There have been some sad developments within the Engine Yard Rubinius team that I’d like to address head on. Earlier today, I had the unfortunate task of reducing the team size to 2 people, which meant laying off the rest of the team.

After a few maintenance updates, Google is readying a more significant Chrome update that fixes a known security issue and delivers an improved V8 JavaScript interpreter. The updated version also addresses some of the missing end-user features, such as more privacy options, a separate bookmark manager and a re-worked pop-up blocker that no longer blocks annoying pop-up windows by loading them in a minimized window state.

Adobe Systems, facing greater competition from Microsoft, is updating its Flash platform with new tools for building user interfaces for Web and enterprise applications.

Malo is ultra small css library for building web sites.

Ruby is an easy-to-learn, dynamic, object-oriented programming language with dynamic typing and automatic memory management. This refcard provides a quick reference to language elements and many important API functions for quick lookup.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sun Microsystems Inc (NasdaqGS:JAVA - News). said on Friday it will cut 5,000 to 6,000 jobs, as the economic crisis compounds the company's struggles with depressed demand for its high-end business computers.

Layoffs at Sun and the long-term impact on their level of support for Java development

The O'Reilly School of Technology (OST) has announced the addition of a new Java Programming Certificate Series to its current list of offerings. Designed to introduce beginning and entry-level programming students to Java and object-oriented concepts, the program helps students progressively attain the advanced skills they need to compete in today's career market. With satisfactory completion of the series, students earn a Certificate for Professional Development from the University of Illinois Office of Continuing Education.

On February 10, 2007, Steve Yegge told us the Next Big Language would arrive within the next 18-24 months. That means that it will happen sometime within the next three months. I can hardly wait!

The Java Persistence 2.0 Public Draft is scheduled to be released this week, so I thought it would be a good time to review some of the new features that you can expect to find. If you're familiar with the first draft of the JPA 2.0 specification (the Early Draft), you know that it focused primarily on the area of O/R mapping improvements. The Public Draft builds on these improvements, and provides ways to leverage them through extensions to the Java Persistence Query Language and through the new Criteria API.

CampMobile is first native Basecamp client that is now available in Apple AppStore. There is a support for viewing/adding/editing/deleting of messages, todo lists, todo items, milestones and comments. All your Basecamp items are saved locally on the iPhone, so you don’t need internet connection all the time. There is a nice Dashboard view and most of the other functionalities you would expect.

There is now an AOT compiler that can compile .clj files to .class files on disk. This can be used to save startup time, deliver applications without source, interop with bytecode-based tools etc.

Emastic beta 3 comes with some structural improvements percent-grid.css and absolute-grid.css. These components will give even more flexibility, elasticity and absolute positioning. Also semantic.css to improve the naming convention and code organization.

PHP V5.3 is designed to prepare developers for PHP V6 when it comes by adding new features, cleaning up existing features by tweaking the functionality, fixing platform-specific issues, and deprecating old features that won't be in future versions of PHP. In this "What's new in PHP V5.3" series, discover the new features and see how they can be used in your Web application.

Today IIS team has made the URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 Release To Web (RTW) available for download. This is a final, production-ready release that is officially supported by Microsoft.

I'm beginning to write some real thing based on Liftweb. The more code I wrote, the more bugs of Scala plugin were fixed. Not only bugs are being fixed, I also created a Twilight color theme for this plugin. And an Emacs color theme is also on the road. When NetBeans 6.5 is official released, I'll put a new Scala plugin too.

This book will teach users to use NetBeans functionality to automate many of the tedious or repetitive tasks frequently encountered when developing applications using JavaBeans. Utilizing NetBeans, users will be able to implement the Model-View-Controller design pattern by using JavaBeans as the model component. They can also add messaging functionality to enterprise applications through the Java Messaging Service API and through message-driven EJBs.

The 1.0.1 bugfix version of GrailsUI has been released. This version fixed some trivial bugs that were leftover from the 1.0 release as well as several bugs that the community uncovered in the last couple weeks.

You ever have one of those days where you think you are the smartest man in the world and the best programmer at your place of work? Then some clever kid comes along and does something that speeds up your code by a few seconds/minutes? Ease your self. Just because that person just solved your problem, doesn't mean they are smart.

We’ll probably never know (at least until Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz blogs about it). But the new deal, announced on November 10, between Sun and Microsoft is ironic, if nothing else, given the twisted history between the two over Java.

You may have already read about it in the various news outlets and blogs covering the announcement, but if you haven’t I’m excited to spread the word that G2One - The Groovy/Grails company - has been acquired by SpringSource. The result is that Groovy and Grails join the growing number of excellent Open Source projects delivered by SpringSource.

SpringSource acquires G2One, the company behind Groovy and Grails!

SpringSource hopes to attract Java developers in the enterprise and dynamic languages fans with its acquisition of Groovy and Grails specialist G2One. The company is today expected to announce that it's buying G2One's team of six experts for an undisclosed package comprising cash and stock. G21 may be small but customers included social network LinkedIn and UK TV broadcasting giant BskyB, who've built back-ends and content management systems on Grails for online users.

On Monday last week, you saw us continue to convert that brand awareness to revenue - with the introduction of a full line of MySQL optimized systems. By our estimates, there are about 11,000,000 MySQL users on earth - our new systems can triple their application performance. So we've made free evaluation units available to MySQL users (via our Try and Buy programs). Click the image to the right to listen to Marten Mickos and John Fowler talk about the opportunities ahead.

We actually announced that we are going to ship FX Desktop 1.0 on December 2. We have an event planned in San Fransisco. We are on track for the deliverable. We felt like it was great to make the announcement overseas as opposed to doing it in the US and give all of our partners in Korea a "you heard it here first."