Builder AU has an article comparing 5 commercial IDE's, VS.NET, Sun Java Studio Creator, BEA Web Logic Workshop, Borland C# Builder, and WebSphere to see how they stack up as a RAD tool.

In this article, Brian Boyce shows how a freeware product called Codesmith can be used to kick-start your projects by demonstrating the development of a set of templates to generate Select, Insert, Update, and Delete stored procedure code together with a corresponding C# data access layer to call the stored procedures.

AfterStep is a Window Manager for X which started by emulating the NeXTSTEP look and feel, but which has been significantly altered according to the requests of various users. This release has improved stability and speed, an Ident module, updated docs, and added menu keyboard shortcuts. Wharf animation has been fixed, and there are many other bugfixes.

Eclipse is a kind of universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular. This is a maintenance release to fix serious defects present in the previous release. These changes only affect some plug-ins and features.

In this article, Chet Hasse talks about some of the new features of Tiger (Java 1.5) intended for programmers of desktop applicatons. Some of the highlights include OpenGL rendering for accelerated graphics capabilities, and hardware accelerated image copies have been extended to all image methods with no programmer intervention required for hardware accelerated copies to be used when they can be used. CUPS support and printing of JTable objects has also been added, along with several other major desktop enhancements.

Ch is an embeddable C/C++ interpreter for cross platform scripting, 2D/3D plotting, shell programming, numerical computing and embedded scripting. Ch supports Windows, Linux,Solaris, HP-UX, FreeBSD and Mac OSX. Ch can be easily interface with binary C/C++ library, andbe embeded or plugin into other C/C++ application programs as scripting engine. Ch Standard Edition is free for commercial and non-commercial use in all platforms.

Imendio, based in Sweden, provides services in application and platform development based for Gnome/GTK+ on Linux, *BSD and UNIX based systems. Today, we interview its founder, Mikael Hallendal (also known in the Gnome developer community as the author of Gossip, Blam! and DevHelp applications) about the business of Imendio, the challenges GTK+ poses and more.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.4-Beta1 is a preview of the next generation of Red Hat's comprehensive suite of enterprise operating systems - designed for mission-critical enterprise computing and certified by top enterprise software vendors. More info and download locations over at DistroWatch.

Perens said the legal arrangement between Sun and Microsoft was "creepy." The agreement, he added, "essentially says that Sun will not stand together with the open source developers who contributed to their own product." Sun spokesperson Russ Castronovo, however, said Perens "can make whatever call he wants to make."

Not so long ago Richard Dale announced Korundum, a RAD environment for KDE. And we should not forgetting Kommander and the official Qt Designer. It seems that KDE/Qt have more than enough RAD tools around. Now another KDE developer has announced Rubydiam, his efforts to bring JIT optimization to Ruby. The results could well be a competing runtime for Free Software development.

With GNOME 2.8 out the door, work on the next version, 2.10, is progressing nicely. There is some new and exciting software, and it's looking to be pretty sweet. There are still many things to be done, though, and if you want to help, there's a pretty good list with things just waiting to be done by you. Maybe even more important are the Nautilus bugs (over 1300 of them) and so its project leader is asking the community to get to work and fix as many as they can.

Some NetBSD 2.0-RC1 builds for those how wants to try this RC1 for the i386 and sparc64. These are unofficial builds without extra patches, made by a NetBSD enthusiast/developer. UPDATE: Jan Schaumann of NetBSD writes:

Solaris Kernel Developer Eric Schrock is bloging more about the Solaris vs. Linux issue and linux kernel moneky Greg is answering on his blog. More here. Elsewhere, Sun is looking into making OOo's XML format an ISO standard and at license options toward opening the Java source code; here are more thoughts on those, by engineer JBQ.

The number of enterprises migrating from Windows to Linux is a growing concern for Microsoft. But it's not a one-way street. Some companies-unhappy with their open-source experience-are making the switch back to Windows.