For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions of applications. For deployment, BundleWorks supports local and remote deployment and provides a library of functions to handle common deployment tasks. For maintentance, BundleWorks tracks all bundle actions and configuration changes providing a complete history of activity.

Since Ed Zander led Sun into the valley of the shadow of death back, what? over five years ago now, it has never recovered. And there's a good chance the same thing may happen to Motorola. With a year left to run on his contract, Zander quit yesterday and clearly not a moment too soon given the events of the last year or so. There are people who would have gladly ridden him out of town on a rail months ago and it's assumed he's resigning now to avoid getting fired. Zander, whose telecom experience consisted of answering the phone, was brought in four years ago to narrow the lead in phones between a first-place Nokia and a second-place Motorola. Motorola is now in third place, losing ground to both Nokia and Samsung, its market share sheered from 20.7% a year ago to 13.1% now.

Mitch Randall, the company's founder and Chief Technology Officer, adds that 'With the recent introduction of our first products, we made a step towards eliminating the need for consumers to regularly lug around multiple bulky chargers, adapters and cords for every battery-powered mobile device they carry, or to struggle with congested outlets and power strips.' Randall advises that 'our products offer true environmental benefits. By eliminating the need for each device to use its own wall plug, our products reduce standby electricity drain when devices are not actually plugged in. Our products further minimize the need to dispose of used AC adapters and chargers when consumers upgrade to newer models of mobile devices, as they regularly do.'

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

My money is on targeting iPhones and WM devices until Android actually shows up live and in the wild on more than 500,000 devices. Also, don't be fooled about the Android developer challenge. That's not $10million in prize money, that's a $10 million bribe in order to obtain the critical mass of engaged developers they know will be required for anything useful to come out of the Android project. If they don't have truckloads of developers begging to get their apps onto the phone, their framework will fail and all the mobile partners will go back to business as usual.

iPhone Developer Summit (www.iphonedevsummit.com) announced today Kevin Hoffman as the Tech Chair of the Conference. The letter from the Tech Chair at the conference Website contained the following message: What's the impact of the iPhone going to be on the delivery of rich content to mobile users? How does Google's new Android differ from the iPhone SDK and iPhone Safari development? When should you use the iPhone SDK versus developing web applications?

Keynote Competitive Research announced Europe's first performance index for the mobile Web. The Keynote Europe Mobile Index is a weekly performance ranking of 10 popular European mobile sites compiled from more than 26,000 measurements taken on multiple carriers from different geographical locations. Keynote recently announced a U.S. mobile index. The Keynote Europe Mobile Index provides insight into the overall performance and availability of popular mobile sites and can be used by customers to benchmark their mobile site performance against the biggest names in the industry.

After Google's Android announcement, at least four big guys should be irritated: Sun Microsystems, Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.Google approaches telephony from the open source side - Linux-based platform, uses Java but does not care about sticking to Java ME - they are planning to use fast OpenGL libraries and are not afraid to be hardware-specific.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

I want to counter a lot of the press and blog comments stating that the release of the SDK is a reversal or some kind of about face. If anybody had done their homework, they would know that Steve Jobs himself stated that he wanted to create an environment that supported native 3rd party app development, but that they didn't have it 'right' just yet, and that he wanted people to be patient.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Egenera, which claims it's the archetype Virtualization 2.0 company to VMware's Virtualization 1.0 - and is going put its PAN Manager software on other people's hardware to prove it - has convinced Fujitsu Siemens, which OEMs Egenera's BladeFrame servers, to put PAN on its own industry-standard Primergy servers. It's Egenera's first PAN partnership since the American company said last week that it was setting up a software line of business around PAN and would move the software out through fellow OEMs. Fujitsu Siemens says the widgetry will form part of its FlexFrame Infrastructure, its latest milestone in its Dynamic Data Center strategy of creating business-responsive IT using the latest virtualization and automation technologies.

Virtual appliances represent a new opportunity to streamline and simplify software distribution for virtual environments. With a virtual appliance, software vendors can ship thoroughly tested, standard configurations that require minimal installation effort. In this session, Troan will discuss best practices on how to build virtual appliances including: 1) Building an integrated collaboration suite appliance. 2) Creating a virtual appliance image with a simple click of a button. 3) Reducing build size by creating a tailored operating system that reduces the amount of space to install, install time and the security exposure created when providing ongoing updates to the software.

My own personal install of Leopard seems to be having periodic trouble completing a shutdown on the 17' MBP. Annoying? Yes. Worthy of posting something inflammatory such as 'wrong with Leopard's spots'? Doubtful. So, in looking at eWeek's Microsoft Watch's latest article, I leave you with this parting thought: If it walks like a shill, acts like a shill, and smells like a shill....

So it seems as though a few minutes after I wrote this blog entry, Google put forth the announcement about Android, a project named after the company they purchased a while back. Google is essentially spearheading an open source project that is an open SDK for mobile devices that runs on a variant of Linux optimized for mobile devices. This could be good or bad for them - they'll need a critical mass of partners who adopt this platform to provide a large enough ecosystem to attract developers. Devs are freaking busy these days, and none of us have time to learn yet another SDK without some reasonable assurance that someone will actually use the software we're building.

Google made its first public move today to put its brand on the mobile sector, announcing an Open Handset Alliance of 33 partner companies committed to advancing an open source platform called Android. Google's partners, gathered apparently over the last year, include T-Mobile, Motorola, Sprint Nextel, China Mobile, KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, Telecom Italia, eBay and Telefonica as well as HTC, Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia, TI and Wind River. Obviously Apple, Microsoft and Nokia aren't members.

Google is supposed to be inching closer to unveiling its fabled 'Gphone,' according to the Wall Street Journal Tuesday. The paper says that in the next couple of weeks Google should trot out 'advanced software and services that would allow handset markers to bring Google-powered phone to market by the middle of next year.' Google is supposed to want to deliver stuff like Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube and its almighty search to handsets and Gphone's Linux-based widgetry would be completely open to rally third-party developers to write additional - albeit potentially insecure and hackable - services. Ads would follow. The Journal says Google is chasing deals with T-Mobile USA, 3 UK and Orange SA.

Now that Leopard is out and everyone is, I suspect, feverishly reformatting their laptops and desktops to install the retail copy of Leopard, developers can finally start sharing their Leopard code samples. Rather than me sitting around making up stupid reasons why such-and-such code sample might be useful to you, I figured I would ask what code you want to see written in Leopard. Keep in mind that I will not write code samples that do not use garbage collection or the new property syntax, so you'll just have to suffer through that.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

Readers of TIME's November 5 edition, which will be on on US newsstands tomorrow November 2, will find that the iPhone is TIME Magazine's Invention of the Year 2007. Among the reasons cited are 'It's touchy-feely' and 'It will make other phones better.' The award also recognizes that the iPhone is not just a phone but a platform.

According to Umang Gupta, chairman & CEO of Keynote, 'Zenprise's BlackBerry customers will greatly benefit from this service. Now, Zenprise customers will be continuously aware of an end user's experience with their carrier network. Keynote's emphasis on real-time network visibility is a crucial component in this partnership and highlights our ongoing investment in the mobile experience. By partnering with Zenprise, the leader in BlackBerry trouble shooting software, customers receive immediate notification of any carrier, server infrastructure, or device issue that impacts BlackBerry users.'

Leopard introduces a bunch of amazingly powerful new controls, but one of my favorite new controls is the NSCollectionView. This control works a lot like the FlowLayoutPanel if you're familiar with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It essentially is a layout container responsible for laying out a collection of subviews. You can either manually create the subview collection, or you can set the content array of the NSCollectionView. This is a really powerful option because if you can set the content array, you can also bind it. For this demo, I've bound the content array of the NSCollectionView to an array controller. If you follow along (or if you cheat and just download the code), you'll notice that the NSCollectionView subviews automatically request Core Animation layers. This means that, by default, new items fade in as they are added, but you can change that transition using the animations tab of the inspector.

The first Rich FAQ we are presenting is the long overdue Mobile Ajax FAQ and was created by Ajit Jaokar, Rocco Georgi and Bryan Rieger. We welcome comments and feedback. AJAX is a browser technology that involves the use of existing Web standards and technologies (XML/XHTML, DOM, CSS, JavaScript, XHR - XMLHttpRequest) to create more responsive Web applications that reduce bandwidth usage by avoiding full page refreshes and providing a more 'desktop application-like' user experience. The term AJAX was coined by Jesse James Garrett in his seminal document at Adaptive Path.

Gee whillikers. After hours on Monday Apple, the PC company people love to love, started behaving like Google. While its Q4 conference call was in progress its stock price went up almost $13 to over $187, a personal best, a position it then failed to hold. Even if it pulled in its December gross margin and had doubts Mac could outdo itself, September was a scorcher and December promises to be better still, it said, projecting earnings of a whopping $1.42 a share on revenues of $9.2 billion, better than the $1.30 on $8.7 billion that the Street has been imagining.

There's a really interesting (free) article by Amol Sharma in the Wall Street Journal about Google's expected cellphone software, and whether Google will be able to do the necessary deals with the mobile carriers. In addition to providing core Google apps (search, maps, YouTube, etc.), the rumor is that the Google mobile operating system will be open to developers who want to use the phone's services, such as GPS data.

Buongiorno, il mio nome Amanda Chapel. I have 15 plus years experience in marketing communications. I am a former vice president in the Consumer Marketing Group at Weber Shandwick, one of the world's largest PR firms. Prior to Shandwick, I spent about 10 years bouncing around various top agencies. This includes senior posts at Cone Communications in Boston and Porter Novelli in Chicago. I cut my teeth at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising in London.

Voice Perspective 2.0 will help contact centers and businesses improve the voice quality delivered to customers whether or not the call is originating either from a traditional PSTN landline-based phone or an IP-enabled phone. This is an important distinction as most VoIP calls today travel over hybrid networks. Keynote stands alone in its ability to measure customer experience of voice service quality for such a hybrid network from the end user perspective.

Of the nearly 1.4 million iPhones sold since it was introduced in June, an estimated 250,000 of them were purchased by people trying to unlock them so that they can use the iPhone on a cell phone carrier other than Apple's dedicated partner, AT&T. This admission came yesterday from Apple executives who were announcing record results for the three months that ended Sept. 29.

I will be attending the Ajax World Conference next week in Santa Clara. I will also be at the opening reception on Monday and the conference party on Tuesday. Over the weekend Jesse Liberty blogged about this as well 'If you are going to be at AJAXWorld, look for me on Twitter, and let's see if we can set up a meeting or a lunch.' Other faculty members, according to the Ajax World website, who will be at these parties include...

SYS-CON Events announced today that 'AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West' main sponsorship opportunities are now sold-out! Limited number of expo and event sponsorship opportunities that are still available are expected to be completely sold before the end of the month. The new sponsors who joined the conference this week, and are not yet listed on the conference Website, will also be announced later in the week.

I will be teaching a one day Bootcamp course on Ajax at the AJAXWorld Conference in Santa Clara, California on September 23, 2007. Details are at http://aja xbootcamp.sys-con.com I will be expanding the Ajax construction tools section from the Ajax Bootcamp I taught in New York at the SOA World conference. I am very impressed with TIBCO GI and Sun jMaki

Dojo Toolkit Co-Creator Dylan Schiemann, Laszlo Systems Co-Founder & Chief Interface Architect Bret Simister, Alacrity Ventures Founder Christopher Allen, UI Architect Joe Johnson, Laszlo Sr. Software Engineer Ben Shine, Vodafone Senior Technology Strategist Daniel Appelquist, Next-Gen Web Solutions specialist Matthew David, and more. These are the high-caliber speakers lined up by SYS-CON Events to speak in the iPhone Applications track at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West taking place next month at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA ? one of just ten simultaneous content-rich tracks at biggest version yet of the world?s leading AJAX, Rich Internet Applications & Web 2.0 event.

The inaugural iTVCon - Internet Video Conference & Expo (November 12-13, 2007) is building out its program and the Conference Advisory Board is busy sorting through the hundreds of proposals for technical and strategic sessions that have been coming in. Final deadline for proposals is September 10, 2007.

AJAXWorld 2007 West will take place on September 23-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California, and will offer a new dedicated 'iPhone Track.' Another dedicated track will offer a comparative education opportunity for conference delegates on emerging RIA tools, including a Diamond track on OpenLaszlo and sessions on Microsoft's Silverlight, Adobe's AIR and Sun's JavaFX.

Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What's this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web front end of your Java applications? Do not miss an event in NYC this Monday, that is created for people who think that they are way too busy to take several days off and spend them in the class. Just take one day off and attend the Real-World Java event. The discounted rate for this event is $395. To get this discount, enter the coupon code ?JUGgold' while registering