Open Source is used to describe an open process of software development in which source code is made available for use or modifications by the users or other developers so as to enhance or customize the software for their own purposes. Open Standards represent common agreements that enable communications and are available for all to read and implement. Often, open source development makes use of open standards for operating systems or software development tools, but the purpose of open source is to support continuous software improvement while the purpose of open standards is to support common agreements that enable communications that is available to all. Some of the prominent open domain tools and technologies are discussed below: ž| Java Technology Java Technology has brought about a fundamental shift in the way applications are developed and deployed by assimilating platform independent execution into the realm of network computing. It allows development of enterprise-worthy programs that can run on a wide variety of platforms extending from servers to hand held devices and smart cards. Java platform is basically a software platform (often called Java Virtual Machine - JVM) running over multiple hardware platforms. Different types of JVMs are available that cater to specialised needs of development and deployment in terms of computing power, network capabilities, memory, storage etc. Java3D provides easy-to-use high level constructs to develop interactive and animated graphical applications that can be deployed on virtually all environments. It targets a wide spectrum of three-dimensional application environments like Virtual Reality Systems, 3D Games, CAD Systems etc. where the basic Java principle of “Write Once, Run Anywhere” is demonstrated in letter and spirit. ž| PostgreSQL PostgreSQL is a time tested open source relational database system with a proven architecture that ensures reliability, scalability and data integrity. It supports ANSI SQL 92/99 standards and runs on all major operating systems. Postgres has all the ingredients needed for an enterprise database system like point in time recovery, save points for nested transactions, online backups, asynchronous replication, support for multibyte character encoding and unicode. It supports storage of large binary objects like images, audio and video and has interface for most of the programming and scripting languages. Postgres has the most liberal open source license (called the BSD license), which grants freedom to use, modify, and re-distribute the source code in any form (open / closed). ž| Extensible Markup Language (XML) XML, a World Wide Web Consortium standard, is a markup language for documents containing structured information. XML is used to describe data and focuses on what the data is, while HTML is used to display data and to focus on how data looks like. XML was created to structure, store and to send information. XML enables the exchange of structured information over the World Wide Web or the corporate intranet, for further manipulation, processing and storage. The ability of XML to combine data with information describing its structure makes it incredibly useful as a data exchange technology. It is fast becoming the standard for data interchange on the Web. ž| Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) VRML can be considered as a three dimensional equivalent of HTML. It is a modeling language for describing three-dimensional objects and multi-participant interactive simulations. It also specifies the appearance of these objects and other properties such as lighting. A VRML world may be animated and highly interactive or be entirely static. Worlds may be based on real places or objects or be totally imaginary or abstract. To view a VRML world, a stand-alone VRML viewer or a plug-in to a Web browser is required. VRML97, an international standard (ISO/IEC-14772-1:1997), is the current version of VRML and is the equivalent of VRML2.0.