The 2008 Summer Olympics are starting today! As you can read here, Sun and specifically Zembly.com (a new online site to easily create and host social applications) is taking this opportunity to launch myPicks Beijing 2008, a social betting site described here by Prakash.

If you wish to find out more about Zembly, this interview with Todd Fast and this demo of the platform should give you a idea of the possibilities. This service is powered by Solaris, GlassFish, MySQL and is running on Network.com. Zembly.com helps you build not only Facebook applications, but also iPhone web apps, Meebo applications, Google Gadgets, and OpenSocial applications.

On the topic of Sun's implication in the 2008 Olympics, check out this brief description of the datacenter powering the NBCOlympics website. Yet more details here.

Arun is back from vacation with a screencast and detailed steps to build a map of the places he's been visiting in 2007. It uses jMaki to encapsulate the Google Map widget and Jersey (JAX-RS' Reference implementation) as the main technologies but also JPA for the database access, NetBeans 6 for the tooling, and GlassFish of course for the overall runtime.

This is a nice end-to-end demo with Ajax, RESTful Web Services, and a relational back-end. Check it out.

The Stories blog is steadily adding new deployment experiences. The latest one is from DaliCMS, a CMS system what uses AJAX and includes a WYSIWYG editor, version and publication management, permission management and separation of look and feel and content.

While clearly building on Java EE 5, this application also builds on a variety of technologies such as Google's Web Toolkit, the Lucene Search Engine, RSS feeds, MySQL, and Adobe's Flex. Read more on DaliCMS here.