Collaborative Software, the company start-up by ex-Open Source Development Labs CEO Stuart Cohen, has licensed the Shared Assessment Programs created by BITS, the consortium of US financial houses intending to use it to create an open source program that makes vendor data more readily available through a Web Services front-end app for collecting and editing shared assessment submissions as well as an XML schema for validating them as XML documents. It's a compliance thing. More info

DataDirect Technologies has released version 3.0 of the DataDirect XQuery product, an XQuery processor that enables software developers to access and query XML, relational data, SOAP messages, EDI messages, legacy data, or a combination of data sources and provides full update support for relational data. More info

JustSystems, Inc. will promote XML?s evolving role at the XML 2007 Conference & Exposition, being held in Boston at the Marriott Copley Place on Dec. 3 ? 5, 2007. ?XML has grown up, with companies accelerating their XML adoption to support SOA and winding up with an abundance of highly-accessible information,? explained Jake Sorofman, vice president of marketing for JustSystems. ?All of a sudden, XML isn?t just about interoperability between disparate applications. It?s about making business-critical information available to executives, knowledge workers, and others who need it.? More info

Until Friday, August 31, 2007, you can buy a single-user license of Stylus Studio 2007 XML Enterprise Suite, and Stylus Studio will e-mail you a complimentary second license for your friends or co-workers. More info

JustSystems, Inc., a global enterprise software company, has announced three important additions to its Partner Program. The 4-tier program, categorized into Strategic Partner, Premier Certified, Certified and Associate designations, was created earlier this year to reflect the company?s focus on quality partners that will add value through complementary software and services to support an end-to-end content lifecycle solution. More info

The idea then came up again with the push to integrated software in the early 80s. Mitch Kapor and Lotus were selling the idea of an all-in-one package, Symphony, which was a word processor, database, spreadsheet, graphics and communication program, with a macro language tying it all together. Bill Gates proposed a different approach, let each app stand alone and share its data with other apps through a common scripting language. This idea was so good that I started a company in 1988, UserLand Software, to create such a scripting language for the Mac, which then had a rich user interface and a totally underdeveloped scripting interface. Today, the Macintosh has a rich tradition of interapplication communication, made possible by this simple idea that every app should have an API. More info

CSC has allied with Citrix on widgetry called Dynamic Desktop, a virtual desktop solution based on Citrix' XenDesktop and described as the first in a new line of enterprise IT services. It'll use it to tempt companies to put their PC applications and user data on servers guarded by firewalls and have their people access their desktops remotely and sell them on the easier administration of such a configuration. More info

Enterprise mashups - the convergence of Web 2.0 mashups and service-oriented architecture (SOA) - can create a world of opportunities for enterprises to come up with internal and customer-facing self-service, composite and 'situational' applications. These applications can be created just-in-time by empowered enterprise business users and by simply combining SOA-enabled information sources and services or SOBAs (service-oriented business application) on the intranet and Internet. More info

Rich Internet Applications pick up the ball where plain Web applications dropped it: they promise to bring the power of desktop applications to the Web. Desktop applications almost went out of fashion with the advent of Web applications. But most people still prefer the rich user interface (UI) and interactivity of desktop applications such as Outlook compared to their Web-based siblings such as GMail and Yahoo! Mail. In many cases the convenience of ubiquity compensates for the inferior or cumbersome user interface. More info

Although AJAX isn't at the forefront of, day, the SOA Tools Project - since STP is more about deploying services than a client-side approach like AJAX - there's a relationship to AJAX via Eclipse, which is based on OSGi. Eric Newcomer, who is co-chair of OSGi's new enterprise expert group, will bring the industry up to date on developments at a session that he will be giving on the opening day of AJAXWorld Conference & Expo on March 19, 2007. More info