From Ruby-land, news that Merb will merge into Rails 3. This seems a case where combining the two efforts should improve the result. We are also noticing a significant increase in the mindshare around JRuby in all these projects as the quality of JRuby continues to increase. Added - also see the Story at SDTimes.

Crossbow is the Solaris' Network Virtualization architecture and has just been released into OpenSolaris. Crossbow provides "virtualized lanes" that will scale at high performance over many cores; see Sunnay's Introduction and Ben's two posts: Announcement and Experiments. Crossbow is useful for Network Resource Allocation and will have deep implications for our Virtualization offerings - see Michaels' note from 2008 on the topic.

From the cloud computing area, Sun acquires Q-Layer; see the Press Release. Vijay has two relevant posts: an Introduction with several good links and a Terminology Overview; Om (@GigaOm) also writes about the Acquisition. Q-Layer should be a great addition to the xVM family.

We planned it a while ago, announced it in July, and it finally happened! The core of the Sun Web Server (used in places like MLB.com and Sun's own BSC and Sun Forums) is now Open Source - see the announcements from CVR and Jyri. The ancestry of the code goes back to the Netscape Server but it has changed quite a bit; see Jyri's details. Sun Web Server 7.0 U4 is included in OpenSolaris but it is also available separately as part of the Sun Web Stack 1.4 and contains many features that complement the GlassFish Server.

Finally, from Solaris-land, a note that Sun is now doing Stricter Enforcement of the existing Patch Policy. No changes or impact on the situation for Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server patches - see our Sun's GF Enterprise Support.