization efforts since 2003.

InterSystems simplifies persistence for Java developers by providing product that allow simultaneous SQL and object data access without mapping. InterSystems Caché is the high-performance object database that runs SQL faster than relational databases. It includes InterSystems Jalapeño technology that allows you to automatically create persistent classes from POJO class definitions. With Jalapeño, you can work entirely within your favorite Java IDE to build database applications in less time than you ever thought possible.

Azul Systems and Axway announced that they are working together to address complex and demanding application performance needs for global financial businesses. Business critical applications present scalability and response time challenges that traditionally have led to server sprawl, low asset utilization, and growing IT administration costs. Azul Systems and Axway have partnered to address these challenges by automating check processing and other financial batch processes that are typically very time-consuming and inefficient.

Aonix announced the beginning of implementation efforts to add symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) capability to its flagship product PERC Ultra. Dubbed PERC Ultra SMP, the product will address the added complexities inherent in design, development, and deployment of SMP-targeted applications where the benefits of scalability, portability, and maintainability of Java applications can be fully realized.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

A lot of rework still happens in projects applying UML techniques because of conflicts and omissions in requirements. To reduce rework, interactive storyboarding is effective, but it seems that projects that use the technique are limited because of the few tools available. To improve this situation, this article introduces the J-CASE open source Tag Library that lets us describe storyboards on JSPs based on use cases, and explains how to generate document and UML diagrams from the JSPs.

JadeLiquid Software announced the release of the WebRenderer Swing Edition 4.2. The WebRenderer Swing Edition is a Java browser SDK built upon Firefox 2.0 and rendering in 100% pure Swing. The rendering quality and Web standards support of Firefox 2.0 is paired with the lightweight drawing of Java Swing providing the commercial strength Java browser SDK.

Genuitec is pleased to recognize its recent showing in the annual Evans Data 'User's Choice IDEs' survey. MyEclipse was recognized as one of the world's top eight IDEs, along with CodeGear's Delphi, Sun's NetBeans, Sun Studio, Oracle's JDeveloper, Microsoft's Visual Studio, Adobe's Creative Suite and IBM Rational Tools. Of note, the top IDEs list included only four Java IDEs.

Carbonfund.org announced a new partnership with Azul Systems. While providing high-end performance products for businesses and increasing data center efficiencies, Azul Systems will go carbon neutral by offsetting its carbon emissions through Carbonfund.org's Carbonfree Small Business Program. Currently, Azul Compute Appliances yield improved power and cooling performance, as well as more predictable service levels to support data center transactions of capital markets, e-commerce, and telecommunication customers. Azul's multicore chip technology is designed to handle processing-intensive workloads associated with dynamic Web-based applications by creating a shared pool of compute and memory resources.