ReadWriteEnterprise

We covered the story last week about the RIM open letters, and my colleague Klint Finley gave three suggestions about how RIM can survive. And then there was a story by Chris Nerney in ITworld talking about how key developers are ending their support for Blackberry, including Seesmic and others.

Since the publication yesterday of a damning open letter to RIM's senior management team from an anonymous employee, Boy Genius Report has two published more open letters. Also, the Financial Post reports that RIM is forming a committee to examine leadership structure in response to analyst pressures to spit the co-chair and co-CEO roles.

The blogosphere is abuzz with people talking about what RIM did wrong, and what the company should do next. You can tell us what you think RIM's biggest mistake was in our poll, and I've talked about what RIM should do before.

But today I want to focus on what RIM has done right, and why it's too early to dismiss the company and its technology.

Dashboard software-as-a-service provider Netvibes and enterprise Java platform builder eXo have teamed up to create Netvibes Studio, a cloud-based development environment for building cross-platform widgets. Widgets built with Netvibes Studio can run in any browser, and can be deployed instantly into the Netvibes environment. Better yet, they will work in most major widget platforms, including iGoogle, Windows Vista, Apple Dashboard, Live.com, iPhone, Opera and more.

Ceylon is a new enterprise development language being developed by Red Hat employee Gavin King. The team plans to release a compiler later this year. King detailed the project at QCon Beijing 2011, and slides from his presentation were published earlier this month. When finished, it will run on the Java Virtual Machine and feature static typing, automatic memory management and other features missing from Java. According to King's presentation, the Ceylon team will strive to make the new language "easy to learn and understand."

It's currently in a very early stage. In a blog post, King writes, "All we have right now is a specification, an ANTLR grammar, and an incomplete type checker." Regarding whether it's a "Java killer," King wrote, "Ceylon isn't Java, it's a new language that's deeply influenced by Java, designed by people who are unapologetic fans of Java. Java's not dying anytime soon, so nothing's killing it."

Microsoft is trying hard to become an open source friendly company, and it's made some strides since the days in which Steve Ballmer was calling Linux a cancer. But today, everyone pays lip service to open source. It's harder to walk the walk than to talk the talk, as we explored in our article on how to spot open-washing.

Microsoft has open-sourced various projects, is working with developers to run open source programming languages on its operating systems and recently hired a senior director of open source communities.

eXo offers an open source Java framework for enterprise social software tools. It includes reusable components for building content management systems, user management tools, activity streams, e-mail integrations, mashups and more.

This week it announced Cloud IDE, a Web-based development environment for cloud applications.

Fabric is a Python library and command line tool for automating deployment and system administration tasks. "Fabric is an awesome tool," writes the London-based developer known as Tav. "Like Capistrano and Vlad, it makes deployments a lot simpler than with shell scripts on their own."

However, Tav discovered that as deployments got more complex, he started wishing for "cleaner and more powerful API." That's why he decided to add some new features to the Fabric source code and create his own project. It can be found here. Tav's changes aren't part of a proper fork, but that's something that's being discussed.