On September 29, InfoWorld’s Executive Editor Doug Dineley proudly announced this year’s winners of the Best Open Source Software Awards or popularly known as Bossie Awards.

The annual Bossie Awards recognize the outstanding “business-oriented open source software products” currently available in the market. This year’s Bossie Awards has over 120 open source projects winners divided in the following categories: application development tools, datacenter and cloud software, desktop and mobile software, networking and security software, and big data tools. All of which were wisely selected, evaluated and recommended by InfoWorld’s editors and expert contributors. With 42 winners, Application development tools category has the most number of winners among the six.

For three consecutive years, Node.js, PhoneGap and Jenkins have been included in this category. Winners from last year such as Less, Angular.JS, Backbone.js, JQuery, D3, OpenShift, Scala, Ruby, Python were also present this year. Here is the complete list of InfoWorld’s 2014 Best Open Source Application Development Tools which software developers can choose from:

• ~D3 (Data-Driven Documents)
• ~Famo.us
• ~JQuery
• ~Atom
• ~Brackets
• ~Node.js
• ~Node-webkit
• ~Hack and HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)
• ~CoffeeScript
• ~Less (Leaner CSS)
• ~Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets)
• ~Git
• ~Mercurial
• ~GitLab
• ~Homebrew
• ~Appium
• ~Dart
• ~Express
• ~Backbone.js
• ~Koa
• ~AngularJS
• ~OpenShift
• ~Cloud Foundry
• ~Docker
• ~Java
• ~Groovy
• ~Scala
• ~F#
• ~Go
• ~Play
• ~TypeScript
• ~Akka
• ~Python
• ~Ruby
• ~Vagrant
• ~Jenkins
• ~NetBeans IDE 8.0
• ~Eclipse
• ~Apache Cordova (aka PhoneGap)
• ~Karma
• ~Clojure
• ~jq

Check out other winners for the rest of the categories:

• Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source applications – (16 winners)
• Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source big data tools – (20 winners)
• Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source data center and cloud software – (19 winners)
• Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source desktop and mobile software – (14 winners)
• Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source networking and security software – (9 winners)

Congratulations to all winners!

Last week, Oracle announced on their blog site the official launching of the newest version of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition – Java EE 8. The Java EE 8 also known as JSR 366 was started through the Java Community Process (JCP). The primary focus of improvements for the Java EE platform are enumerated below, details are posted on JCP website:

• Ease of development – using CDI to improve managed bean model
• Cloud Support – enhancement of Java EE 7’s cloud support infrastructure
• Java SE 8 – use of Java SE 8 to build Java EE 8 and benefit from its features such as “repeating annotations, lambda expressions, the Date/Time API, type annotations, Completable Futures, etc.”

The following JSRs are proposed initial contents for the Java EE 8 Platform:

• Java API for JSON Binding (JSR-367) – defined as “standard binding layer (metadata & runtime) for converting Java objects to/from JSON messages”.Schedule of Final Release: Third Quarter of 2016.
• JCache (JSR-107) – “standardize in process caching of Java objects”. Final release date: March 18, 2014.
• Model View Controller (MVC)(JSR-371) – described as”a model-view controller specification for Java EE”. Schedule of Final Release: Third Quarter of 2016.

A number of additional APIs were also submitted for possible inclusion in the Java EE 8:

• CDI 2 (JSR 365) – an enhanced version of CDI 1.1 (JSR 346), targets “modularity and Java SE support”. Schedule of Final Release: First Quarter of 2016.
• JMS 2.1 (JSR 368) – newest version of Java Message Service API, used by Java programs in accessing enterprise messaging systems. Schedule of Final Release: Third Quarter of 2016.
• Servlet 4 (JSR 369) – will help users of Java EE cope up with the latest updates in HTTP such as HTTP/2. Schedule of Final Release: Third Quarter of 2016.
• JAX-RS 2.1 (JSR 370) – newest version of Java API for RESTful Web Services, wherein “asynchronous processing” will be introduced. Schedule of Final Release: Third Quarter of 2016.
• JSF 2.3 (JSR 372)– newest version of Java Server Faces with enhancement on specification’s clarity and addition of new features. Schedule of Final Release: Third Quarter of 2016.

Meanwhile, there is also a probability that all or some of Java EE platform’s existing technologies such as Java API for WebSocket, Expression Language (EL), Interceptors, Concurrency Utilities for Java EE, Batch Applications for the Java Platform, Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE (CDI), Bean Validation, Common Annotations, Java Connector Architecture, Java Transaction API (JTA), Java Persistence API (JPA), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), and JavaServer Pages (JSP) will be updated for Java EE 8’s release.

The Expert Group for Java EE 8 is scheduled to be determined this quarter and the final release is expected on the third quarter of 2016. Oracle encourage feedbacks on this new JSR and will keep everyone posted for updates.