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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. Make mashups secure With the advent of mashups, innovative developers all over the enterprise are seeking new ways to leverage the value of corporate information through the use of external Web applications, APIs, or services. Although the thought of this adventure has sent many corporate security specialists running behind their firewalls, mashups are here to stay. Indeed, they have strategic value for many enterprises, so you’d better figure out how to live with them.  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 IT immigration: Thoughtful debate amid the flames Wow. My column last week proposing to grant citizenship to immigrant developers, "Open the floodgates to IT immigration," generated a torrent of comments from readers (83 and counting). Many were emotional, some were flames, almost all were opinionated, and the vast majority was – drumroll – thoughtful and rational, and they made me sympathetic to their point of view. As one person wrote, "there's a lot of layers to this onion," and our readers peeled them all back. Thanks, everybody, for taking the time. July 19, 3:00 a.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 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 Women in technology: A call to action A quick scan of almost any IT department -- from the trenches to the corner office -- confirms it: Women who embrace technology as a lifelong career remain a rare breed. To be sure, opportunity for women in technology has advanced in the past few decades, as have education initiatives aimed at leveling the playing field, but for every woman rising to prominence or embarking on a profession in IT, there seems to be another opting out of her career in technology. January 29, 3:03 a.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 Tabblo’s approach to rich Internet apps If you want a peek into the future of RIAs (rich Internet applications), take a look at Tabblo (tabblo.com). The model that Tabblo has set into motion for photographers -- both amateur and professional -- will soon be adopted by enterprise IT to empower its user base. January 16, 3:00 a.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 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 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 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 Racing to market with SOA Oded Noy had faced challenges before — when he co-founded an application management startup, for instance, or when he participated in war game simulations for the Israeli Air Force. But this was unique: Create a scalable platform that would transform the online car shopping and financing experience for consumers — in six months. August 9, 12:40 p.m. PDT Sun joins OpenAJAX, Dojo Foundation Bolstering its AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) efforts, Sun Microsystems is joining the OpenAJAX Alliance and the Dojo Foundation. In participating, Sun plans to help drive standards for AJAX programming and boost interoperability in AJAX technologies. June 16, 10:30 a.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 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 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 Microsoft builds bridges with Live Clipboard At Microsoft’s PDC (Professional Developers Conference) a decade ago, the company took the first steps toward a union of Windows and the Web. Adam Bosworth showed off the technologies we now call AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). J Allard demonstrated Active Server Pages. Håkon Lie talked about a proposed standard called CSS. And the tools division rolled out a suite of components that would make Internet protocols available to Win32 programmers and Office scripters. March 15, 3:00 a.m. PST Tools for enterprise mashups It was inevitable that someone would coin the phrase “enterprise mashup,” and SOA analyst Phil Wainewright seems to have gotten there first. A mashup, for those not at the white-hot center of Silicon Valley’s latest craze, is a composite Web application. March 8, 3:00 a.m. PST Speeding retrieval with in-memory data management My first real Java application, back in 1997, was a servlet-based group scheduler. It wasn’t quite the smash hit that Hanson’s “MMMBop” was that summer, but as some of you may recall, it had its charms. February 15, 3:00 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 Do-it-yourself software services? If you’re a regular reader of my column, you know that I’ve been looking closely at the pluses and minuses of the SaaS (software as a service) model recently. SaaS solutions let you easily deploy standard functionality across a wide spectrum of users cheaply, as opposed to best-of-breed, on-premises applications, which cost more but offer product and competitive differentiation. December 13, 3:00 a.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 British American Tobacco builds SOA one step at a time For British American Tobacco (BAT), SOA success came early. The challenge now lies in determining how quickly SOA should be scaled across the enterprise, and for which functions. November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Making SOA work Implementing SOA (service-oriented architecture) is one of the most daunting projects that an enterprise IT organization can undertake. Service orientation represents a whole new way of thinking and doing, one that changes the way developers operate and interact with the business. November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Making a routine of citizen journalism Compared with New Orleans we’ve got little to complain about, but last week’s torrential rains did flood parts of southwestern New Hampshire pretty badly. The town of Alstead, 15 miles north of my home in Keene, got the worst of it: roads crippled, a clutch of homes swept away, several people killed. In Keene, folks were evacuated by boat from homes all along Beaver Brook, and more than a few furnaces and water heaters were wrecked when basements took on five and six feet of water. October 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT Putting AJAX to work It's easy to see why AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) has captured the imaginations of so many Web developers. For the first time, browser-based UIs are rich and full-featured enough to do away with so-called thick-client desktop applications. October 17, 3:00 a.m. PDT The importance of interaction data The twin themes of this year's Accelerating Change conference were AI (artificial intelligence) and IA (intelligence amplification). On the AI track, people talked about making systems smarter. On the IA track, people talked about harnessing collective human intelligence. The tension between the two groups struck some sparks. October 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft driving toward .Net unity Specialized programming languages and their supporting environments have always been tightly coupled: SQL and the database; business rules and the rules engine. It's tempting to wish for an überlanguage or one syntax to rule them all, but what really matters is a common environment. At its 2005 Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft showed that it's finally putting all of its eggs into the .Net basket. September 21, 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 Startups vie to make Linux more attractive with bundled offerings Integrating open source applications is a task daunting enough to lead some companies toward proprietary products. To that end, several startups this week revealed plans to offer prebuilt, certified solutions so customers have fewer integration migraines. August 3, 6:00 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 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 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 JackBe boosting AJAX apps development JackBe next Monday is releasing an upgrade to its JackBe NQ (Nimble and Quick) Suite development environment for building AJAX-based rich Web client applications. June 15, 2:45 p.m. PDT The tacit dimension of tech support When I had dinner recently with InfoWorld Contributing Editor Phil Windley, he put his finger on something I've been trying to nail down for years. Like me, Phil works mainly in a home office, is married to a nongeek, and is often called on to deliver spousal tech support. June 15, 5:00 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 partners on refactoring for Visual Basic 2005 Microsoft and Developer Express on Tuesday are announcing availability of Refactor! for Visual Basic 2005, a free plug-in that provides refactoring to Visual Basic 2005 developers. May 10, 3:30 p.m. PDT Microsoft not glowing over LAMP Microsoft officials are undaunted by the popular LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python/PHP) application stack that serves as an open source rival to the Microsoft .Net platform. April 28, 4:30 p.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Alberto Savoia Agitar CTO and founder Alberto Savoia has a unique tool for testing code: lava lamps. On April Fools’ Day 2004, Savoia connected two lava lamps to his testing network. When code passed, the green lamp glowed. When it failed, the red lamp lit up. This bit of inspired silliness led to a concept Savoia calls XF (eXtreme Feedback), where everyone from the CEO to customers can see how code passes muster. XF ties into another innovation, “software agitation,” where code is shaken, rattled, and rolled at the unit level several times an hour. These ideas form the heart of Agitar’s Agitator and Management Dashboard tools, which recently won a Jolt Product Excellence Award. The former Google executive is on a mission to make unit testing the industry default. “We want to do for software quality what Google has done for search quality,” he says. April 11, 5:00 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 Personnel issues cloud software development SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Personnel issues with software programming teams remains a sore point with development projects, panelists and audience members agreed during a session at the SD West 2005 conference here on Monday evening. March 15, 5:00 a.m. PST Don't throw out the SOAP with the bathwater What goes around comes around. Three years ago, mine was one of the voices urging the Web services movement not to lose touch with the Web’s essential nature, as embodied in the architectural style known as REST (Representational State Transfer). Perverse devil’s advocate that I am, I’ll now switch sides and urge the REST movement not to dismiss Web services and SOA (service-oriented architecture). March 11, 3:00 p.m. PST Annotating the planet with Google Maps My previous column on Google Maps provoked an unusually strong response. First up was Wil Rivers, who pointed out that Telcontar’s Drill Down Server is the engine that does the heavy lifting on the back end. Next was a series of gripes about data quality and completeness. March 4, 3:00 p.m. PST Microsoft promotes 'smart clients' San Francisco -- Three years after introducing Visual Studio .Net and the .Net Framework, Microsoft on Monday promoted the benefits of the developer tools and demonstrated some of the updates coming later this year in Visual Studio 2005. February 7, 11:53 a.m. PST Apache Avalon project closes down Avalon, an Apache project to build a framework for object-oriented, component-based programming, has been shut down, forking off into several separate open source efforts, an official of the Apache Software Foundation confirmed on Wednesday. December 23, 4:45 a.m. PST Sun readies tool support for 64-bit AMD systems Sun Microsystems plans to release its Sun Studio 10 development tool in the fourth quarter of this year, featuring support for 64-bit applications running on AMD Opteron and Nocona processors, Sun officials said on Tuesday. September 21, 4:10 p.m. PDT Borland looks to take on Visual Studio with Diamondback SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Borland Software with the planned Diamondback release of its Delphi tool for Windows applications is looking to take on Microsoft while accommodating .Net, Win32, and Delphi development, a Borland official said Monday at the BorCon conference here. September 13, 10:02 p.m. PDT Borland to tout tool for building Microsoft apps SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Borland Software at its BorCon conference here on Monday will preview the upcoming Diamondback release of its Delphi development tool for the Microsoft platform, which supports development via managed code. September 12, 10:00 p.m. PDT Interview: Rational’s Devlin touts merger with IBM Mike Devlin is general manager of Rational Software as part of the IBM Software Group. Prior to IBM’s February 2003 acquisition of Rational Software for $2.1 billion, Devlin was Rational CEO and was a co-founder of the company in 1981. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill talked with Devlin about the merger with IBM, open source trends, and other issues in an interview at the Rational Software Development User Conference in Grapevine, Texas, earlier this week. July 23, 4:10 p.m. PDT > Application development |
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