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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. Best of open source in software development The wealth of open source software development goodies is heaven for the developer community, but it's hell on an awards committee. Considering IDEs, debuggers, defect trackers, code coverage tools, unit testers, load testers, and so on, we could have come up with more awards here than the rest of the Bossies combined. Then there were paths that could only lead to trouble. Could we really choose a best language? Or a best development platform? Could we pick Python over Perl, or Rails over Mono?  September 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Easy-to-learn Curl 5.0 equips developers to create powerful RIAs RIAs (rich Internet applications) are all the rage now, and for good reason: Given the wide availability of high-speed Internet service, they have the potential to combine the ease-of-access of Web applications with the ease-of-use of desktop applications. Curl, which is a programming language, an IDE, and a runtime engine, was actually ahead of its time back in 2003, when I wrote about Curl 2.0 for Byte.com. However, broadband access wasn't quite so widespread at the time, and the idea of RIAs didn't seem quite so compelling. August 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT ILOG JRules 6.5 brings rules to SOA ILOG JRules Version 6.5 is primarily a refinement of the architecture and features first introduced in Version 6.0. With the 6.x line, ILOG adopted the basic architecture seen across the BRMS (Business Rules Management System) industry. As such, JRules combines a rule engine deployed and managed as a stand-alone module (Rule Execution Server); a rule repository for sharing, versioning, and reporting on rules (Rule Team Server); and a set of authoring tools for both business users and technical staff to interact with the repository (Rule Studio). August 2, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft releases rich media app betas This week Microsoft is quietly delivering a flurry of updates to its developer community, including the release candidate version of Silverlight, the new rich media competitor to Adobe's Flash Player. Also available for download will be a Silverlight plug-in for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 -- another huge hunk of bits Microsoft is making available for download this week. None of this would be complete without Beta 2 of the 3.5 version of the .Net Framework itself, also ready for downloading. July 26, 3:02 p.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 Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 still set to ship in 2007 Although Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 software development platform is part of a February 2008 multiproduct launch, the company intends to ship it by the end of 2007, said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog. July 13, 1:36 p.m. PDT Microsoft Orcas Beta 1 hints at a killer IDE on the horizon While the Visual Studio team at Microsoft has been burning the midnight oil for some 18 months to bring us Orcas Beta 1, the CLR (Common Language Runtime) team has been hammering away on .Net Framework 3.5 Beta 1. Happily, all the effort appears to be paying off. June 1, 3:00 a.m. PDT NetBeans IDE tackles Ruby, JavaScript Move over, Java. The NetBeans open source tools package is making room for popular scripting languages. May 4, 12:00 p.m. PDT Dynamic languages: More than just a quick fix IT’s rise to prominence as a core competence that delivers competitive advantage has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the number of software development projects it must complete. Well aware of the hidden costs of unfulfilled tasks, enterprise IT managers are fast shedding their prejudices against dynamic languages in search of a quick way to cut down the backlog. April 16, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft exec hails .Net, cites advantage over Java Microsoft officials at the VSLive conference in San Francisco this week elaborated on where the company is headed with its software development tools, noting the planned Orcas and Rosario releases of Visual Studio, due later this year and a year afterward, respectively. InfoWorld editor at large Paul Krill sat down with Prashant Sridharan, Microsoft group product manager for Visual Studio, to discuss Microsoft's tool plans as well as issues such as the level of developer talent available. March 28, 2:30 p.m. PST Microsoft airs Orcas, Rosario dev tools visions Microsoft not only plans to release Orcas, a major upgrade to its Visual Studio software development platform, by the end of the year but also plans to follow up Orcas with the Rosario release of the platform a year later, a Microsoft official said on Monday. March 26, 1:45 p.m. PST Reinvigorated Java IDEs change the development landscape Java IDEs are one of the most used app dev tools in corporate development. They are also among the most capable developer products on the market. With that in mind, it’s time to ask yourself: Are you using the Java IDE best suited to your needs, or is it time to re-evaluate? March 26, 3:00 a.m. PST Java IDE shines on Ruby JetBrains is now accommodating Ruby developers with the company's IntelliJ Idea Java IDE. February 6, 2:08 p.m. PST Agile scripting: Bigger bang for app-dev bucks Enterprises will spend too much this year creating monolithic apps — the sort of server-side efforts that involve formal requirements and tie up dozens (or hundreds) of architects, coders, and testers. Most would be better off using scripting languages, Web services, and SOA to weave together browser-based apps that leverage existing assets. January 8, 3:00 a.m. PST Software Development: Simplicity tops the agenda Software development continued to move toward simplicity in 2006. Most evident was the widespread adoption of SOA (services-oriented architecture), which has become the technology of choice for integrating systems of all kinds -- in-house between departments, across stovepipe applications, and in B2B and B2C commerce. January 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Top AJAX tools deliver rich GUI goodness The buzzword AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is just a few months shy of its second birthday, but it’s already ubiquitous, and even the technology itself has begun to gather steam. Its success is no surprise to some of the major commercial AJAX-tools vendors -- they all started building their packages for conquering the JavaScript layer long before the buzzword arrived. Some are more than five years old, and it’s easy to use adjectives including “mature,” “established,” and “polished” to describe these wares. November 27, 3:00 a.m. PST Borland's CodeGear upgrades Java IDE Newly christened CodeGear, Borland Software's subsidiary offering developer tools, will make its first major product announcement on Monday. November 20, 5:00 a.m. PST Infragistics and telerik grant better control over ASP.Net 2.0 development One of the big advantages of developing ASP.Net 2.0 Web sites with Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Web Developer Express is that you can accomplish a great deal in design mode by dragging, dropping, and configuring components before manipulating the components programmatically. Microsoft supplies dozens of controls in its Standard and Data toolboxes; it also allows developers to add controls to the Visual Studio toolbox. September 18, 3:00 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 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 Adobe Flex 2.0 enriches the RIA development experience Flash forward from my 2004 review of Macromedia Flex 1.5 — a product plagued by limited, proprietary features, clumsy development opportunity, and a hefty price tag — and you’ll find a refreshed suite sporting more than just a new proprietor. August 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT Ruby programmers to get Visual Studio link Software to be formally introduced later this year will link the Ruby programming language and the open source Ruby on Rails Web framework to Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 application development platform. July 13, 12:30 p.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 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 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 NetBeans attempts to eclipse Eclipse NetBeans 5.0 is a substantial upgrade to what was already a very solid IDE. This release reveals many new features, enhancements, and a slight repositioning, as Sun attempts to shine the spotlight on aspects that take NetBeans beyond the pure-play IDE. April 13, 3:00 a.m. PDT ILOG extends the tools for rules ILOG delivered JRules 6.0 at the end of March, just a little more than a year since the introduction of Version 5.0. JRules 6.0, in keeping with the company’s push to extend development and maintenance of business applications to business experts, includes new vocabulary features that are similar to regular expressions and are far friendlier to nondevelopers. In addition to performance and reporting improvements, Version 6.0 ushers in a Web-based rules repository and integration with any Eclipse-based IDE. April 10, 3:00 a.m. PDT EclipseCon reflects IDE’s rise as plug-in platform of choice EclipseCon kicks off this week in Santa Clara, Calif., marking the second annual convocation of Eclipse partners and vendors, who will gather to learn about and celebrate alliances, new products, and new directions. March 20, 3:00 a.m. PST Getting smart about languages and libraries The ever-quotable Sean McGrath penned another of his trademark aphorisms this week: “The library IS the language.” By “library” he means the great edifices of reusable code that are, in their modern form, delivered as the core Java and .Net class libraries. Mastering them is a challenge that can take years, McGrath wrote. Mastering programming languages, he suggested, is comparatively trivial. February 22, 3:00 a.m. PST The open source answer: An interview with Bruce Snyder How does open source figure into the build-or-buy decision? For an informed perspective, we turned to Bruce Snyder, co-founder and developer for the Geronimo project and a senior architect at LogicBlaze, a provider of open source solutions for SOA and business integration, including ServiceMix ESB and ActiveMQ messaging platform. February 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Update: Borland to exit IDE business, focus on ALM Borland Software plans to sell off its struggling Java development tools business to focus instead on selling services and products for managing software development, the company announced Wednesday. February 8, 5:25 a.m. PST The high-performance GUI All of our standard technologies for human-computer interaction -- the mouse, the GUI, and the web of linked documents -- can be traced directly to Douglas Engelbart. Almost 40 years ago, he showed all of these innovations working together in the famous 1968 “mother of all demos.” Although Engelbart still isn’t as widely known as he deserves to be, many people do realize that his pioneering work set the agenda for computers and software that are intuitively easy to use. January 25, 3:00 a.m. PST Application development tools focus on team process and code quality It was a year that saw the resurgence of old tools and the redesign of new ones. Static code analysis, which was abandoned long ago, became the latest craze in 2005 following concerns about security, code quality, and code ownership. Today, impressive offerings in all three areas are available; 18 months ago, the vendors themselves barely existed. Likely, these products will coalesce and one or two packages will emerge that can perform all three forms of code analysis. January 2, 3:00 a.m. PST ECMAScript: The Switzerland of development environments? There is a perpetual debate in programming circles about the pros and cons of static vs. dynamic typing. I've always favored dynamically typed languages, such as Lisp, Perl, and Python, because my own coding efforts tend to focus on application prototyping, content wrangling, data analysis, and system automation. December 28, 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 C and C++ give way to managed code One important trend highlighted by this year’s research is the ongoing transition away from C and C++ -- the two languages that have been programmers’ mainstays for many years -- in favor of Java, and, more recently, C#. This shift might seem peculiar to some. After all, C remains the implementation language of choice for Linux, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database, and other key open source projects, which points out the fundamental position of C: It’s a terrific language for systems programming and infrastructure-level software, but it’s less suited to the needs of straightforward applications. November 30, 12:30 p.m. PST Lifting the Curtain on SQL Server, VS 2005 Microsoft created quite a stir at its Professional Developers Conference and Business Summit back in September, when it lifted the veil on ambitious plans for stitching together a stupefying array of client, middleware, and server technologies into a seemingly all-encompassing back-office blitz. Although many elements are new, Microsoft ‘s service-oriented enterprise play has been in motion for many years now, stretching back to the bet on XML, Web services, and .Net that culminated in Windows Server 2003. November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Yahoo reportedly in talks to buy AOL stake Yahoo Inc. is the latest in a series of companies looking to purchase a stake in American Online Inc. (AOL), The Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition on Friday. October 14, 4:22 p.m. PDT Sampling Visual Studio 2005 Earlier this week, Microsoft released Beta 3 of Visual Studio 2005 TFS (Team Foundation Server). Turns out my developers are always interested in seeing competitors to CVS, and the moniker Beta 3 seemed safe enough for them. So whilst I was gnashing my teeth over what turned out to be another last-second Vinatieri victory for my beloved Pats, these geeks were installing TFS on a spare Windows server. September 29, 4:00 a.m. PDT Nokia joins Eclipse in mobile tools move Application development for handheld devices will become a key focus of the Eclipse Foundation for open source tooling. Nokia will announce on Monday that it has joined Eclipse and is proposing a project to build a framework for mobile Java developer tools. September 18, 9:01 p.m. PDT Software porting is evil Although I love writing code, I hate porting code. To me, the least enjoyable task in software development is crawling through an application, usually one that I didn’t write, trying to figure out what compile-time errors really mean, and tracing back the origins of puzzling run-time results. What has always fueled my dislike for porting code is that, having cut my teeth on systems and software built for portability and interoperability, I know that for the great majority of project types, porting is a necessity created by operating systems and development tool vendors. Yet the technology exists to take porting, and meticulous platform validation, out of the software development cycle. September 14, 4:00 a.m. PDT PDC offers glimpse under Vista's hood Not since two years ago, when attendees of Microsoft’s annual Professional Developers’ Conference (PDC) got their first look at Longhorn, has Microsoft promised a conference so jam-packed with groundbreaking new technology. PDC 2005, kicking off this week in Los Angeles, promises to be the hottest Microsoft event in years, giving software professionals a chance to dive into core Windows Vista APIs, including WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation, formerly code-named “Avalon”) and WCF (Windows Communication Foundation, previously called “Indigo”). Also planned are sessions on the next versions of C# and Visual Basic, both of which will include support for the new .Net Language Integrated Query Framework, which provides tools for easily managing multiple data types, including objects, relational data, and XML. In addition, C# 3.0 will include syntactic improvements to the language itself. September 12, 4:00 a.m. PDT Borland upgrading IDE while preparing for Eclipse future Borland Software on Tuesday will unveil a major upgrade to its JBuilder IDE. The release, however, comes amid uncertainty regarding the future of commercial Java IDEs, in large part because the open source Eclipse consortium continues to provide so much advanced technology to developers for free. September 6, 9:00 a.m. PDT Borland upgrades IDE as open source alternatives loom Borland Software on Tuesday will announce an upgrade to its JBuilder IDE. But the future of the commercial IDE market is clouded, with Eclipse providing base technologies for free. September 6, 5:00 a.m. PDT Progress Software joins Eclipse Progress Software on Monday will announce its membership in the Eclipse Foundation for open source tooling. With this move, Progress will follow companies such as Borland Software and BEA Systems in joining the IBM-spawned Eclipse organization. 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 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 JBoss embraces EJB 3.0 JBoss is upgrading three of its Java middleware products to include an early version of the EJB 3.0 specification. June 27, 5:00 a.m. PDT Java, 10 years later Java’s first decade has proven it to be remarkably adaptable. Originally conceived as an embedded language for consumer devices, Java emerged from Sun Microsystems in 1995 as the programming language for Web browsers. It then morphed into the leading tool for business computing and serious application development -- in many ways the successor to both Cobol and C++. June 27, 5:00 a.m. PDT Client-facing Java perks up Although Java has earned a reputation for solid back-end performance, its history as a client-facing platform has been troubled. When Java first shipped in 1995, programmers could create GUI components with the AWT (Abstract Windowing Toolkit). This package attempted -- with only modest success -- to provide a cross-platform set of controls and widgets. But programs that relied on the AWT were unstable, barely portable, and not terribly attractive. June 27, 5:00 a.m. PDT IBM to offer tools tryouts Developer tools for SMBs and enterprises will be posted to IBM's alphaWorks site on June 30, with the offerings geared toward automated development, data access and security. June 24, 12:30 p.m. PDT ActiveGrid blazes path for enterprise LAMP Back in 1998 I built a mission-critical application using the technology suite now called LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python). It was a killer combination: blazing performance, rock-solid reliability, rapid development. Perl's dynamism was an essential ingredient, but looking back, I see it was also a crutch. If I had needed to redeploy to a cluster, swap in a different authentication scheme, or alter the flow of the application, I'd have been able to do those things quickly, but it would have been harder for somebody else to. June 22, 5:00 a.m. PDT Borland, Macromedia back Eclipse Borland and Macromedia are making commercial tools for the open source Eclipse IDE. Macromedia plans to join the Eclipse Foundation on Monday, unveiling a plug-in planned for Eclipse. Borland already unveiled an incarnation of JBuilder last week, code-named Peloton and engineered specifically for Eclipse. June 6, 4:35 a.m. PDT AJAX breathes new life into Web apps One year ago, Thomas Lackner didn’t ask much of JavaScript. When he sketched out the architecture to a Web application, he knew he could count on the browser language for “set-a-cookie hacks” and for loading images, but he turned to the server side for the heavy lifting. But when Google began launching highly interactive Web sites such as Gmail and Google Suggest, the scales dropped from Lackner’s eyes and he saw the opportunity. May 23, 5:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft ships second Visual Studio 2005 beta Microsoft on Monday is releasing the second beta version of its upcoming Visual Studio 2005 as well as the April Community Technology Preview for the SQL Server 2005 database. April 18, 6:00 a.m. PDT NEC and Sun extend systems integration partnership NEC and Sun Microsystems will work more closely together in the areas of systems integration, network technologies, and middleware, the companies said Tuesday. April 5, 4:37 a.m. PDT In Brief: Open source group goes international with new board SOA Software (formerly Digital Evolution) has added a registry-based dashboard to its Service Manager. The registry-based dashboard uses real-time alerts to improve Web services performance by securing, monitoring, and managing XML and Web services and providing centralized management of service-oriented architectures (SOAs). The dashboard offers an easy-to-use graphical interface with visual indicators such as live charts and color-coded graphs that enable customers to monitor service-level agreements, security thresholds, and performance metrics. The registry-based dashboard will be included in the SOA Software Service Manager 3.0, which is slated to ship in May.? Service Manager pricing starts at $5,000 per CPU. April 4, 9:10 a.m. PDT Borland turns hard-core Following up on the enterprise tools strategy it announced last autumn, Borland is now shipping Core SDP (Software Delivery Platform). With this move, the company adopts the model previously embraced by Microsoft and IBM, in which product suites are based on the role the developer occupies in the software-delivery infrastructure. In this initial release Borland identifies four principal roles: architect, analyst, developer, and tester. (Others will be added later.) The tool chains for these roles are all built on a platform of services called Core::Foundation, which includes a central team repository, versioning and configuration management, requirements management, and collaboration and project-management capabilities. April 4, 6:00 a.m. PDT Separating code from its environment Programming languages and environments are an abiding passion of mine. I'm always on the lookout for a better mousetrap, and lately I've been working with three relative newcomers: the PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor)-based plug-in architecture of the WordPress blogging engine; the Ruby on Rails framework; and Mark Logic's XQuery-based Content Interaction Server. March 30, 6:00 a.m. PST Four Java IDEs duke it out For decades, programmers dreamt of development environments in which powerful, integrated tools could provide enormous productivity. The first advanced environments of this kind appeared in the Unix community during the early 1990s. But the inability of hardware platforms of the time to support the computational needs of such complex products condemned them to an early demise. March 28, 6:00 a.m. PST Campaign to save Visual Basic 6 gathers support An online petition gathering signatures to save Microsoft’s Visual Basic 6 programming language will not change the company’s intention to cut free support on March 31, a Microsoft representative said on Thursday afternoon. March 10, 4:30 p.m. PST BEA, Microsoft, Sun tout data visualization, tools moves Major players in software are making plays in data management and software development. BEA Systems is looking to spread its wings in data visualization, and Microsoft and Sun are reinforcing their tools arsenals. March 9, 3:50 p.m. PST Parallel systems development eyed by Eclipse The Eclipse tools environment is being extended to support development of applications for large, parallel systems, an Eclipse official said at the EclipseCon 2005 conference on Tuesday. March 2, 5:05 a.m. PST Eclipse evolving, seeks to become vertical apps platform BURLINGAME, CALIF. -- Eclipse Foundation members on Tuesday stressed the evolution of Eclipse technology and cited goals to have Eclipse serve as a platform for building vertical applications such as health care record systems. March 1, 1:10 p.m. PST BEA, Borland endorse Eclipse platform BEA Systems will base the next version of its WebLogic Workshop IDE around the Eclipse open source tools platform, while Borland Software is stepping up its participation in Eclipse. February 28, 12:01 a.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 IBM to bolster Eclipse tools arsenal IBM on Friday is announcing Eclipse-based developer resources for the Apache Derby database and voice-based applications, in advance of next week’s EclipseCon 2005 conference. February 24, 9:01 p.m. PST BEA touts Eclipse participation BEA Systems on Tuesday fleshed out plans to participate in the Eclipse Foundation for open source development tools, citing intentions to base its IDE around Eclipse and make several contributions. February 22, 3:35 p.m. PST BEA to join Eclipse open source tools foundation BEA Systems on Friday confirmed its plans to join the Eclipse Foundation open source tools consortium. February 18, 9:30 a.m. PST Exploring the deep structure of code It’s been a while since I’ve written code in Java. This week, however, I updated my installation of Eclipse, dusted off an old Java program, and saw that ancient artifact in a whole new way. January 14, 3:00 p.m. PST RIA platforms lend apps more Flash Building effective applications -- ones that can be distributed and run smoothly over the Internet -- requires circumventing the shortcomings inherent in static Web browser delivery. Many companies are turning to RIAs (rich Internet applications) to achieve that goal. December 3, 3:00 p.m. PST Sun melds Java and collaboration Unique among its development tool rivals, Sun’s Java Studio Enterprise 7 includes tightly integrated collaboration capabilities. Not only can developers send instant messages to each other from within the IDE, the collaboration tools also allow them to share and work on source code together. November 12, 3:00 p.m. PST IBM’s Atlantic tools platform set to sail IBM Rational on Wednesday plans to flesh out complete plans for the upcoming IBM Software Development Platform, code-named “Atlantic.” October 12, 3:30 p.m. PDT The process is the problem for developers Much like last year, the numbers in this year's survey showed developers continuing to take a conservative approach to adoption of new platforms, tools, and technologies. But more tellingly, respondents' answers to open-ended questions show that purchasing decisions are only half of the story. Survey participants say some of the most important problems lay not in the code, but in the inner workings of their development teams and processes. September 24, 3:00 p.m. PDT Readers weigh in on IDEs Should your developers use an IDE to develop software? If you think that discussion ended years ago, think again. The voluminous response to my Aug. 30 column proves that the debate rages on. September 10, 3:00 p.m. PDT Product Previews JBbuilder gets a Java technology facelift Due in september, the latest edition of borland’s JBuilder IDE includes support for the latest Java technologies, including JDK 5.0, J2EE 1.4, and JSF (JavaServer Faces). An integrated performance management suite helps developers improve their code through profiling, thread debugging, and request analysis. The new version also integrates with tools for team collaboration (including Borland’s own requirements management and software configuration management tools, and the Subversion source code control system) and supports distributed code refactoring. JBuilder Enterprise will retail for $3,500, and the Developer edition will cost $499. A basic version called JBuilder Foundation will be available for free download. All three versions will be available for Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows. JBuilder 2005, Borland August 27, 3:00 p.m. PDT Macromedia flexes development muscle Flex Builder, the promised IDE for Macromedia’s Flex application framework, has arrived. Builder abstracts MXML, Macromedia’s markup language for creating Flash-based user interfaces, giving programmers a visual layout editor and tools for binding to back-end data sources. August 27, 3:00 p.m. PDT The great IDE debate Although I don’t write much code in my daily work as CTO, I do occasionally dip my toe into the code-writing waters. Because I come from a development background myself, I take an active interest in the procedures and processes of my development team. Generally, though, I let those guys run free as long as they are using basic best practices to get their work done. Those basic best practices include simple things such as source-code control, reusable code writing, peer code reviews, and most importantly, consistently hitting project milestones with code that works and scales. August 27, 3:00 p.m. PDT Microsoft raises the curtain on Visual Studio 2005 In terms of stability and functionality, Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 is a marked improvement over the preview released in May. I found that Beta 1 resolved most of the interactive operational glitches I experienced in my earlier look at the product. August 13, 3:00 p.m. PDT IBM touts Atlantic tools IBM used the rational Software Development User Conference in Grapevine, Texas, last week to preview upcoming developer tools, providing details about the next major release of the IBM Software Development Platform, dubbed Atlantic. July 23, 3:00 p.m. PDT IBM readies 'Atlantic' tools plus open source effort GRAPEVINE, TEXAS -- IBM at the Rational Software Development User Conference here Monday revealed a planned upgrade to its Rational and IBM tools portfolio, dubbed “Atlantic,” and also pledged to make some IBM products available under an open source format. July 19, 11:10 a.m. PDT Eclipse packaged with plug-ins for ease of use Eclipse-based tools provider Innoopract is shipping Yoxos, a $19.95 Eclipse 3.0 distribution that is equipped with popular plug-ins to ease the load on open source developers. July 7, 4:26 p.m. PDT Novell releases Mono 1.0 After three years of development, open source developers now have an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s .Net application development platform, thanks to Novell Inc., which on Wednesday released version 1.0 of its Mono development platform. June 30, 2:10 p.m. PDT Sun participation in Eclipse still possible SAN FRANCISCO -- The on-again, off-again issue of having Sun Microsystems participate in the Eclipse open source tools initiative may soon be on again. June 30, 1:15 p.m. PDT Space, time, and data In a column last year entitled “How Rich is the Rich GUI?” I mentioned in passing an intriguing use of fish-eye distortion by the Flash developer Samuel Wan. Similar to Mac OS X's Dock, Wan's fish-eye menu selectively magnifies items near the cursor while shrinking distant items. The result is a list that's fully scannable without scrolling and that reveals detail in a focal zone. June 25, 3:00 p.m. PDT Capturing user experience closes the feedback loop If you want to make software developers squirm, force them to watch people using their software. June 4, 3:00 p.m. PDT Art and science of usability analysis Chris Rockwell is president of Lextant, a company specializing in user research and interactive system design. Test Center Lead Analyst Jon Udell asked Rockwell to comment on the art and science of usability analysis and on the impact of new tools such as Morae and VisualMark. June 4, 3:00 p.m. PDT Preview: Visual Studio 2005 Let’s settle this up front. Microsoft has let its developers down. During the past few years, the company has left a trail of broken promises: a .Net-centered operating system; a broad stack of managed, .Net-based server applications; effortless targeting of everything from servers to cell phones; an egalitarian approach to programming languages; and a new, revolutionarily productive, framework-aware IDE. May 28, 3:00 p.m. PDT The long road to Longhorn Developers and development project leads have some hard labor ahead when Longhorn establishes a wholly new Microsoft platform. It’s true that Longhorn keeps slipping, slipping, slipping into future, but you should treat these delays not with sighs of frustration, but sighs of relief. You want this ship behind schedule because you would never have made it to the dock on time. May 28, 3:00 p.m. PDT Eclipse to name executive director The Eclipse Foundation’s board of directors next week will formally name former Oracle executive Mike Milinkovich as executive director of the open source tools foundation. May 27, 5:10 p.m. PDT Microsoft talks Team Systems at TechEd Microsoft will spotlight Visual Studio Team Systems -- a tools platform designed to help programmers work together more efficiently -- this week at its annual TechEd conference. May 24, 6:00 a.m. PDT IBM adds partners to Workplace mix IBM on Monday will announce that a slew of partners have signed up to support its new Workplace Client Technology, which was rolled out earlier this week. The Workplace Client is a rich client platform designed to ease management of and access to a variety of applications. May 14, 3:06 p.m. PDT Oracle to go BAM this summer In response to market demand for more real-time business information, Oracle announced today it will offer a BAM (business activity monitoring) tool, Business Activity Manager, as part of an upgrade to its application server software due out in the middle of the year. May 14, 3:00 p.m. PDT IBM looks to modernize Cobol IBM is looking to modernize Cobol applications by bridging its mainframe-oriented Cobol and WebSphere products to EJB and service-oriented architectures. May 11, 5:00 p.m. PDT IBM to inject consistency into middleware IBM on Monday will outline an ambitious plan to establish greater technical consistency within its line of middleware products. The end goal is to increase the portability of both data and applications across many different environments, including proprietary IBM operating systems, Linux, and Windows and, ultimately, to make that data easier to manage. May 7, 1:00 p.m. PDT IBM introduces WebSphere Business Integration Server Express IBM on Wednesday put another piece of its integration strategy in place for SMBs (small and midsize businesses), unveiling a new WebSphere-based server that helps users better integrate both business processes and people. May 5, 12:00 p.m. PDT Ease-of-use is focus of Java improvements Making Java development easier is the focus of both an upcoming release of the J2EE specification and an IBM tools rollout. May 4, 8:00 a.m. PDT IBM envisions virtualization IBM is prepping its VE (Virtualization Engine) to allow servers to be partitioned like mainframes, enabling them to run as many as 10 services on a single processor. April 30, 3:00 p.m. PDT IBM delivers SOA enablers IBM is rolling out a series of software and services intended to help corporate users more efficiently create and deploy SOAs (service-oriented architectures) within their existing infrastructures. April 23, 6:00 p.m. PDT > Application development |
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