Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth has been telling Reuters that Sun is in the process of certifying Ubuntu on some of its low-end and mid-size hardware. The code it's certifying is Hardy Heron, the Ubuntu 8.04 rev that's due out later this month. Sun told the wire service that it's making sure its Java programming language, tools and Java server are compatible with Heron.

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Yakov Fain, in Lesson 9 of his immensely popular online 'Java Basics' series for JDJ Industry Newsletter, talks about using threads for creating more advanced programs than those already discussed in Lesson 8. He analyzes the role they play in major Internet portals like Yahoo, CNN, or your bank's Web site. These portals usually display different types of information like News, Weather, Stock Market quotes, etc. Each of these info pieces appears on the screen instantaneously even though it's coming to the portal from different servers.

Developers using Java on clients or in small projects may not believe that there is a fundamental problem with Java's robustness. People working with huge applications and application servers written in Java know about the problem but may doubt that it's possible to build something like an unbreakable Java architecture.

Sun plans to ease licensing restrictions for use of Java source code for commercial development of Java applications by increasing the transparency of its licensing with the JCP and the development community at large. 'We're trying to simplify, as best we can, all the legalistics involving application development,' said Sun Fellow Graham Hamilton.

Take Java computer code that can translate images into sound, via a rudimentary software program capable of converting pixels of various colors into piano notes of various tones, and what you have is a technology that enables blind people to read maps.

In a passing remark about how 'there may someday be a redistributable JVM RPM at jpackage,' a mailing list last week prompted new speculation that IBM's version of open-source Java might be on its way since 'someday' - apparently - 'may even be next week.'

'As we enter the new year, you should expect 2005 to be one in which we place an ever heightening focus on our dialog with the community, and the developer community in particular,' writes Sun's president and COO, Jonathan Schwartz, in his first blog entry of the new year. Firefox comes in for especial praise: 'I'd put the Firefox community (enabled by the Mozilla Public License), near the top of all open source community efforts.'

The JFC/Swing API, natively precompiled on Linux for the first time, delivers measurable improvement in Java GUI performance. The Excelsior Engineering Team has ported Excelsior JET, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) with an ahead-of-time compiler, to the Linux/x86 platform.

What does the runaway success of Firefox mean for the Java developer community? According to Harshad Oak, it shows the Java community that it's possible to compete with Microsoft. Firefox users had to relate with the product and promote it as if it was their own creation. 'Linux already did that in the OS space and Firefox is now doing it in the browser space,' he notes.

On June 30, IBM and two U.S. senators announced the initial deployment of a system to link local Mississippi law enforcement agencies to a single database of public safety information. The federally funded project will deliver public safety information across Mississippi to the desktop and a range of mobile devices.

On cue, Sun on Monday wheeled out its expected new four-way Opteron server, the V40z, priced at $8,495 and claiming to best IBM, HP and Dell on price/performance since the industry-standard widgetry runs Solaris and the Java Enterprise System.

The Geronimo project, which aims to develop an open source, certified J2EE server that is ASF licensed and passes Sun's TCK reusing the best ASF/BSD licensed code available today and adding new code to complete the J2EE stack, will not make its August 6 launch date. Maybe in September, though, says project chair Geir Magnusson Jr.

If you missed this year's CFUN conference (June 26-27), you missed a lot. In addition to the great time spent meeting and talking with other ColdFusion programmers, Ben Forta gave a keynote demo of the next version of ColdFusion, code-named 'Blackstone'.

With demo after demo designed to dispel the notion that Java is not performant and a host of announcements concerning everything from the open-sourcing of Java 3D to the new versioning system for the Java platform, Sun's top executives opened the 9th annual JavaOne yesterday with all guns blazing. Here JDJ editorial board member Bill Roth takes a close-up and personal look at what was said at the opening General Session.

Sun Microsystems today underscored its commitment to open source and desktop technology leadership by contributing Project Looking Glass and Java 3D technology to the open source community. This contribution will unleash a new dimension of developer innovation by making Sun's technology available at Sun's 3D Desktop Technology Open Source Project on java.net.

JDesktop Network Components (JDNC) has been released by Sun as an open source project, so that the technology is available to the community early enough to allow it to directly shape the vision, the feature set, and even the code. 'There is still a lot of work to do,' says Sun's Amy Fowler, 'the JDNC feature set is far from complete and there remain rough edges, especially in the API, which has not had extensive usage outside of unit testing and markup-driven use-cases. But, that is exactly why we need your involvement.'

Linux is taking the world of Java application servers by storm. Recently, Sun Microsystems hosted an event to tout the adoption of the latest version of the enterprise Java platform, known as Java 2 platform, Enterprise Edition, or simply J2EE 1.4. At this event, many of the application server vendors were present.

'While the aims of the F/OSS movement in Brazil are liberty not (necessarily) economy,' reports Simon Phipps in his blog from a conference in Porte Alegre, 'the people are open-minded, reasonable and friendly and recognise the value of platform independence as a vehicle of freedom.' By far the largest technology contingent in the 'User Groups' area of the conference, Phipps adds, was the contingent of Java user groups.

'Customers don't want lock-in slavery anymore,' argues David Mohring. Sun should, he says, open-source license the J2SE, J2EE, and J2ME framework libraries and release a fork of the Solaris Kernel under the GPL license.

Hard on the heels of the announcement by Sun's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz earlier this week that Solaris will be open-sourced comes confirmation from Sun's Java technology evangelist: 'We haven't worked out how to open-source Java - but at some point it will happen,' says popular speaker and expert in Java technology and distributed systems, Raghavan 'Rags' Srinivas.

Linux is making huge gains as the platform of choice for developing and deploying enterprise Java applications. Sun has seen more than 1 million downloads of the Linux version of its latest application server release, and all application server vendors uniformly agree that Linux is a fast growing platform.

Is open source and the commoditization of certain technologies cannibalizing software license revenue? Possibly, but many argue that this market dynamic stimulates many vendors to accelerate innovation and to create new technologies and applications. And, while this market dynamic can be disruptive, it creates a roaring buyer's market for IT decision makers.

McNealy & Schwartz agree that 'This Internet Thing Has Legs!' - plus industry veteran Satya Koachina on the subject of Java on Linux, Faisal Islam on the rivalry between Sun and Microsoft on the desktop, and other comments about Java technologies culled from the world's news media, online communities, magazines, and Web sites.

In February 2004 David Skok's new VC firm - Matrix Partners - orchestrated, with Accel, a $10 million investment in JBoss, Inc. This first round of funding in an open source company was a bold play, but then David Skok, famous in the Java arena as the founder of SilverStream Software - acquired by Novell in 2002 - is no stranger to bold moves.

Use the open source Java game APIs - designed to meet the requirements of Linux and OS X, among other OS's - and you could be a winner in the Java Technology Game Development contest announced by Sun this week at the GDC.

The ongoing thumb-wrestling match for world domination between Sun and IBM, says Sean Gallagher, spilled over from being a quiet debate to having the lid blown clean off it recently by a series of very public moves by Sun and IBM. The results are less about who's right than they are about who can play the media trump card better. Here he tries to give the gist of the most recent developments.

With the recent call to 'Let Java go' in mind, here's what James Gosling, now CTO of Sun's Developer Platforms Group and famous as one of the co-inventors of Java, had to say about open-sourcing Java back at last year's JavaOne in San Francisco.

Sun CEO Scott McNealy went to a reunion-style meal with the now scattered founders of Sun, Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla and Andreas 'Andy' Bechtolsheim, and when he got up from the table he had bought Bechtolsheim's latest stealth-mode start-up Kealia Inc, a company whose Web site only gives directions to its offices in Palo Alto.

With Linux on the desktop now going so well for Sun, it's interesting to hear the CEO of BEA Systems too concede that 'it's not Java on the desktop that is going to keep Microsoft from owning all computing...' Read an exclusive interview here.

Most organizations that use Linux as a business operating system are developing their own applications for Linux - perhaps in response to the current scarcity of packaged applications available on Linux. With so much internal development for Linux, it is critical that the IT groups building your Linux-based applications have a means to efficiently produce reliable code.

Steve Ballmer has started a new campaign to strengthen Microsoft's ties with governments and businesses on mainland China, in response to Sun's recent success with bringing the Linux-based Java Desktop System to the People's Republic.

At COMDEX yesterday Scott McNealy announced a mega-deal between Sun and The China Standard Software Company to put the Java Desktop System on 'half a million to a million' desktops in the coming year...and on 500 million Chinese desktops ultimately.

Embedded Linux delivers the reliability, openness, and performance required by the new generation of smart devices. This article is part of Michael Mathews' feature in the next issue of LinuxWorld Magazine. To read more about embedded Linux with Java, be sure to pick up the November/December issue of LWM