This year it looks certain that a new participation record will be set, more than 16,000 votes have already been recorded, as more than 20,000 SYS-CON Media readers are estimated to cast their votes in this year's Readers' Choice Awards.

Yakov Fain reaches Lesson 11 in his popular 'Java basics' series. This time he deals with how and why Java programmers working on large projects that have lots of classes usually organize them in different packages; and explores the new element introduced in Java 5.0 called static imports.

Criticizing something as wildly successful as the World Wide Web seems a bit radical and potentially unpopular. There is no doubt that Tim Berners-Lee's elegantly simple invention enabled an unprecedented revolution in the way computers are used and by whom.

This year will mark the tenth anniversary of the official launch of Java technology. It seems like only yesterday. No doubt there will be celebrations similar to the five-year anniversary, so I thought I would take this opportunity to step back in time and track Java's course.

Calling the announcement 'a huge milestone not only for BEA, but for the entire Java community as well,' BEA's EVP, Products confirmed yesterday that BEA is joining the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer and Board Member.

This year it looks certain that a new participation record will be set, as more than 4,000 votes have already been recorded in just the first seven days of voting, as more than 50,000 SYS-CON Media readers are estimated to cast their votes in this year's Readers' Choice Awards. Highlights after just one week's voting are as follows.

BEA's CEO, Alfred Chuang, proclaimed yesterday: 'A new world order is emerging and the whole thing is running on a software platform.' The statement was made as BEA introduced new telecommunications services to help provide customers with a mix of voice, data, and wireless services.

eBay, The World's Online Marketplace, has more than 114 million registered users, 10,000 developers, and over 700 live, third-party applications.

Jim Bole, Infravio vice president of products and services, will present at the Web Services Edge International Web Services Conference & Expo in Boston, Massachusetts. Bole's presentation will examine 'Best Practices in Web Services Security, Service-Oriented Architecture Policy and Governance.' The conference will be held at the John B. Hynes Convention Center from February 15-17, 2005.

SYS-CON Media, the world's leading i-technology media company, announced that its 2005 Readers' Choice Awards polls opened today, February 1, 2005, and will remain open for six months, until July 31, 2005. More than 50,000 readers are expected to cast their votes to select the best software products and services of the year for Java, Linux, Web Services, XML, Microsoft .NET, ColdFusion and Macromedia MX.

In its search for the right chemistry, BEA, which has been rearranging its office furniture for a while now, has hired an executive out of Borland and two out of Sun to man key posts.

SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com), the world's leading i-technology media company, announced today that SYS-CON.TV (www.sys-con.tv), the first streaming live i-technology television is scheduled to debut on February 15, 2005 to coincide with the first day of the upcoming Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference Expo.

SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com), the world's leading i-technology media company, announced today that the first branded blogging community, www.blog-n-play.com (TM), will go beta on February 15, 2005, to coincide with the opening day of the Web Services Edge 2005 East International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edg e2005east).

No sooner had we begun our reader-driven quest for the top twenty software people in the world than - by popular acclaim, as they say - we're going to extend the field to choose from...from forty to over a hundred. Here we bring you a sneak peek at the sixty contenders that we'll be adding now to the poll, with thanks to everyone who has proferred suggestions. Even 100 won't do this subject justice, but it will be interesting to see how the i-Technology community decides to rank them, when voting on this new, expanded group begins in February.

SYS-CON Media today announced further details of the upcoming cross-platform technology event, Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edge), to be held in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, February 15-17, 2005. More than 3,000 i-technology professionals are expected to participate this year including the show expo floor, making it the largest Web Services event of the year. The following is the official announcement of the keynotes, sponsors, conference tracks and sessions, tutorials, and the Web Services case studies to be presented during this year's three-day event.

BEA announced that a beta version of its next-generation WebLogic server, known as Diablo, is available for download, free. BEA is calling this its most significant WebLogic server release ever.

In an all-cash deal worth approximately $10.3 billion, Oracle is going to acquire 100% of PeopleSoft's shares, at a newly increased price of $26.50, a $2.50 increase on its 'best and final' offer which expired in November. PeopleSoft's board has approved the deal. 'We believe this revised offer provides good value for PeopleSoft stockholders and represents a substantial increase in value from October,' says the chairman of PeopleSoft's transaction committee, George 'Skip' Battle. Says Oracle's Ellison: 'Today we announced both a great quarter and the agreement to acquire PeopleSoft. This merger gives Oracle even more scale and momentum.'

Despite receiving 61% of PeopleSoft shares in its tender last month, Oracle hasn't yet overcome PeopleSoft's 'poison pill' provisions aimed at making a takeover too costly even for Larry Ellison. Just in case Oracle fails in its attempt to have a court remove the pill so it can move forward with its takeover, it's keeping its 'hit list' of alternative targets fully alive, said its president in an interview yesterday.

An enterprise development project deploying to the WebLogic platform needs to maintain several different domain configurations during the project's development, test, and deployment phases. Version control and continuous rollout of ever-changing domain configurations to the different environments can be a challenging task.

In a memorable discussion, Microsoft SOAP guru Don Box and Anders Hejlsberg - the 'Father of C#' - both paid tribute to Java last week at a conference in Canada.

These days Calvin Austin is one of the busiest people in the Java world: J2SE 5.0, that was also known as the 'Tiger' project, is being officially released today! JDJ's Yakov Fain was able to catch Austin, spec lead for Java 5.0, right before the plane from San Francisco to New York where he'll today be presenting the new features of the Java language to the New York Java Users Group.

In an ongoing effort to get developers to embrace its WebLogic Platform 8.1, BEA said it will once again sponsor day-long seminars across the US called dev2dev Days. The free seminars are offered to give developers insight into how WebLogic can be used to create applications.

SYS-CON Media is inviting BEA, Borland, IBM, JBoss, JOnAS, Macromedia, Microsoft, Oracle, Orion, Sun, and Sybase to an 'Application Server Shoot-Out' at the upcoming Web Services Edge Conference & Expo, in Boston next February. The shootout will be a live competition aimed at finding out which app servers support the latest WS-I standards and how they compare in terms of how many transactions they can handle, how many lines of code they require, how they react to simulated network and hardware failures and a whole range of other metrics.

What do a CNET technology columnist, 95.5 million telephone handsets, and Sun's president and COO all have in common? Answer: they all strongly favor Java. Is it a sign of better times ahead for the language once known as 'Oak'?

The so-called 'Beehive' and 'Pollinate' projects will be riding the next wave of Open Source innovation, if things go according to plan for BEA's scheme to release the source code for a large portion of its application development framework for WebLogic Workshop.

You may not be aware of it yet, but Mac OS X - version 10.3, better known as Panther - is a great Java development environment. I am a fairly recent Mac convert from the Windows and sometimes Unix/Linux world that I lived in. Maybe you are like me. Maybe aliens have abducted your friends and have turned them into Mac converts as well.

'I was sick of hearing people say Java was slow,' says Keith Lea, 'so I took the benchmark code for C++ and Java from the now outdated Great Computer Language Shootout (Fall 2001) and ran the tests myself.' Lea's results three years on? Java, he finds, is significantly faster than optimized C++ in many cases.

It wasn't all that long ago, the last issue of WLDJ if I am not mistaken, that I expressed my dismay over why so few projects in my travels were using WebLogic Workshop as the primary development IDE. And only a few readers sent in e-mails regarding their reasons for choosing another IDE over Workshop - some of which had a lot of merit (actually, all of them did). And, not being too far removed from the subject, I just happen to be on a WebLogic development project where I came in midpoint through development, and - you guessed it - Workshop was not being used.

BEA confirmed today our exclusive reports from this morning, by formally announcing that it was open-sourcing, under the Apache License 2.0, the runtime to the WebLogic Workshop application development framework.

With Web services usage on the rise, organizations are seeing a growing complexity in the enterprise systems being built. The need for a robust management solution is critical, as organizations look for better ways to monitor and control their IT environment.

Let's dive into the murky waters of modeling, describe some of its challenges, and provide, an overview of the state of business process modeling. In my first article in this series (WLDJ, Vol. 3, issue 4), I discussed the importance of architectural blueprints and best practices in order to establish repeatable ways for building robust, enterprise-wide integration solutions, for an adaptable and agile enterprise.

We often like to assume that most corporate IT organizations have kept somewhat up-to-date with all of the various technological innovations over the years, and have done so in an incremental manner. However, the reality of the situation is quite different. You may (or may not) be surprised by how many IT organizations do not necessarily ride the 'bleeding edge' wave for one reason or another.

Cedric Beust has a day job with BEA, but blogs at night instead of sleeping ('which is such a waste of time anyway,' he says). It gave him the time and opportunity to declare what above all he wants out of Java right now: he wants to be able to write Java code for the .NET platform.

SYS-CON Media, the world's leading i-technology magazine publisher, announced today that its WLDJ has applied for BPA membership. BPA International will track circulation for WLDJ based on demographic and geographic coverage. The upcoming May 2004 issue of WLDJ has a print circulation of 42,000 copies (*) and its initial statement is expected to have an average circulation of more than 40,000 copies.

Exclusive: JDJ interviews...Alfred Chuang - Founder, President, and CEO of BEA Systems: 'It's not Java on the desktop that is going to keep Microsoft from owning all computing,' he says, 'it's Java on the server. The better enterprise Java gets, the more powerful applications can be, and there's nothing Microsoft can do to get in the way of that.'

In a move aimed at helping portability of applications between rival Java application servers, Sun and IBM are going to collaborate with BEA to bring BEA's Controls to the JCP for ratification as a standard.

Casio has chosen BEA WebLogic Integration 8.1 as the software platform for its next generation supply chain management (SCM).