Stories by: Paul Krill

Seeking to bolster Flash and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) application development, Adobe is working on "Gumbo," the next version of the Flex platform.

The battle to provide social networking in the enterprise is under way between solutions from established software vendors and readily available offerings such as Facebook and LinkedIn, with these sites possessing a lot of momentum, an industry insider stressed during a conference on Friday afternoon.

Following through on a restructuring plan announced in May, Sun on Thursday laid off approximately 1,000 employees in the United States and Canada.

The Novell-sponsored openSuse project for Linux released openSuse Build Service 1.0 on Wednesday, providing developers with access to code repositories for the openSuse Linux distribution and making it easier for developers to contribute code.

In a not-so-surprising revelation, Sun plans to support the Python and Jython scripting languages in future releases of the open-source NetBeans IDE, which has been expanding beyond its Java origins lately.

Sun on Tuesday announced availability of Java VisualVM, an open-source GUI tool for troubleshooting and profiling Java applications.

IBM began on Monday an open beta program for the second product based on its Jazz ALM (application lifecycle management) platform, IBM Rational Requirements Composer.

While perhaps best known as a major social networking site in the Web 2.0 vein, Facebook is becoming a popular place to interface with potential customers, similar to what companies such as Scribe and iLike have done. Facebook also is being viewed as a place for enterprise collaboration, with Serena Software leveraging the site for this purpose. To get perspective on Facebook, InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Aditya Agarwal, Facebook director of engineering. Agarwal formerly worked in the Oracle server technologies division.

In a move that could add substantial volumes of Flash content to Internet search results, Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo to provide optimized Flash Player technology to enhance the searching of this content.

Oracle presented on Tuesday a comprehensive roadmap for its recently acquired BEA Systems middleware technologies, making BEA's application server Oracle's strategic Java container and pledging continued support for BEA customers.

Sun Microsystems is sponsoring a collaborative environment for building and hosting social applications that would run on environments like Facebook and OpenSocial.