InfoQ.com is the site for the Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, and Agile developer that contains daily news from domain experts, as well as lots of articles, video interviews, video conference presentations, and mini-books.
Recently, we were impressed by their link to Softhouse's five minute guide to Scrum, which is very often used by Scrum founder Jeff Sutherland at press briefings and short introductions to scrum.
We were also very happy to see that the presentation "Secure and Reliable Web Services" of our regular speaker Guy Crets can be viewed on-line at http://www.infoq.com/presentations/secure-reliable-webservices. Enjoy IT.
Bill Thompson has a very interesting article at The Register about Web 2.0 and AJAX, in which he warns for the dictatorship of the presentation layer. "If Web 2.0 is the answer then we are clearly asking the wrong question", he says and he goes on that we should not be fooled by the cool sites and apparently open APIs.
According to him, most of it is window dressing, and that may be true if all you do is add some Javascript to an application. I agree with Bill that Web 2.0 is not the solution to all problems, but Web 2.0 allows you to build brandnew, innovative applications that were not feasible, or at least not so simple to build, without. Or as Sadagopan points out that mashups are transcending new frontiers as e.g. at HousingMaps.com.
Oracle has already made several strategic acquisitions, and is adding another interesting one in November 2006 with the 440 million USD acquisition of Stellent. With IBM buying FileNet, Open Text picking up Hummingbird and Documentum becoming EMC's jewel of its software crown, the acquisition of Stellent was not really a surprise. But the fact that Oracle grabbed Stellent and not IBM, SAP or Microsoft, came as a surprise to many analysts, particularly because Oracle had a multi-vendor strategy for its Content DB as middleware for ECM vendors. E.g. Open Text is an important partner of Oracle Content DB, and hence another acquisition candidate for Oracle. Although Oracle offers all the necessary components to solve content management, it did not have an off-the-shelf solution. The acquisition of Stellent looks like a smart one because this is an excellent dedicated solution for ECM with a strong focus on Sarbanes-Oxley and compliance processes, but also because it has 4700 dedicated customers, which Oracle may now be targeting as database, Content DB and Fusion middleware customers.
Both Stellent and Open Text are - together with IBM and EMC/Documentum - in the best quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management of October 2006, as you can see in Michiel Hazen's blog and in this Gartner MQ reprint at Stellent's Web site (in PDF).
More at Stellent (the official press release), Jason Wood's blog (comments from a market watcher) and Bridging a gap to Oracle's middleware (the broader picture).