Stories by: Paul Krill

A Google executive Thursday heaped praise on Apple's iPhone, even with his company set to challenge Apple in this same space with its Android mobile computing platform.

Aptana, which has enabled Web 2.0 development via JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, and PHP with the Aptana Studio IDE, has added Python to the mix through its acquisition of Pydev, which was announced this week.

An open-source technology has been launched to help developers using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 find duplicated code in their software projects.

The Linux Foundation on Wednesday plans to announce an event enabling Linux users to interact with the Linux community, including high-level maintainers and developers.

Sonatype on Tuesday began offering a tool for Java developers to manage internal Maven-based code repositories and access external Maven repositories.

Standardization efforts for the next version of JavaScript have taken a sharp turn this month, with some key changes in the Web scripting technology's direction. JavaScript creator Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla, has helped forge a consensus on how to proceed with the direction for JavaScript's improvements. "JavaScript was sitting still. It was stagnant," he says.

Developing with the popular AJAX technique for Web applications is the focus of product releases Monday from both WaveMaker and Genuitec.

FiveRuns and Morph Labs on Tuesday announced they are partnering to provide free application performance testing for Ruby on Rails applications, with the goal of bolstering applications running in the cloud.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has joined the Linux Foundation, the foundation said Monday.

A beta release of the open source NetBeans 6.5 IDE is being offered by Sun Microsystems on Wednesday.

Yahoo on Tuesday announced general availability of Fire Eagle, which enables users to their mark their location on the Web and is being leveraged in applications such as travel and messaging systems.