Jun 19, 2006 News Wire

XStream is a Java library for easily converting Java object hierarchies to XML data. But now a specialized version of the library has emerged that can output data in JSON format, easily readable by JavaScript code in an AJAX application.

Though I remain skeptical at some of the nonstandard approaches being taken by the OpenAJAX Alliance, Sun has joined the initiative, which can only be a good thing. Sun has also announced its sponsorship of the Dojo Foundation.

Despite some reliability issues with certain components of Microsoft’s Atlas framework for AJAX, Microsoft is committed to releasing the framework with the next version of Visual Studio. Some of its ideas have security experts worried, however.

Google launched the new ad scheduling feature for AdWords on Thursday. “With ad scheduling, a campaign can run all day, every day, or as little as 15 minutes per week. A campaign can also run and pause several times each day.”

Much of the European Union has signed on to a plan that may include far-reaching requirements for web accessibility on government sponsored web sites.

Opera 9 will be released tomorrow, June 20th. This version includes many new developer features. Speculation is rife regarding what Opera will do at its launch event in Seattle.

Flickr chooses to deny access to its API to direct competitors like photo sharing site Zoomr.

The long-awaited major update to arguably the most popular free forum software around is one step closer to release with this first public beta release. Not for use in production environments!

The next major version of Java, also known as Java 6 codenamed “Mustang”, will include Apache Derby, a relational database implemented in pure Java. Java applications that rely on a database will not need to distribute their own database libraries.

Major development of this SAX-compliant parser for non-well-formed HTML comes to an end with its 1.0 release, which brings stability and feature completeness. Bugs will continue to be fixed as they are discovered.

Great overview of the various open source licenses that are available, with a clear decision tree to assist you in selecting the right one.

Read and comment on draft sections of the upcoming O’Reilly book “The Art of Agile Development” for free as they are written.

After much internal debate, Flickr is looking to reverse its position on granting API access to direct competitors like Zoomr. If this goes forward, this will be an excellent example of one of the big players doing the right thing in the API world.

Ayende Rahien takes a look at the early documentation for ADO.NET Entity Framework. His notes are not encouraging, and he sums up with a prediction that there is little to be excited about, and many opportunities for confusion.

ASP.NET 2.0 supports pluggable page state persisters, objects that control how the page state (the values and current states of all the ASP.NET controls on a page) is preserved across multiple page loads. Find out how to write you own!