TurboGears founder Kevin Dangoor has announced the release of TGWebServices, a multiprotocol web services toolkit for TurboGears. TGWebServices provides a super simple API for creating web services that are available via SOAP, HTTP->XML, and HTTP->JSON.

If there’s one thing the Java community has an addiction for, it’s frameworks. There are 100s of Java frameworks and surprisingly there’s even a passionate community of users behind many. However only a handful of frameworks have made it big. Struts and WebWork figure in that list.

The two frameworks recently announced their plans to merge into Struts Ti / Struts Action Framework 2.0, which has resulted in some anxiety and uncertainty in both communitites.

In this interview we speak to Patrick Lightbody, project lead for WebWork and now a committer at Apache Struts. He answers several WebWork + Struts queries and also talks about Ajax frameworks and Ajax support in WebWork. The interview concludes with Patrick’s thoughts on Ruby on Rails and its relevance to the Java community.

Open Source software has had a major role to play in the growth of Java. Apache and in particular the Jakarta project has been the birth place of several top Java components like Struts, Ant and Tomcat. In this interview, we speak to Henri Yandell, the current chair of the Jakarta project.

Henri speaks about open source software and its contribution to Java. He also shares his thoughts on why one should contribute to open source and his views on open sourcing Java itself. He also tells us about projects he thinks have a lot to offer to Java developers and which projects hold promise for the future.

In this interview, we speak to Satish Talim, a well known IT name in India. Satish has been working with Java for almost a decade.  Here he shares his Java experiences, his views on open source and also has some useful advice for those starting off with Java.