Open Source: News

Mozilla will probably add a third beta to the development schedule for Firefox 3.1 to get a better handle on remaining bugs and give several new features, including a faster JavaScript engine and a private browsing mode, more testing time, the company's browser director said Tuesday.

Google late last week claimed results of in-house data sorting tests bolster its claims that its MapReduce technology can manipulate more data faster than any conventional database.

Supercomputers from IBM are more energy efficient than supercomputing iron from rival vendors, according to latest research from The Green500.org.

IBM is working on a platform for collaborative mashups that needs little more than a browser and a server to create a shared environment that includes audio and videoconferencing.

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.

The New York Times used Ruby on Rails to pull together, analyze and display election results in near real time on one of its busiest Web traffic days ever. How did nytimes.com scale up Rails -- a framework known for quick development turnaround but less than lightning fast performance?

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published the specification for a Microsoft-created file format that caused bitter debate during its path to become an international standard.

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

Marking the two-year anniversary of their controversial interoperability agreement, Microsoft and Novell this week are announcing upcoming availability of both the beta version of Moonlight, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application technology on Linux, and the general release of Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

Open-source database vendor Ingres unveiled Ingres Database 9.2 on Tuesday, the first major release of the venerable software in more than a year.

Mozilla Tuesday unveiled a Web application that speeds Firefox customization by offering users several sets of pre-selected add-ons.