Software > Application ServingEssentials

Offline access to Web applications is becoming an important trend, with Adobe and Google looking to make the most of this new direction.

Seeking to beef up the capabilities of its recently launched Beehive collaboration platform, Oracle said Monday it has bought the intellectual property of Tacit Software and hired all of its software engineers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Microsoft is aiming to use the Internet as a hub to "mesh" data, devices and applications that are always updated and available from anywhere. Microsoft's new Live Mesh, which it announced as a limited technology preview Tuesday and planned to detail further here at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo, combines hosted services for storage, sharing files and peer-to-peer connections to allow multiple different devices to work together and users to access updated applications from anywhere, the company said.

In another acquisition involving companies focused on open source, proponents of the Spring Framework and Apache software have joined forces in a merger being announced Tuesday.

Sun Microsystems Monday unveiled the second major version of its GlassFish open-source application server, adding an enterprise-class feature like clustering and central administration to the Java EE 5-based software.