“We’re very excited about Java SE 7; this is a great release with strong technology updates. I'm pleased that the Java community has come together in favor of technical progress and that we have a clear path forward for Java SE 8,” said Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president Oracle Fusion Middleware and Java Products. “Oracle has a strong vested interest in the success of the Java platform and is firmly committed to delivering a consistent, high-performance, high-quality Java SE implementation and will be supporting the Java SE 7 release across the Oracle Fusion Middleware product portfolio.”

A new multicore-ready API that enables developers to more easily decompose problems into tasks that can then be executed in parallel across arbitrary numbers of processor cores has been developed. Furthermore, a comprehensive I/O interface for working with file systems that can access a wider array of attributes and offer more information when errors occur has been added.

Java SE 7 also adds several new networking and security features, expanded support for internationalization, including Unicode 6.0 support, and updated versions of numerous libraries. Support for dynamic languages including Ruby, Python and JavaScript has been improved, according to Oracle.

The write once, run anywhere concept Java Platform consists of several programs, each of which provides a distinct portion of its overall capabilities. Java was developed by James A. Gosling, a software developer from Calgary, Canada. Known as the father of the Java programming language, Gosling worked at Sun Microsystems from 1984 to 2010. He left the company after Sun was acquired by Oracle Corporation for US$7.4 billion.

The Java SE 7 development process was not without controversy:  The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) did step down from the Java SE/EE Executive Committee in 2010, saying that the JCP was no longer an open process (ip-192.com reported here.) Sun Microsystems released the bulk of its implementation of Java under the GNU General Public License on November 13, 2006.

“More than 7,000 customers have chosen Oracle Linux for mission critical systems because of our world-class support offerings,” said Wim Coekaerts, Senior Vice President, Oracle Linux and Virtualization. “The addition of Ksplice’s zero downtime update technology further extends our Linux technology leadership.”

Oracle says that the addition of Ksplice’s technology will increase the security, reliability and availability of Oracle Linux by enabling customers to apply security updates, diagnostics patches and critical bug fixes without rebooting.

Ksplice, started by four MIT students, released the initial extension on April 23, 2008 and offered prebuilt and tested updates for the Red Hat, Cent OS, Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu, among others. The application also supported virtualization technologies OpenVZ and Virtuozzo.

“System administrators are forced to choose between known best practices and added operational costs when administering Linux updates,” said Jeff Arnold, CEO, Ksplice Inc. “Ksplice’s technology will be able to take Oracle’s kernel updates and transform them into zero downtime updates that provide always-accessible systems with no reboot necessary. This results in improved system availability and security as well as reduced operational costs for the customer.”

At the time of Oracles announcement, about 700 companies did use the service to protect over 100,000 servers, Ksplice said. The open community expects that a fork based on the original source-code will appear soon to offer continued support for other Linux kernel variants, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu.

"Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis," Edward Screven, Oracle's chief corporate architect, said in a statement. "We intend to begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office.”

OpenOffice dates back to 1999 when Sun Microsystems purchased the StarOffice code from StarDivision, a company based in Germany. One year later, Sun announced that the code for the productivity suite will be available under both the LGPL and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). The first version of OpenOffice for Windows, Linux, and Sun Solaris was released on May 1, 2002, and a version for the Mac OS followed in June 2003.

The OpenOffice suite includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, presentation and database management programs, a vector graphics editor, and a tool for creating and editing mathematical formulae. The latest stable version 3.3, released on January 25, 2011, features interface improvements, a FindBar, and an updated print form. The programs support extensions to add new functionality similar to Mozilla Firefox. Security is paramount to OpenOffice, and there is no known virus "in the wild" at the time of this writing.

Oracle said that it will continue to support the adoption of open standards-based document formats, such as Open Document Format (ODF). The company also said that it will make large investments in other open source software such as Linux and MySQL.

In September 2010, a group called The Document Foundation was created and a rebranded fork of OpenOffice.org named LibreOffice was born. The stated goal is to produce a vendor-independent office suite with ODF support and no copyright assignment requirement.

"Open source brings numerous benefits to NASA software projects, including increased quality, reduced development costs, faster development cycles and reduced barriers for public-private collaboration to commercialize agency technology," said NASA's Chief Technology Officer for Information Technology Chris C. Kemp. "The full benefits of open source can only be achieved if NASA is able to establish the processes, policies and culture needed to encourage and support open source development."

Guest speakers will provide insights into best practices and share valuable lessons learned in building and using open source communities. Sessions on licensing, government restrictions, including International Traffic in Arms Regulations, governance, and risk assessments are planned. Confirmed speakers include Kemp; Pascal Finette, director of Mozilla Labs; Robert Sutor, vice president of Open Systems at IBM; Chris Wanstrath, CEO and co-founder of Github; and Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president of Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat.

Goals for the summit include establishing a method to support collaboration with the public throughout the development lifecycle; exploring NASA's ability to release and develop software under varied open source licenses; determining whether and to what extent NASA can participate in open source software governance bodies; and gleaning best practices from private industry and other federal agencies.

The summit is a first for NASA and will take place on March 29 and 30 at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The event runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. PDT on both days. More information is available here. The site allows interested parties to register for the event. To be admitted to the base, all participants must bring state or government-issued photo identification. Virtual participation is open to the public through online media, including live video streaming, electronic discussion and collaborative note taking.

The picture shows the launch of the space shuttle Columbia for the STS-1 mission on April 12, 1981. Photo: NASA/Public Domain

“Overall, I think we’ve managed to take the now defunct MySQL 6.0 tree (way back in 2008) and release something that can truly live up to the line database for cloud,” Drizzle programmer Stewart Smith says on his blog. “Drizzle is modern, modular, rather solid and understandable. The future is bright, there is so much more to do to make the ultimate database for cloud. Drizzle7 is a great platform to build on – both for us (developers) and us (people who use relational databases).”

While initial development was started in 2008 by Brian Aker, the team now includes contributors from Canonical, Blue Gecko, Data Differential, Google, Intel, Rackspace, Six Apart, and others. Drizzle has also actively participated in the Google Summer of Code Project. The database uses plug-ins to add features such as query cache, logging to files, syslog, remote services, and the authentication system. Drizzle also supports multiple concurrent engines and a wide variety of native data types.

“Drizzle7 is something that can be packaged in Linux distros,” Smith says. “It’s no longer something where the best bet is to add the [Personal Package Archive] PPA and upgrade every two weeks or build from source yourself. If you’re looking to deploy Drizzle (or develop against it) you can rely on this release.”

Drizzle is available for download here. Information on how to install the database in an Ubuntu environment are available here, users interested to deploy Drizzle using RedHat or Fedora can get start here.