Best of this Week Summary 20 April - 26 April 2009

• The big bigger biggest (sad?) news this week was of course Oracle going to buy Sun (here's Oracle's announcement). Rod Johnson (from SpringSource) is wondering what Oracle actually did buy. He concludes luckily one of the great strengths of Java is its developer and open source community, thus Oracle does not own the future of Java. Makes sense.
  
  Alef Arendsen (previously SpringSource, now JTeam) wonders which company/group will be the next, since only a few large opensource bodies are left: "the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), products in the Eclipse Foundation, products carying the JBoss name and last but not least, a broad set of products under the SpringSource umbrella".
  
  Sun "invited Oracle president Charles Phillips and chief corporate architect Edward Screven to an employee-only town hall last Wednesday", answering employee questions. In short: Oracle loves Sun's software (Java, MySQL) and hardware, but the future is unclear for OpenOffice and Sun's cloud effort.
  


• A beginners tutorial on how to integrate GWT with PHP using XML as the "bridge" between the two technologies.
  


• Manage your Amazon S3 with freeware CloudBerry Explorer. Makes it for example easy to move buckets between the US and Europe.
  
  Cloudkick is a free tool which allows you to migrate your Amazon EC2 AMIs to to Slicehost (owned by Rackspace).