Carol Sliwa

Sun Microsystems Inc. said attendance jumped to 14,000 at its JavaOne conference this month in San Francisco. Yet Sun continues to struggle in the commercial tools market, despite its cachet as the inventor of Java.

Sun Microsystems Inc. said attendance jumped to 14,000 at this week's JavaOne conference

Developers at this week's JavaOne conference will get a chance to check the progress that tools vendors have made in their long quest to ease Java programming so they can better compete against Microsoft Corp.

Don't believe reports you might hear about the death of electronic data interchange. Not only is EDI alive more than 20 years after its birth, it's also thriving at companies that use it to exchange purchase orders, invoices and other information with trading partners.

Many North American retailers are preparing to comply with an approaching Jan. 1, 2005, "Sunrise" deadline that requires them to be able to process one more digit than they're accustomed to when scanning bar codes.

Fry Inc. has been using Microsoft Corp. software to design, develop and host e-commerce sites during much of the past eight years. But that's expected to change.

IBM Corp. officials said turnout for last week's inaugural EclipseCon 2004 exceeded expectations by drawing 634 paid attendees from 226 companies and 23 countries. And while that may reflect a broadening interest and, in some cases, outright enthusiasm from developers for the open-source Eclipse platform, tools and plug-ins that IBM created, there was little doubt which company was leading the way.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. isn't the only major retailer to issue an RFID edict to its top suppliers.