Hats off to the Project Wonderland developers. Despite Oracle laying them off, the team will continue work on Project Wonderland. According to the project blog the core group behind the 3D virtual world toolkit believes in the open source project enough to keep working on it without backing from Oracle.

Despite the layoffs, Nicole Yankelovich, who was the project team lead before being cut by Oracle, says that the project has "great momentum." Nicole Yankelovich, who was project lead before being cut by Oracle, says that the team is pursuing for-profit and not-for-profit options, and things look good:

Oracle's lingering takeover of Sun Microsystems stands to do a lot for Sun, but at the moment, the lifeboat is just out of reach. As a result of its continuing losses, Sun is dramatically slimming down — several thousand of the company's employees won't be returning after the New Year's break.

Cutting employees, of course, means cutting the things they work on, and that could spell trouble for some of Sun's less profitable ventures.

SpringSource (which, it's easy to forget, is now a division of VMware), introduced Spring 3.0 today, a major new version of the company’s Java development framework. SpringSource is targeting developers focused on web and service-based applications with the new release. This release of Spring's framework is the first since VMware's acquisition of the company, and version 3.0 is backward compatible with version 2.5. It has full REST support for web applications.