An plan to forge an Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) was announced by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) at VMWorld this week. Format contributors inlcude HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource. Read more »

REST meets SOA as Rich Seeley talks with XFire creator and new MuleSource hand Dan Diephouse. He rejects the criticism that REST may have trouble scaling in enterprise applications, but he argues that tools are needed to make it easier for developers to create RESTful Web services. Read more »

Summary: Out of the gate, XML was a data format to end all data formats. It was very meta – had a strong ‘data-about-data’ aspect that would allow one program to tell another program how to deal with data. But XML as a base for a standard document format has been the hot interoperability news item lately, as Microsoft went before ISO to standardize Office Open XML. Clearly, whether any and all flavors of XML can be ‘standards’ for interoperability is an underlying matter of contention. Some are more equal. Read more »