Stories by: Paul Krill

Sun Microsystems and the OpenSolaris community on Wednesday unveiled an upgrade to the open source version of the Solaris Unix OS, OpenSolaris 2008.11. They also revealed plans to have OpenSolaris running on a line of laptops in 2009.

Python 3.0, a new version of the language released earlier this week, has incompatibilities with the 2.x line, according to the Python Software Foundation.

Ruby on Rails 2.2, an upgrade to the popular Web application framework, was released Friday, featuring an internationalization framework and stronger support for HTTP validators, according to the Ruby on Rails Web site.

Concentrating on rich Internet applications, Zend Technologies is backing Adobe's Action Message Format (AMF) in Zend Framework 1.7.

Two years ago this month, Microsoft forged its controversial partnership with Novell that, among other things, had the two companies agreeing not to sue each other over intellectual property issues, in part to protect Suse Linux users over any patent litigation from Microsoft.

Expressing a now-familiar theme, a Microsoft executive at the ApacheCon conference on Friday morning touted Microsoft's efforts to be more open, highlighting moves such as offering the company's "M" modeling language under the Microsoft "Open Specification Promise."

Sun is offering on Thursday its open-source Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server version 3 Prelude, a Web application server based on a modular OSGi architecture with capabilities from the planned Java Platform EE (Enterprise Edition) 6 release.

ActiveState Software on Tuesday is releasing Version 5.0 of its Komodo IDE for dynamic languages, offering more speed, more support for distributed version control systems, and improved code-sharing across a team.

Aptana last week announced the release of Aptana Jaxer 1.0 and the introduction of Jaxer Pro, both of which are "AJAX servers" that let developers build Web applications using JavaScript, DOM, CSS, and HTML.

Canonical, which wants Linux to challenge Apple's Macintosh in usability on the desktop, is unveiling on Monday upgrades to its Ubuntu Linux distributions, offering 3G and virtualization improvements. Version 8.10 of Canonical's Desktop and Server Linux distributions are being announced Monday and will be available Thursday.

Furthering its open-source SOA middleware, MuleSource this week upgraded both its SOA governance platform, enabling custom extensions, and its ESB, which offers REST support.