Stories by: James Niccolai

The Web development frameworks Rails and Merb have decided to end their rivalry and join forces in a single project, they said last week.

Window Snyder, the head of security at Mozilla Corp., will resign her position at the end of the year, she said in a blog post Wednesday.

Yahoo will launch its platform for Web developers this week, part of an effort to attract more visitors by adding Facebook-like social networking features to Yahoo's Web sites.

David Axmark, a cofounder and former lead engineer for MySQL, has resigned from Sun Microsystems a few weeks after another cofounder said he may also leave the company.

The computing grid built to carry data from the Large Hadron Collider to scientists around the world is also being used to speed the development of life-saving drugs and uncover the causes of climate change, people involved in the project said Friday.

Google's leadership on the Web stems partly from its powerful data centers, which allow it to provide lightning-fast search results while keeping energy costs to a minimum. The company has been mostly secretive about what goes on inside these giant computing factories, but on Wednesday it offered a peek at what it has been able to achieve -- on the energy side at least.

VMware CTO Stephen Herrod drew a cheer at the VMworld conference Wednesday by announcing plans to bring the next version of VMware's VirtualCenter management software to Linux and the iPhone.

VMware's CEO made his pitch on Tuesday for a new type of operating system for the data center, and in the process assigned the "traditional OS" to the dustbin of history.

VMware, facing increased pressure from rivals Microsoft and Citrix Systems, will announce new products this week intended to let customers extend their use of virtualization beyond servers and into all corners of the data center, including storage and network equipment.

China has stepped up investment in its homegrown Godson microprocessor and hopes to build its first petaflop-class supercomputer using the chip in 2010, one of the country's senior engineers said on Tuesday.

Fujitsu is developing an eight-core version of its Sparc64 processor, which should give a performance boost to the Sparc Enterprise Servers that Fujitsu jointly develops with Sun Microsystems.