Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt jailed for six years

One of Bollywood's biggest names, Sanjay Dutt, was today jailed for six years on the last day of an epic trial into India's worst terrorist attack, the bombings in Mumbai in 1993 that claimed the lives of 257 people.

Dutt, whose early success was founded on action hero roles but later turned his hand to comedy, was found guilty of illegally possessing three AK-56 rifles, a pistol and ammunition in a trial that lasted more than a dozen years.

The actor claimed he feared for his life after the notorious "Black Friday" bombings, which were allegedly staged by Mumbai's Muslim-dominated mafia in retaliation for deadly Hindu-Muslim clashes a few months earlier.

However, the judge rejected this defence and also refused bail. "The crime was not brutal and did not result in any harm to anyone," said the judge, Pramod Kode. But it was an "eminently dangerous act", which encouraged others to break the law.

Dutt stood weeping before the judge, after pleadijng with folded hands to be given bail to prepare an appeal. "Don't be sentimental, be calm and quiet," the judge told the actor. Dutt was also fined 25,000 rupees (£305).

The muscular 48-year-old, who has 1bn rupees' worth of films riding on him, was cleared of conspiracy charges in the blasts. He is likely to serve a little more than four years in prison as he has already spent 18 months in jail awaiting trial.

Bollywood was quick to support the actor, who has garnered sympathy for his long battle with alcohol. Actress Kirron Kher told reporters Dutt had "suffered enough for years [and] he has been exemplary in behaviour."

The sentencing once again raised questions about India's film industry, which has long been dogged by rumours of links to Mumbai's criminal underworld. But trade analysts questioned whether the impact would be long-lasting.

"Sanjay Dutt was not convicted of terrorism. People will make the distinction and he will be welcomed back by the masses. He's got a big following. Even if he does four years he can come back and start afresh," said Komal Nata, who runs Film Information, an industry guide.

The sentencing of Dutt, along with three others, ends the Mumbai bombings trial, which dragged on for 12 years and saw more than 100 people convicted, 686 witnesses and 13,000 pages of testimony. A dozen people were sentenced to death, while 20 others face life sentences.

Adobe ColdFusion links to AIR

Adobe will ship its ColdFusion 8 application development platform Monday, offering faster performance and basic linkages to Adobe's AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) technology.

ColdFusion is a server technology for building Internet applications. AIR, which is Adobe's planned software for deploying Internet applications on the desktop, can use ColdFusion as a server component. AIR applications can connect to ColdFusion for enterprise data and services, said Tim Buntel, Adobe senior product marketing manager for ColdFusion. AIR had been known as Apollo and is only available in a beta form at this point; general availability is expected later this year.

Although ColdFusion 7.0.2, released last year, could offer basic data exchange with AIR, version 8 improves data synchronization and performance significantly, according Adobe. Future versions of ColdFusion could expand connectivity to AIR, Buntel said. For example, development tools could be built for this purpose.

Also highlighted in version 8 of ColdFusion is multithreaded support within the ColdFusion language. "It allows developers to run individual parts of their application in separate threads in the application server, so the processing of your application can efficiently use the resources of the server," Buntel said.

Another feature is a Server Monitor capability, which is a rich Internet application that gauges metrics like memory usage and page response times.

Adobe received far greater response than expected to the public beta program launched in late-May. Anticipating that 5,000 developers would download the product, Adobe instead had nearly 14,000 downloads, Buntel said.

A beta user cited the product's speed compared to previous versions. "I've seen, depending on what we're doing, at least two times faster [response times] and in many cases [it has been] up to four or five times faster," said Terry Ryan, IT director at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

The school's student portal application is being written entirely in ColdFusion 8, Ryan said. ColdFusion 8's Server Monitor, meanwhile, has saved the school from having to write its own monitoring tools, he said.

ColdFusion competitors most commonly are PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), ASP.Net, and Ruby on Rails, Buntel said. But these technologies have a more limited reach than ColdFusion, he said.

"Their emphasis is primarily on traditional Web-based applications and being part of Adobe, we're going beyond just HTML," with capabilities for PDF, Flex, and Air as well as connectivity across Java and .Net, Buntel said.

Version 8 enables invoking of .Net objects and generation of PDF documents. Interactive debugging is offered based on the Eclipse IDE.

The enterprise version of ColdFusion 8 costs $7,499. It enables deployments with a J2EE application server. The standard edition, for smaller installations, costs $1,299.