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Tech giants chart research goals Power consumption, parallelism, and the rapidly-expanding world of mobile communications are among the leading areas of research and development currently being investigated within some of the IT world's largest companies. U.S. agencies: More application testing needed Two U.S. government agencies are embracing performance-engineering processes and application testing throughout the development cycle as a way to avoid costly fixes after deployment, officials there said Wednesday. August 29, 1:40 p.m. PDT Pundits on parade: What’s next in tech You’ve heard of Christmas in July, that classic advertising gimmick designed to lure shoppers into stores despite the oppressive heat and humidity. We’ll, we’ve got New Year’s in August, which invites you to stay indoors and read “The next big things in IT” -- 15 predictions about the future of technology.  August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Java unit tests you forgot to run Unit testing -- a form of software testing done by developers using hundreds of small, fast tests -- is a central practice at sites that are committed to software quality. By following a dictum of "unit test, rather than debug," developers and their managers identify problems early and solve them as they go, giving them confidence in the code under development and assurance that a project will not founder once development completes and the quality assurance engineers start testing. July 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT Software more art than science, says Microsoft's Mundie Ever wondered why Microsoft software needs continually to be patched and updated? Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie believes it's because software development is still more an art than a science. June 5, 5:58 a.m. PDT Microsoft tests more Windows Live services Microsoft continues to test updates to its Windows Live online services, including a service launched last year that allows users to submit blog posts simultaneously to more than one blogging platform. May 31, 11:21 a.m. PDT Homegrown high-performance computing Once the domain of monolithic, multimillion-dollar supercomputers from Cray and IBM, HPC (high-performance computing) is now firmly within reach of today’s enterprise, thanks to the affordable computing power of clustered standards-based Linux and Microsoft servers running commodity Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. Many early movers are in fact already capitalizing on in-house HPC, assembling and managing small-scale clusters on their own. April 23, 3:00 a.m. PDT What the enterprise can learn from consumer technologies Today’s corporate end-users are far more tech-savvy than their productivity with IT tools indicates. After all, screen-deep in IMs, widgets, and elaborate consumer Web apps, they’re proving themselves well-versed in the production and distribution of content as facilitated by the consumer Web 2.0 craze. April 9, 3:00 a.m. PDT Light makes right for virtual machine performance Runtime performance is an aspect of virtual machine qualification that often goes overlooked. Many IT shops wrongly assume that virtualization performance is tied to the underlying hardware, discounting the impact of the controlling virtual machine monitor or hypervisor. In reality, the efficiency of the virtualization layer can literally make or break the scalability of a virtual machine-based deployment. And as the test results show, it’s often the lightest-weight solution that delivers the best raw VM performance. March 22, 3:00 a.m. PST More IT war stories Off the Record, the real-world slice of life that graces the last page of InfoWorld, is one of our most popular columns. I know this from reader surveys and from all the e-mail I receive about it. As reader Roland Sickenberger put it recently, “It’s my favorite part of the magazine, kind of like a ‘Dilbert come to life’ thing.” March 5, 3:00 a.m. PST IBM, Cisco soft launch IPTV in Europe IBM and Cisco Systems have "soft launched" an IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) with HD, video on demand, and other capabilities at a demonstration center at the IBM Industrial Solutions Center in La Gaude, outside Nice, France. January 30, 2:41 p.m. PST Back to school: Getting girls into IT Despite the success of various education initiatives in the past several years, there’s little doubt that the shortage of women in technology begins on the playground. As such, many industry leaders and experts believe the long-term solution to the gender imbalance in IT lies in women technologists going back to school -- way back, to high schools and even elementary schools to mentor young girls, who too often give up on math and science at an early age. January 29, 3:02 a.m. PST Activism provides competitive advantage for IT Encountering another woman working in technology was a rare event for me when I started out in IT many years ago. In the years since, women have made significant strides, sometimes against great odds, proving their mettle as both tech execs and engineers. January 29, 3:01 a.m. PST Gender crisis in IT You don’t need a degree in statistics to recognize that IT is a men’s club. Just walk the floor of any tech conference or, in all likelihood, your own office — XY chromosomes everywhere you look. January 29, 3:00 a.m. PST DevPartner Fault Simulator takes on .Net fault handling In electronics engineering, a fault simulator predicts what will happen to a circuit when a component malfunctions, without having to actually install a bad component in the circuit. DPFS (DevPartner Fault Simulator) applies a similar idea to software: It shows you what will happen to your .Net application when an abnormal situation occurs, without having to actually create the situation. January 19, 3:00 a.m. PST Technology of the Gods January is named after Janus, the two-faced Roman deity of beginnings and endings, who reportedly was able to look both forward and back. So for our Jan. 1 issue, we pay homage to the mythological immortal with our seventh annual Technology of the Year Awards, an analysis of where IT has been and where it’s going in 2007. January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Review of reviews It’s coming up on closing time for 2006. All around us, everyone is going into holiday mode. Not to be curmudgeonly contrarians, InfoWorld will be following suit, taking a one-week break before returning on Jan. 1 with our first print issue of the year. (It’s really only a semi-hiatus; InfoWorld.com will continue to perk over the holidays with a slightly reduced slate of stories.) December 18, 3:00 a.m. PST Good ideas take time Two years ago, I publicly floated the concept that IT should start thinking more like entrepreneurs. What a disaster! I was speaking at a meeting of CTOs, and I mentioned that I’d heard of a few IT departments that were focusing, at least in part, on creating saleable new products and services for their companies. I asked the group what they thought of the idea. December 4, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 InfoWorld 100 Awards: Education Open Source Lab at Oregon State University www.osuosl.org 24/7 On-Demand Systems and Applications Availability Project Lead: Corey Shields, Infrastructure Manager Project Description: Provides free hosting for the Linux Kernel Project, the Apache Software Foundation, Debian Linux, Gentoo Linux, OpenOffice.org, KDE, Mozilla, and Drupal. The lab's size has more than tripled in the past 18 months and hosts 130 servers. The servers run a variety of Linux distributions, mostly Gentoo and Debian. They host a range of Apache-based Web services, source control systems, content management systems, wikis, and many underlying databases, mostly MySQL. The project leverages Splunk, Xen, and Cfengine combined with Revision Control. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Redefining innovation Innovative ideas are a dime a dozen, according to Jim Andrew, senior partner at big-time consultancy BCG. In fact, at most companies, coming up with great concepts for a product, service, or process isn’t even an issue. But turning those ideas into money … ah, there’s the rub. October 30, 3:00 a.m. PST How to bungle a software upgrade Ten years ago, I was the IT manager at a successful software company whose main product was aimed at large insurance companies. It was a DOS app that read records from large data files, did a little processing, and passed the results to other apps downstream. It wasn’t particularly pretty, but it was accurate -- and it was fast! It worked in batch mode, processing thousands of records per minute, which was a critical feature, considering how many records our clients needed to manage each day. September 26, 3:00 a.m. PDT Amid investigation, HP nets new contracts See correction below September 21, 4:40 a.m. PDT Surgient delivers virtual test labs Test-lab automation software that leverages virtualization to ease fundamental IT operations has started to emerge. September 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft partners with Satyam in Asia Microsoft and Satyam Computer Services opened two business intelligence software testing and development centers in Asia on Tuesday, hoping to usher in a new era for Chinese financial applications. September 5, 6:09 a.m. PDT The case for altruism The first timeI heard about Wikipedia, I thought, This has no shot. Why would highly qualified people devote their energies to an encyclopedia they couldn’t make a dime on? September 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT Hackers still important, Red Hat exec says Volunteer hackers still play an important role in open-source software development despite the many companies that pay developers to work on open-source products, according to Michael Tiemann, Red Hat's vice president of open source affairs. August 29, 4:47 a.m. PDT Software sleuthing in the field While I was reading Ellen Ullman’s novel The Bug last month, life imitated art. The protagonist in that story is a programmer who grapples with a fiendish bug. It strikes intermittently and, to add insult to injury, the testers can never manage to capture the core dump that might yield the clue as to why. August 23, 3:00 a.m. PDT Telecommunications: Grappling with M&A mania The challenges telecommunications carriers face are not so different from those of their enterprise customers. They’re just a lot bigger. And IT managers are meeting them by pursuing consolidation -- that is, reducing the number of systems and personnel -- with a vengeance. August 21, 3:00 a.m. PDT Enerjy CQ2 quantifies development project progress With all the attention paid to the various ways of managing software development, one would think a product that quantifies and displays the progress of projects, teams, and individual developers would be a common tool. August 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT Phone enables Linux application tests Trolltech plans to begin offering developers a Linux-based phone that can be used to test how mobile applications work on a live cellular network, the creator of software development tools said on Tuesday. August 15, 7:05 a.m. PDT Oracle enhances Linux pretesting Oracle is doubling the number of Linux systems pretested by its Validated Configurations program. August 15, 5:27 a.m. PDT Does “built to last” apply to IT? Over the weekend, I bought an amazing antique chair: a fancy wooden office swivel chair in practically mint condition, including all its original cast-iron hardware. Although probably made between 1900 and 1915 (the patent date is 1897), it’s remarkably modern, with fully adjustable height, tilt, and back support, like the best Aeron chairs of today (well, its wooden surfaces are a tad stiffer). With any luck, it will last another 100 years and be just as functional. August 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT Software testing product also writes code Agitar Software plans to ship a software testing product next year that will test a developer’s code and, if necessary, automatically generate alternate bug-free and more efficient code, according to an executive of the company. August 10, 5:48 a.m. PDT Parallels pushes virtualization into overdrive Client virtualization meets many needs -- security sandboxing, development, client lockdown, access to platform-locked applications or content, and safe remote access, to name but a few. But it is accepted that client software virtualization is too slow and resource-hungry to be of practical use to professionals. As a result, client virtualization has gone virtually nowhere. August 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Quest brings sweet simplicity to database benchmarking As applications become more and more complicated, and businesses grow more reliant on electronic transactions, benchmarking becomes increasingly important. Businesses could really never get along without benchmarking, and some are starting to feel the pains of neglecting this process as their business needs grow. July 13, 3:00 a.m. PDT Broaden your options: Don’t fear native code I have prepared an account of the history of .Net and Java that’s intended to balance more fanciful post-mortem accounts (of .Net and Java, not of me). It reads thus: Sun created Java to cash in on the success of Visual Basic and to convince development managers that C++ coders are all slobbering toddlers playing with nail guns. Sun did grant C++ dispensation for “performance-sensitive applications,” a category that covered most of Sun’s software catalog. Microsoft created .Net to keep Java from gaining traction and to put that cross-platform nonsense to rest once and for all. One OS, one run-time, many languages was the best way to go. C#, the Microsoft alternative to Java with the honesty to use “C” in its name, still kept the pencils and paper clips away from the inmates, except, of course, for those developers working on performance-sensitive applications, a category that covered most of Microsoft’s software catalog. July 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT Watch your step -- the boss may be out to get you Several years ago, I signed on with the project management office of an international food services company. My first assignment was to head up a team guiding an enterprisewide general ledger upgrade. Most of the coding and data scrubbing would be performed by my team, but experience had taught me the importance of end-user participation. So I was thinking about UAT (user-acceptance testing) from my first day on the project. July 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT Interview: Black Duck swims in IP waters Intellectual property issues have become a paramount concern in software development projects lately, with a great deal of the angst arising from the use of open source software. Forging a business model to address this problem, Black Duck Software provides a platform to identify intellectual property during the software development process. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill spoke with Black Duck President and CEO Douglas Levin, a former Microsoft executive, this week about Black Duck and issues pertaining to intellectual property and open source. June 29, 12:00 p.m. PDT Update: Ozzie's illustrious IT career takes another turn Within minutes of the official Microsoft announcement Thursday that Ray Ozzie has stepped into the role of chief software architect, his official biography at the company Web site was updated to reflect this latest development in what was already an illustrious IT career. June 15, 5:02 p.m. PDT Open source education Graham Glass wrote a blog entry this week that touched on two of my favorite themes: open source and education. In the middle of a project based on the red-hot Ruby on Rails platform, he took time out to explain how he found, and worked around, a Rails limitation. Digging down to the roots of the problem took six hours of investigation. Crafting the work-around took just six lines of code. June 7, 3:00 a.m. PDT Don't upgrade Web software, just keep improving it When I logged in to my bank’s online system to pay some bills last night, I was greeted with the following message: “Bill payment system upgrade completed.” May 31, 3:00 a.m. PDT Developers turn blind eye to security Mary Ann Davidson, chief security officer for database giant Oracle, remembers the first time she heard her company's marketing scheme that advertised its database products as "unbreakable." May 25, 6:54 a.m. PDT Upstart startups Startups aren’t typical fodder for InfoWorld stories. For that matter, we don’t devote all that much ink to tech companies in general, preferring to focus on technologies, products, and strategies that help IT do what it needs to do. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Tech startups to watch Startups are back! or at least, startup fever is back. Scan the latest numbers from PricewaterhouseCoopers and you won’t find any hockey sticks -- the level of investment in enterprise-related technology startups has actually remained fairly flat, hovering between $1.5 and $2.3 billion per quarter from 2003 through 2005. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Akimbi virtualizes the application test bench In the average datacenter, a lot of IT resources are spent on preproduction application testing. Servers, networks, databases, and applications must all be deployed, followed by a series of installs and uninstalls for various versions of the application environment being put through its paces. The more homegrown applications you create, the more staff hours you burn on this repetitive but crucial work. “It’s all quite churny,” says James Phillips, CEO of Akimbi. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT A casting call for my screencasting experiment I’d like to invite some of you to join me in a journalistic experiment. As you know if you’ve been following my work through the years, I preach what I practice. My analytical perspectives flow from my own hands-on work. However, my experience is necessarily limited to certain styles: Web programming, lightweight integration, semistructured data, collaboration. May 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Akimbi makes virtual labs real Akimbi Slingshot is one of several products in a nascent product category called virtual lab automation. Slingshot and other tools, such as Surgient’s Virtual QA/Test Lab Management System (VQMS), enable IT test sites to make good use of virtualization technologies by simplifying the process of configuring, deploying, capturing, and simultaneously running multiple VMs. May 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT Update: Microsoft settles antitrust suit in California Microsoft Corp. Tuesday reached a tentative US$70 million deal to settle a California class-action antitrust lawsuit, according to a statement by the law firm representing the plaintiffs in the suit. May 2, 4:45 p.m. PDT ClickTracks and HitsLink cull Web site stats without the stress Web sites are an important conduit between customers, potential clients, and employees, so it’s not surprising that organizations invest heavily in watching how their sites are used. For this job, enterprises often turn to the big guns in Web analytics -- Coremetrics, NetIQ, Omniture, or WebSideStory -- because they present visitor behavior from practically any perspective. But this complexity can mean hours of trying to set up and then harvest useful data from reports. Even more difficult is using reports to spot potential click fraud. April 14, 3:00 a.m. PDT Start plotting your Vista migration map Office 2003 to Office 2007. Windows XP Pro to Windows Vista x-of-6. It's all looming on the horizon, and even though that horizon moved to early 2007 as of this week, it's still going to spawn headaches if you don't make adequate preparations. To avoid ruining your Fall, you're best off planning your user-migration process now rather than in, say, November. March 23, 3:00 a.m. PST Product Previews Parasoft brings BPEL testing, SOA governance to SOAtest Parasoft has released SOAtest 4.5, an update of the software test and analysis solution for Web services and SOA implementations that adds governance over development and test processes, broader test management capabilities, and automated testing of BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) and BPEL-based processes. Version 4.5 also brings direct integration with Mercury Test Director and IBM Rational TestManager. Now available for Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux, and Solaris, the new edition starts at $3,995. SOAtest 4.5, Parasoft March 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Cassatt unveils Java server virtualization software Three-year old startup Cassatt is extending its server virtualization software to J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) applications, the company said Monday. March 6, 2:23 p.m. PST Agitator 3.0 puts Java code through the wringer Anyone with a 2-year-old knows that one of the most effective ways to test your software is to put it in front of the child: If there’s any odd combination of clicks and inputs that will crash the program, the child will invariably find it. Agitator 3.0 is certainly far more rational in its testing procedures than a toddler, but it takes a similar tactic, handily testing your Java code by sending over a maelstrom of test values to ferret out errors. February 23, 3:00 a.m. PST Microsoft adds new features to Windows Live Microsoft Corp. this week introduced enhancements to its Windows Live portal (http://live.com), the entry point for users to access its Web-based services. January 26, 3:14 p.m. PST Lint traps bugs at compile time The lint utility, which is shipped with some versions of Unix, traces its roots back to the days when compiling even modest programs took a long time. The utility was designed to check code for obvious errors and typos and remove them (as one would remove lint from clothing -- hence the name), so that an entire compilation cycle would not be wasted due to a spurious comma or semicolon. January 26, 3:00 a.m. PST Coverity and Klocwork code analyzers drill deeper Remarkable increases in hardware performance are enabling the design and creation of tools that were simply not possible years ago. With two processor cores tearing through 3 billion instructions per second, it's now possible to devise tools that perform rich, very thorough analyses very quickly. January 26, 3:00 a.m. PST Survey: CIOs strive to improve business processes A recent survey of global chief information officers (CIOs) found that using IT to make improvements to a company's business processes is the top priority for them in 2006, according to Gartner Inc. January 23, 11:37 a.m. PST Wall Street Beat: Earnings bring mixed results Earnings season blew in with a vengeance this week, with disappointing fourth-quarter results from industry bellwethers Intel Corp. and IBM Corp. offset by better-than-expected reports from other vendors. January 19, 4:20 p.m. PST Nasdaq to cut Mercury in wake of accounting mess Shares of software maker Mercury Interactive will be removed from the Nasdaq stock exchange on Wednesday because of Mercury's failure to file financial reports on time, Mercury announced Tuesday. Losing its Nasdaq listing is a blow that will further hinder Mercury as it works to repair the damage from an accounting debacle. January 3, 8:57 a.m. PST Top technologies of the year Welcome to our first issue of the year. For those of you who took a break, re-entry into the heady universe of work may be a bit discombobulating. Fortunately, last Saturday, the world’s ever-considerate timekeepers saw fit to give us an extra sliver of time -- a leap second-- to prep for the new year. And now, with the pop of the cork (or was that the buzz of a pager?), we’re ready to herald 2006, a potential banner year for the enterprise. January 2, 3:00 a.m. PST Tech reviews for the holidays Even IT takes a holiday now and then. Same goes for the InfoWorld staff, which chills out by taking a one-week break following the publication of this, our 51st and final issue of the year. December 19, 3:00 a.m. PST Microsoft grooms Virtual Server to be a true VMware challenger Virtual PC was nice for Windows power users. But for developers and sys admins testing against specific OS images and doing similar business-oriented tasks, Virtual Server 2005 is the only thing out of Redmond that might make us stray from VMware. Fortunately, after slipping a couple of ship dates, Microsoft released Virtual Server late last year to semi-enthusiastic hand clapping from its customers. December 8, 3:00 a.m. PST 2005 survey spots trends in software development Software developers are often important augurs of IT technologies’ direction and rate of adoption. Managers who responded to trends among developers would have been the first to detect the growth of Linux and the open source movement, the emergence of Java as a significant platform for server-based computing, and the arrival of integration technologies such as XML and Web services. November 30, 12:30 p.m. PST Put your load testers to work To enable predictive and scalable performance, a testing strategy should be injected throughout the development lifecycle. November 21, 3:00 a.m. PST Prep your Web apps for stellar performances High-performance Web sites and apps don't happen accidentally. A detailed performance and scalability testing strategy is needed throughout the development lifecycle -- and that requires a good load-testing solution. November 21, 3:00 a.m. PST Working for Dilbert's boss I’m the software QA manager at an enterprise application development company -- and all my boss needs is pointy hair and an Etch A Sketch for a computer to be a direct replacement for Dilbert’s boss. A few months ago, he calls me into his office and asks how long a particularly large project will take to run through a complete QA test-fix-and-verify cycle. November 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Compuware aims for hacker-proof ASP.Net applications Driven by a constant stream of well-publicized and highly disconcerting breaches, the demand for software security has spawned numerous tools that analyze code bases and search for any vulnerabilities that a cracker could potentially exploit. October 31, 3:00 a.m. PST Jtest 7.0 passes with honors Parasoft Jtest 7.0 is like a Java code development assistant on a SoBe Adrenaline Rush intravenous drip. Not only does it do source analysis, perform coverage analysis, and manage unit test production, execution, and tracking, but now it provides on-the-fly generation of functional tests for everything from stand-alone applications to container-supported servlets and EJBs. September 19, 4:00 a.m. PDT The buzz about fuzzers Writing perfect secure code is hard. Daniel J. Bernstein has probably come the closest to it in practical, publicly released software. With his almost maniacal drive for security perfection, he has written multitudes of software that remain unbroken. September 9, 4:00 a.m. PDT Dirty words, take II My column "IT's Seven Dirty Words" -- a subjective list of terms that shouldn't be repeated in polite IT company -- generated piles of e-mail from readers who were quick to add a few choice words of their own. In the interest of sharing, let me reproduce a few of their suggestions. September 5, 4:00 a.m. PDT VMware sends in the clones to ease testing IT professionals are constantly pressed to do more with less and to do it faster. The latest version of VMware Workstation proves a valuable tool in achieving that evasive goal. With it, administrators have the ability to test multiple images for desktop and laptop deployment simultaneously, or to test every code change to an application sequentially to see which has problems, or to test myriad Microsoft security updates before deploying them on mission-critical servers faster and more easily than ever before. August 22, 4:00 a.m. PDT Decoding analyst-speak How many industry analysts does it take to change a light bulb? We’ll get back to you on that. But first, wouldn’t you like to purchase our Illumination Industry Survey, which predicts that yearly spending on light bulbs will reach $3.7 trillion by 2010? August 22, 4:00 a.m. PDT IT's seven dirty words Remember the George Carlin routine “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television”? (No, I’m not going to print them here; if you’re really curious, Google ’em.) I got to thinking the other day that IT has its own set of dirty words. Try saying any one of these in polite IT company, and someone will hand you a bar of soap to wash your mouth out. My filthy seven: August 15, 5:00 a.m. PDT Farewell, CTO Connection If you haven’t checked out this week’s columns yet, let me be the one to break the bad news: Chad Dickerson is hanging up his InfoWorld CTO spurs and heading off to Yahoo, where he’ll be toiling away in the brave new world of search. August 8, 5:00 a.m. PDT Software's common DNA Here are five species of application that seem, at first glance, to have little in common: mainframe “green screen,” Win32/VB, Java/Swing, Web browser, and .Net WinForms. An enterprise application portfolio is likely to include members of each of these species. Nobody chooses this diversity; it just happens, and it complicates everything from development and deployment to maintenance and testing. August 3, 5:00 a.m. PDT Mercury extends reach of application-testing tool Mercury Interactive recently released an updated version of its Business Process Testing QA (quality assurance) tool, adding new user-acceptance features to the software and expanding its integration with other Mercury testing tools. August 1, 9:30 a.m. PDT Memory Firewall monitors apps at run time When it comes to foiling hackers, Saman Amarasinghe views the world in stark terms. August 1, 5:00 a.m. PDT Open source on Windows -- an unholy alliance? I have a confession to make. Sometimes, when I’m trying out an unfamiliar open source component, I cheat. Even if the software I’m working on will deploy to Linux, I’ll sometimes develop it on Windows first. July 6, 5:00 a.m. PDT Exclusive: CodeAssure 2.0 seeks out security holes in your software The regular release of software patches to protect applications from hackers suggests that safety from malicious attacks remains a difficult and elusive goal. Part of the problem is that security is not wired into software developers’ thinking the same way quality and usability are. Application security only emerged as a key issue once internal applications were exposed via the Web to all passers-by, including crackers and miscreants. June 24, 5:00 a.m. PDT Code jag in Vegas About two years ago, a funny thing happened during a stay in Las Vegas. Up against great implementation odds, I got in touch with my inner hacker. June 21, 5:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft Research aims to ease development BANGALORE, INDIA -- Microsoft Research is working on a technology that will enable software developers and system integrators (SIs) to develop and modify enterprise business applications at a higher abstraction level than basic coding, according to a researcher at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore. June 13, 4:51 a.m. PDT Debugging SOA Last month on my blog, I wrote about how my choice between two bookmark-sharing applications -- Rubric and Scuttle -- tipped in favor of the latter when I couldn’t debug a database-related problem with the former (infoworld.com/2833). Rubric, like most Perl-based software, relies on a bunch of CPAN modules. In this case, the Class::DBI module, an object/relational mapper, was throwing an error. I’m sure the cause was something simple, but when I began to spelunk around inside Class::DBI and its dependent modules, I concluded that I was on a slippery slope. June 1, 5:00 a.m. PDT Exclusive: e-Test 8.0 earns very good marks With the latest release of e-Test Suite, Empirix continues its tradition of providing Web site developers with point-and-click simplicity that makes creating and executing test scripts a breeze. However, the new version only partially addresses one of my major gripes about the 7.0 incarnation: the lack of an integrated scripting language to allow for true customization and extensibility of the test scripts. April 25, 5:00 a.m. PDT Anatomy of an IT disaster: How the FBI blew it Some FBI agents ruefully refer to the trilogy project, a massive initiative to modernize the FBI's aging technology infrastructure, as the "Tragedy" project. It certainly has all the earmarks of tragedy: the best intentions, catastrophic miscommunication, staggering waste. March 21, 6:00 a.m. PST Compuware targets untested code One of the little-discussed realities of software development is that many packages ship without having been fully tested. Despite the new emphasis on continuous regression testing and the sophistication of quality-assurance tools, there's an intractable portion of code that just isn't exercised. March 11, 3:00 p.m. PST Value servers feel the strain In the off-the-shelf world of value servers, surmounting challenges to high availability is your job. Management solutions make remote observation easier, and clustering is getting closer to standard fare for OSes. February 25, 3:00 p.m. PST No magic IT formulas Technology workers who don’t see themselves as passionate, creative professionals, and who lack commitment to their work, will inevitably occupy the lower strata of the future job market. I’ve said that before. My new corollary to that is that all working people are consumers even on company time. We need to feel impressed and inspired by the tools and materials we’re given. February 4, 3:00 p.m. PST LISA smiles on J2EE app testers Capable of prying into just about any nook or cranny where one might apply J2EE technology, Interactive TKO’s (iTKO) LISA (Load-bearing Internet-based Simulator Application) is a QA engineer’s dream. January 7, 3:00 p.m. PST The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid We all like to think we learn from mistakes, whether our own or others’. So in theory, the more serious bloopers you know about, the less likely you are to be under the bright light of interrogation, explaining how you managed to screw up big-time. That’s why we put out an all-points bulletin to IT managers and vendors everywhere: For the good of humanity, tell us about the gotchas that have gotten you, so others can avoid them. November 19, 3:00 p.m. PST Europeans debate software patents, interoperability BRUSSELS -- The European Union's (E.U.'s) planned software patent rules represent a major threat to interoperability unless specific exemptions are made to the legislation, participants at a conference on the issue heard on Tuesday. November 9, 7:05 a.m. PST Source code analysis breaks new ground Large-scale software systems are staggeringly complex works of engineering. Bugs inevitably come with the territory and for decades, the software profession has looked for ways to fight them. We may not see perfect source code in our lifetime, but we are seeing much better analysis tools and promising new approaches to remedy the problem. October 29, 3:00 p.m. PDT Compuware readies tools for Microsoft apps development Compuware plans to enhance its suite of products for the Microsoft development platform, with tools to improve application performance, code quality, and security. September 27, 5:05 p.m. PDT Ariba opens development center in India BANGALORE, INDIA -- Ariba Inc. has set up a software development facility in Bangalore, India, which will work on product development as well as technical support and services, the company announced Friday. September 17, 9:12 a.m. PDT Agitator stirs up unit-test drudgery No one doubts the benefits of unit testing. Nor does anyone doubt that unit testing can be as tedious as it is important. It’s like going back to check your carries and borrows in a math problem. August 27, 3:00 p.m. PDT Product Previews Rackable delivers servers for high-density datacenters Blade servers offer good bang for your buck in terms of datacenter real estate, but they also limit flexibility. Rackable Systems’ Scale Out Series server line hopes to give IT managers the best of both worlds, by offering blade density with the benefits of traditional rack-mount server design. Each Scale Out cabinet enclosure has room for as many as 92 servers, with an additional 19 inches of rack-mount space for networking equipment. The servers support both Intel and AMD CPUs in either single or dual-processor configurations, and each includes one full-height PCI-X expansion slot. Both in-band and out-of-band management systems are available. Rackable will engineer and configure systems to order, running a wide range of operating systems and software. Contact Rackable for pricing. Scale Out Series, Rackable Systems August 20, 3:00 p.m. PDT Two takes on preproduction testing It’s a hard-core developer’s worst nightmare: You pour your heart and soul into a new project, double-checking every .Net I-interface and cross-checking every T-SQL statement only to discover — post-deployment — that a hidden flaw is killing your program’s scalability. Management is breathing down your neck and you’ve got that uneasy feeling that the outsourcing vultures are beginning to circle, but every line of code looks as perfect as when you first crafted it. July 16, 3:00 p.m. PDT Microsoft looks to youth for future of Office Microsoft Corp. this week will host 15 university students from around the world at its Redmond, Washington, headquarters to pick their brains on what the Office productivity suite should look like 10 years from now. June 21, 4:29 a.m. PDT New candidates line up for 2004 Some folks dinged my patch-management column, commenting that Redmond doesn’t really release as much new code as all that. Well, I’m wondering where they were on Monday, June 14 -- a busy night in Redmond -- when the company unleashed release candidates of Windows XP SP2 (Service Pack 2) and of Virtual Server 2005. I’ve got this mental picture of Microsoft employees scurrying around like Keebler elves publishing release candidate after release candidate into the eager, cherubic faces of worldwide systems admins. June 18, 3:00 p.m. PDT IBM brings grid to software vendors Seven independent software vendors (ISVs), including Citrix Systems Inc. and Cognos Inc., have been the first to take advantage of an IBM Corp. program designed to help bridge the gap between commercial software vendors and the world of grid computing. June 16, 3:24 p.m. PDT TechEd drills into IT challenges Microsoft trained its focus on concrete challenges facing IT at its TechEd 2004 conference last week, rolling out products designed to enhance security, productivity, and integration. May 28, 3:00 p.m. PDT > Application development |
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