SoftJin, an EDA(Electronic Design Automation) software development services company, todayannounced its free source code for Anuvad*, a suite of GDSII-OASISlibraries and GDSII to OASIS translator, has been downloaded by over 400,since its introduction last year (November, 2004). The downloaders includelarge IDMs, foundries, mask shops, EDA tool suppliers, fablesssemiconductor companies, design services companies and design consultantsfrom over 40 countries. The GDSII to OASIS translator in Anuvad compressesGDSII design files by up to 20x.

TongTech, one of China's leading middleware technology companies, and the world's biggest UNIX system vendor, Sun Microsystems , announced today that a cooperation agreement, based on JAVA, would be established and a Business Orientated Architecture (BOA) would be launched. The announcement came at a publicity meeting held today by the two parties.

Network Testing Lab's, today announced thepublication of its XML Infrastructure Front-End review. According to testsdone by Network Testing Labs, Reactivity, Inc.'s Gateway 2400 product wasthe leading application in this review. Products from Actional(www.actional.com),DataPower [recently acquired by IBM, (www.datapower.com)], Forum Systems(www.forumsys.com), Reactivity (www.reactivity.com), and Sarvega [recentlyacquired by Cisco, (www.sarvega.com)] were comparatively reviewed. Thereview was published in the December issue of Business CommunicationsReview.

The HR-XML Consortium announced today theformation of an initiative to deliver a web services (WS) profile forbackground checks and other employment screenings. HR-XML's WS profile forscreening will build upon the Consortium's existing Background Checkingspecification, which enjoys significant support among leading employmentscreening providers.

Stylus Studio announced the availability of a new XQuery tutorial entitled 'Schema-Aware Queries and Stylesheets.' This is the third tutorial of Dr. Michael Kay's XQuery series which contains, 'Learn XQuery in Ten Minutes', and 'An Introduction to FLWOR Expressions'. 'Schema-Aware Queries and Stylesheets' is packed with information for novices and experts alike!

Cape Clear Software today announced the appointment of James Pasley as chief technology officer (CTO). In his new position, Pasley assumes the role of Cape Clear's lead technologist and is responsible for ensuring that Cape Clear's enterprise service bus (ESB) technology supports the evolving needs of the company's global customer base.

Oracle today announced general availability of the Oracle(R) Identity and Access Management Suite, a comprehensive, integrated portfolio of products that protect applications, critical systems and data from unauthorized access.

In this article I am going to introduce you to the latest version of the Berkeley DB XML, version 2.2.8. Berkeley DB XML (BDB XML) is built on top of the well-known Berkeley Database (BDB). BDB XML is an open source, native XML database. Like its ancestor, BDB, it's an embedded database. It provides APIs for the Java, C++, Perl, Python, PHP, and Tcl languages. It supports the popular XML query languages XQuery and XPath 2.0. I will show you how to use BDB XML in two ways. This month I will introduce the BDB XML shell, and next month we will explore using BDB XML with Java. BDB XML has a lot of features, and I will try to cover the most important ones.

SYS-CON Events (www.sys-con.com) announcedtoday the 'Real-World AJAX One-Day Seminar' (www.ajaxseminar.com) to takeplace on Monday, March 13, 2005, in New York City. Delegate and sponsorregistration information can be obtained at the conference website,www.ajaxseminar.com, as it becomes available.

Imagine a fresh business relationship between ACME Corporation and Partner. As a result of this relationship, ACME wants to grant Partner limited access to one of its core internal applications. They do this, naturally, by exposing a Web service.

Leveraging 15 years experience in developing single-source publishing solutions, Mekon has designed the first XML publishing adaptor to enable Adobe FrameMaker users to utilise the powerful print pagination capabilities of FrameMaker and FrameMaker Server within DITA based XML publishing systems.

Sleepycat Software, makers of the world's most widely deployed open source developer databases, announced that Berkeley DB XML is used by MapServer Enterprise, a new software platform that lets developers build and manage web-based geospatial applications. Berkeley DB XML serves as the common repository for storing connections to geospatial data and the rules for presenting the data, allowing MapServer Enterprise users to easily create interactive maps and define the appearance of map features such as roads, freeways and city borders. Autodesk recently announced that it is releasing the MapServer Enterprise code as open source to the new MapServer Foundation an independent non-profit organization with the mission of supporting and promoting open source web-based mapping tools.

Altova, creator of XMLSpy and other leading XML, data management, UML, and Web services tools, announced a new addition to its award-winning line of XML applications. Altova SemanticWorks 2006 is a visual Semantic Web development tool with support for Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) creation and editing.

Seagull Software has announced the availability of LegaSuite For CICS, a comprehensive solution for transforming CICS applications into SOA assets. Users can implement LegaSuite with no changes to their CICS applications. LegaSuite includes features such as integrated BPM workflow capabilities and modeling tools that can be used to easily model services and business processes.

Software AG has announced enhancements to four XML Business Integration products - Enterprise Business Process Manager (EBPM), Enterprise Information Integrator (EII), Enterprise Service Integrator (ESI) and Enterprise Legacy Integrator (ELI). The products now better support Process-driven Integration to enable customers to efficiently use their entire SOA infrastructure.

Software AG has made its Adabas, Natural, EntireX and supporting products compatible to the new IBM System z9 mainframe and flagship operating system, z/OS version 1.7. Software AG customers' mission-critical databases and applications can benefit from the increased system availability, security and encryption capabilities of the System z9 mainframe.

A pair of lawsuits has been filed and domain registrars are lined up about the block in opposing a recently proposed extension of ICANN control over domain name extensions. The battle seems destined to last awhile.

Members of the OASIS consortium approved XML Catalogs as the standard specification for resource mapping. XML Catalogs 'allows machine processing to deal with realities encountered on the Web today'.

Vancouver-based Layer 7 Technologies has released an update to SecureSpan Gateway, their Web Services gateway product. SecureSpan Gateway, XSpeed Edition focusses on performance through the use of 64-bit processing and Tarari Inc.'s advanced XML ASIC hardware.

Forum XWall Web Services Firewall Service-Oriented Architecture security solution integrates market-leading Web services security policy enforcement with CA's eTrust TransactionMinder for transactional identity management; CA's eTrust Antivirus for virus management; and CA's Web Services Distributed Management for service provisioning.