One important factor of choosing an online service is about data. Is my data safe? Can I pull out my data any time when I decide to stop using the service? Both are important factors I consider when choosing a service. Services from providers like Google have their brand name, and I blindly know that they keep my data safe. But what happens when you sign up for new services?

FileIt.in is now providing this safety-net for you now. You may export your data anytime (in Atom format). This is if you want to migrate from FileIt.in to any other service, or if you just happen to be cautious and want to have another backup (FileIt.in has nightly backup scheduled).

Terracotta has now acquired popular OpenSource Java scheduling library Quartz. This comes as a news few months after its acquisition of Ehcache. I am happy about this acquisition as it will ensure continued support and improvement of the Quartz project.

I was surprised when my friend Senthil (he is a Subversion committer) broke the news that Subversion project is moving to Apache Software Foundation. Read the official Collabnet announcement.

Google’s OpenSource blog announces a brand new language: Go. No, it is not a language running in the JVM. Reading the installation doc, it is understood that Go compilers support two OSes: Linux and Mac. By the way, did I mention the blog post announcing the language has signatures including Rob Pike and Ken Thompson?

This is the mail I received:

We regret to inform you that on November 30th, 2009 we will
be suspending the zembly service.

More than three years ago, we started this project with
the goal of making it easy to create next-generation Web
apps. Our original tagline was "Build the web, using the web,"
and the ideas we were incubating around platform-mediated Web
applications, Web API mashups, and social programming were
brand new.

We learned a lot along the way. Your confidence and enthusiasm
helped us improve the project and do amazing things that we
never imagined when we began this journey.

Thank you to everyone who's been with us through the ups
and downs. It's heartening to see that many of the best ideas
pioneered in zembly have started to appear elsewhere. With your
support, we're proud to have contributed to the DNA of the Web.

For more information about the zembly suspension, please refer
to the FAQ section at http://zembly.com

Finally, if you have questions, please contact us at
zembly-support@sun.com

All the best,

-- The zembly team
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
4150 Network Circle
Santa Clara, CA 95054

I liked Zembly when SUN first started it. It was damn easy to create mashups. But unfortunately, like SUN’s other products and services, I knew Zembly was sucking SUN’s money with no business model.

There have been some prominent releases in the past few weeks:

• Apache POI 3.5-FINAL: For reading/writing Microsoft Office format files from Java.
• Jetty 7.0: A servlet container akin to Tomcat. Easily embeddable and ideal for use in testing.
• XOM 1.2.3: New version of the XML parser written by Elliotte Rusty Harold.

My favorite UML tool, Jude UML (I use the free community edition) will be renamed to astah* UML. I don’t know why this difficult-to-remember and difficult-to-pronounce change in name for an established brand. The name change is scheduled on Oct. 19^th.

Post acquisition by Facebook, the software behind FriendFeed has been OpenSourced. Tornado is a Python WebServer/Framework. The distinguishing feature of this WebServer is that it is non-blocking and designed for high-scalability.

Facebook in the past has OpenSourced many of their frameworks and tools.

My article Portlet Development with Liferay published in the August 09 edition of Linux for You is available online.

Tom Baeyens (founder and lead of JBoss jBPM project) has announced the availability of jBPM version 4.1.