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On the road to the virtual desktop Click ‘n’ run. It seems like such a simple concept. Surf up to a Web page, select the desired application from a list, and click. Voila! Microsoft Word appears on your desktop. Or Excel, or Adobe Photoshop… you name it. Herd behavior demonstrated at Demo "Whatever happened to working alone?”  September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Credit Suisse plans virtualization a massive scale With 20,000 servers to manage, financial services powerhouse Credit Suisse had a long list of reasons to consider server virtualization: reducing the number of physical servers to manage, cutting power needs, improving software provisioning time, and deferring expensive datacenter buildouts. But it also needed a clear set of guidelines to determine when to virtualize, plus a clear set of procedures for managing a virtualization initiative. September 24, 3:00 a.m. PDT Trust key to Internet security A few of my previous columns discussed my vision of creating a more secure Internet. It involved replacing the Internet's default anonymity with pervasive authentication, from the hardware initialization, through the OS and all applications, the user, and ending with a verifiable network stream. It is my strong belief that without a complete overhaul of default authentication, malicious hacking is going to continue indefinitely. September 14, 3:00 a.m. PDT Sweden's OOXML vote declared invalid The Swedish Standards Institute has declared its recent vote in favor of Microsoft's Office Open XML format invalid. It means that Sweden will probably abstain from an important upcoming international vote on whether to make the format a standard. August 31, 9:47 a.m. PDT Ex-ECMA chief expects Open XML approval by March With ISO's Sept. 2 voting deadline looming, the recently retired secretary general of ECMA International defended Microsoft's Office Open XML document format against fierce technical criticism. August 28, 1:42 p.m. PDT SMB technology: Replacing in-house software with applications in the cloud In the near future, there's only one way to go for SMBs when it comes to purchasing business software -- and that's out of house. Whether it's full-on SaaS (software as a service), where users access all facets of the application through a browser, or a hosted product (including hosted Exchange, where only the server component is off-site and users employ a standard desktop client such as Outlook), either model is simply too cost-effective for SMBs to ignore. August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Processors: Dividing chips into many virtual cores The current approach taken by x86 CPUs -- to stuff as many processor cores and as much cache memory as will fit on one chip -- will prove impossible to scale beyond a certain point. And adding more, big, hot processor cores may not be the best fit for server roles that call for managing large workloads over long periods of time. August 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Talend: Data integration for the masses! There's no question about it: Business intelligence is the holy grail of most CIOs and IT managers alike. After all, the idea behind BI is great: Pull data from all the nooks and crannies on your enterprise network into one system where it can be cleansed, correlated, and presented to executives for analysis via easy-to-use dashboards. May 14, 3:00 a.m. PDT Innovation, startups hot again in the enterprise Five years ago enterprise startups hit the skids, stung by a perfect storm of commoditization, vendor consolidation, and the IT spending downturn. In the intervening years, however, the skies have cleared and, to paraphrase Ronald Regan, "It's morning again for enterprise startups." May 1, 7:00 a.m. PDT Web 2.0 Expo draws startups, superstars If anyone knows about the potential of what has been dubbed "Web 2.0" it's the folks over at O'Reilly Media. Heck, company founder Tim O'Reilly himself coined the phrase back in 2003 to describe the emergence of a new generation of Web-based business models in the wake of the dot-com collapse. And if this week's first-ever Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco is any measure, the Web 2.0 phenomenon is on track to exceed expectations. April 16, 4:00 a.m. PDT Tech tops the pop charts Remember the adrenaline rush when you first saw MTV in 1981? When they played “She Blinded Me With Science” in ’83? Well, if you want a fresh, geeky, thought-provoking video experience that gets your heart pumping, check out “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us,” one of the top-viewed videos on YouTube. It’ll appeal to the coder in you, as well as the futurist. March 15, 3:00 a.m. PST The smart business of diversity Carly Fiorina served as CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, the first woman to run a Fortune 20 company. After she was ousted, along with a $21 million exit package, Fiorina did what a lot of us would do if we had millions of dollars in the bank and some time on our hands: She wrote a book. In Tough Choices, published in October, Fiorina talks about rising to the top of a male-dominated culture. Fiorina spoke with InfoWorld correspondent Carmen Nobel for our upcoming feature on the issues women face in IT. January 22, 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 Oracle tackles identity governance There’s a common nightmare haunting CISOs (computer information security officers) that features a glance at the morning paper, and 72-point banner headlines with the name of their employer and the words “LOST” and “CUSTOMER DATA.” December 4, 3:00 a.m. PST XQuery and the power of learning by example If you set out to explore XQuery, the XML query language, you’ll soon encounter a collection of examples, or use-cases, that show how XQuery can query and transform XML data. These scenarios are elaborated in a W3C document that presents a sample data set — about books, authors, prices, and reviews — and enumerates a set of queries against that data. For each query, there’s a description (“List names of users who have placed multiple bids of at least $100 each”), a solution written in XQuery code, and an expected XML output. November 15, 3:00 a.m. PST Web apps, just give me the data If you search the Web for “fortune500.xml,?you’ll find an ordered list of the Fortune 500 companies. It’s just what you’d want if you were writing a custom portfolio application. But it didn’t exist until last week when Doug Purdy, a Microsoft program manager, created it while writing his own personal portfolio application. Because he also blogged the list, you can use it, too. November 8, 3:00 a.m. PST Rebooting HTML for the Semantic Web "Making standards is hard work," writes Tim Berners-Lee in a recent blog post. And he should know. The creator of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee is responsible for developing and popularizing some of the most significant open standards in computing history. November 6, 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 Microsoft beats SOA drum with ESB guidelines Heralding the most viable, "real-world" approach to building SOAs (service-oriented architectures), Microsoft has unveiled new guidelines for partners to create an enterprise service bus (ESB). October 4, 12:39 p.m. PDT Technology with no past To the extent that it’s possible, I’m declaring today the beginning of recorded history in information technology. On this day, the phrase “information technology,” abbreviated IT, came into being as shorthand for electronic devices that aid humans in storage and sharing of, analysis of, protection of, and access to significant amounts of digitized content. Content? That’s anything you’re capable of holding in your brain for even a nanosecond. IT is not a department or a group of people. It’s a smart phone. It’s a room full of SPARC servers. A telephone headset? A keyboard? I don’t know. They’re new terms. We’ll work that out as we go. I do know that if we didn’t have such things, information technology would be inaccessible. September 20, 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 XML for business reporting gains momentum Two years ago I wrote an unflattering report on XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), an emerging standard that aims to improve the speed, accuracy, and transparency of business and financial reporting. I applauded its goals, as we all should in the wake of Enron and other scandals, but worried about the complexity of the 151-page XBRL specification, its aggressive use of esoteric features of XML, and its reliance on accounting “taxonomies” defined by committees. August 16, 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 Ten major vendors team up on SML Ten major IT vendors including Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp. on Monday released a draft of a new specification, the service modeling language (SML), which they claim will make it easier for customers to manage their heterogenous systems. July 31, 11:59 a.m. PDT Enterprise mashups They’re all the rage in the Web 2.0 crowd: mashup services that typically combine maps with all sorts of data from a variety of Web sources. In the past year, we’ve seen a host of much-discussed sites pop up, from Zillow.com for real-estate value estimation, to AuctionMapper, which presents eBay search results on maps to help locate the nearest sellers. July 28, 9:31 a.m. PDT Sprint wrangles mashups Mashups are seductive, thanks to their whizzy interfaces and lightweight development requirements. To creative developers, they constitute an open invitation to mix and match data and services in unexpected ways. But if you don’t think them through from an enterprise perspective, “mashups are no more than Happy Meal toys,” says Edmund Vazquez, manager of Web services integration and SOA implementation at Sprint Nextel. July 28, 9:31 a.m. PDT Amazon's pragmatic approach to metered infrastructure In March, Amazon.com introduced S3 (Simple Storage Service ), a metered storage service for arbitrary blobs of data. Recently, Amazon’s adventure in metered Web services continued with the announcement that its SQS (Simple Queue Service), which had been in beta since well before the surprise announcement of S3, has now joined S3 as a commercial offering. July 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25 The top technology slot in the enterprise has changed. Once, forward-looking CTOs and CIOs scanned the horizon for new technologies that would improve the lot of IT. Today, as many of this year’s top 25 CTOs can tell you, technology leaders must also focus on understanding the business goals of the enterprise -- and then craft technology strategies to meet those objectives. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT OpenAJAX forges ahead Members of the OpenAjax initiative, formed in February to promote the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web scripting technique, have generally agreed on a definition of AJAX that concurs with Wikipedia's description. May 22, 5:00 p.m. PDT The evolution of office document standards In high tech it has always been the same. What to an outsider may seem like an inconsequential piece of new technology, to an insider is visionary. This is the case with the recent ISO preliminary vote approving the OpenDocument format as a specification, not to mention the excitement surrounding the fact that the OpenDocument Foundation has completed a plug-in for Microsoft Office that allows Office applications to create ODF documents natively. May 16, 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 Accessing the web of databases I've just posted the fourth installment in my new series of Friday podcasts. It’s an interview with Kingsley Idehen, CEO of OpenLink Software. OpenLink’s flagship product is a universal database and application server, Virtuoso, which I last wrote about in 2003. May 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT IBM DB2 "Viper" revs XML engine Code-named "Viper" and due for release in early summer, will be more worthy of its “Universal Database” tagline than previous versions. Not only does Viper contain an extensive list of enhancements that cover everything from security and development to storage and administration, but topping the list is a newly integrated XML storage engine that Big Blue says will put Microsoft and Oracle to shame. May 1, 3:00 a.m. PDT SPML 2.0 ratified as OASIS Standard In a move that could open the door to more user account provisioning in the enterprise, the OASIS consortium approved the SPML (Service Provisioning Markup Language) version 2.0 specification as an official OASIS standard on Tuesday. April 11, 1:36 p.m. PDT Sun signals a new day for open source Tim Bray, co-creator of XML and director of web technologies at Sun Microsystems, talks to InfoWorld Senior Editor Neil McAllister about Sun’s efforts to open its code. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Web 2.0 offers fertile ground for SAAS Despite hype and venture capital money, the ASP (application service provider) model of the late 1990s failed in spectacular -- and very public -- fashion. But industry leaders and analysts who gathered this week at the Software as a Service Summit in Napa, California, said that current market conditions give the new generation of ASPs, which the industry now calls software-as-a-service (SAAS) providers, a far better chance at success. March 3, 12:32 p.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 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 The browser as orchestrator It’s been a busy week for my LibraryLookup project, which first launched in December 2002. In its original and still most widely deployed incarnation, LibraryLookup is a JavaScript bookmarklet that connects an Amazon book page to the corresponding record in a library catalog. The success of this technique got me thinking about themes I’ve pursued ever since: the dynamics of user-driven innovation, the protean flexibility of RESTful (Representational State Transfer) Web applications, and the dynamics of lightweight service orchestration. February 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 Sun urges Massachusetts to reject Open XML Sun Microsystems Inc. Monday urged a Massachusetts state official to rethink an opinion that Microsoft Corp.'s Open XML (Extensible Markup Language) meets the state's parameters for an acceptable open document format just because it has been submitted as an open standard. November 28, 4:52 p.m. PST The two-way data web Two years ago, I gave the keynote address on the opening day of XML 2003. The next day, Adam Bosworth delivered a weirdly complementary keynote, in which he began to lay out an idea he’s been developing ever since, first at BEA and now at Google. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the truly scalable databases of the future will be more like the Web than like Oracle, DB2, or SQL Server. November 23, 3:00 a.m. PST Product previews McAfee tailors anti-spyware to fit business needs Spyware has become a formidable security threat to large companies and small businesses alike. Addressing the different needs of large and small organizations, McAfee this week released two new anti-spyware offerings, one tailored for large enterprises and one for small businesses. Both offerings leverage technology called On-Access Scanning to spot and eliminate spyware, adware, and keylogging programs before they can install on systems. McAfee AntiSpyware Enterprise, a stand-alone anti-spyware product, will be available in early December. McAfee Managed VirusScan plus AntiSpyware, aimed at small businesses, is a subscription-based service that is available now. AntiSpyware Enterprise and Managed VirusScan plus AntiSpyware, McAfee November 14, 3:00 a.m. PST Sabre's customer-driven SOA How does a technology-driven company with massive performance and scalability requirements -- and incredibly varied customer and supplier bases -- transition to SOA? For Sabre Holdings, the answer was a lot of in-house development and a complex interweaving of the old and new. November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Verizon goes back to the workbench To overcome its SOA roadblocks, Verizon had to build an entire SOA operational infrastructure virtually from scratch -- and it has the patents to prove it. "As a technology, Web services are great, but today's standards don't have nearly enough operational infrastructure around them," says Shadman Zafar, Verizon's senior vice president of architecture and e-services. "You can end up with a plethora of Web services but no awareness of which of them are where and provide what function -- and most important -- which have the right kind of capacity and SLA to be usable by what and whom. The result is that SOA risks simply becoming a toy for the developer." November 7, 3:00 a.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 New processes for Thomson Prometric "The biggest challenge we've faced in creating an SOA has been identifying exactly what a service is," says Christopher Crowhurst, vice president and chief architect at Thomson Learning. "Understanding what the business is doing, converting that to a set of services, and working out how to expose those services in a granular, extensible way so that you're not constantly breaking consumers' interfaces -- we learned that many people just can't do it." November 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Managing metadata When we talk and write about IT issues, we use certain words to mean many different things: "Platform," "architecture," and "integration" are among the worst offenders. But the most overloaded term in the IT lexicon may well be "metadata." October 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT What about BizTalk? I said I wouldn’t but I did. I missed the first episode of Alias and now I’m hosed. Sydney’s pregnant and she’s pissed. The boyfriend is still around, but he’s someone else now? And this isn’t making her cranky? October 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Reinventing the office suite The controversy over office document formats heated up again this month when Microsoft and Massachusetts tangled over the state’s firm intention to standardize on the OpenOffice.org XML format. Personally, I think everyone’s barking up the wrong tree. Office suites haven’t felt like the center of the computing universe for a very long time. The network’s where the action is. September 14, 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 Software AG acquires rich client development tools Software AG has agreed to acquire Web application tools developer Casabac Technologies GmbH in a move to expand its portfolio of business integration products, Software AG said Thursday in a statement. August 12, 5:07 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 XQuery blankets the enterprise thanks to major collaboration Back in 1998 there was no consensus that anyone would need a full-fledged XML query language. Today, XQuery is being implemented by all the major relational databases, by middleware vendors, in content management systems, and by open source projects. It’s even becoming part of the SQL standard. “You’ve got to consider that success for a language,” says Jonathan Robie, one of the prime movers in the development of XQuery. August 1, 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 Sonic’s ESB takes new approach to fail-over If the SOA movement had an official flag, on that flag would be a diagram of an ESB (enterprise service bus) — an open and distributed integration platform that provides interfaces to a wide variety of systems and applications and ensures reliable messaging among them. And if you dotted the flag with the logos of leading SOA vendors, Sonic Software’s would surely have to stand out from the rest. August 1, 5:00 a.m. PDT XML's quirky namespaces Last month, Microsoft announced that the forthcoming Office 12 will save to XML by default and that earlier versions will be retrofitted to work with XML. This week Apple released its podcast-aware version of iTunes and defined an extension to RSS 2.0 for use with its online music store. Over the next year or so, these initiatives will create millions of new users of XML. They'll also expose thousands of developers to a feature of XML that's caused more than its fair share of headaches: namespaces. July 13, 5:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft readies Atlas Web development framework Microsoft at its annual Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in September will debut a new object-oriented framework aimed at simplifying the development of client-side browser applications. July 4, 5:00 a.m. PDT Can contracts survive in the grassroots ecosystem? My documentary on the evolution of Wikipedia’s heavy metal umlaut page has been the most popular screencast I’ve made. It investigates the sociology of Wikipedia-style collaboration, but it also explores the dynamics of the underlying version control system. June 29, 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 Office 12 jumps to XML In a move that could bring a chorus of both cheers and jeers, Microsoft has committed to adopting XML technology as the default file format in the next version of Office, expected to enter beta testing this fall. June 6, 5:00 a.m. PDT Office 12 to include XML file formats June 1, 9:01 p.m. PDT What's next after AJAX? The rapid spread of the term AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) -- from Weblog to Wall Street Journal within weeks! -- might lead developers to assume it’s a breakthrough that heralds the death of desktop applications. There’s certainly a kernel of truth in that: The recent spate of new Web applications under the AJAX banner have redefined end-users’ expectation of what’s even possible within a Web browser by offering smooth scrolling, incremental updates, and more responsive input forms. May 23, 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 Paving the information footpaths I’m sure there are dozens of versions of this story, but I heard it from Larry Wall, the father of Perl, and it goes like this: Instead of laying down sidewalks, the builders of a new university campus waited for footpaths to emerge on the lawns. Then they paved the footpaths. Larry designed Perl around this idea of structure emerging from use, but that was an unusual case. We typically lay down the sidewalks first, and when footpaths emerge we profess surprise or try to ignore them. May 4, 5:00 a.m. PDT WINHEC - Microsoft aims "Metro" at Adobe SEATTLE - The next version of Windows will include a new document format, code-named "Metro," to print and share documents, Microsoft Corp. said Monday. Metro appears to rival Adobe Systems's PostScript and PDF (portable document format) technologies. April 25, 2:46 p.m. PDT Past and future meet in Novell OES Novell’s OES (Open Enterprise Server) 1.0 is not actually a new product, but a weaving together of existing ones. Aiming to bring old Novell customers to Linux, and Linux shops to NetWare, OES combines SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) 9.0 and NetWare 6.5, including Virtual Office Services and iPrint, Novell File Services and iFolder, identity management (nSure and eDirectory), Novell iManager Web-based admin, and clustering. No longer do these services require NetWare servers or even NetWare client software on Windows workstations, and with outstanding support for Linux workstations and servers, OES is worth investigating for any organization that uses Linux, especially for workstations. April 22, 5:00 a.m. PDT Developing with next-generation Dynamic HTML Last week I mentioned Greasemonkey , a Firefox extension that enables scripts to run in the context of Web pages. Since then I've written a few of my own Greasemonkey scripts. The first, which I've shown in a screencast, is an improved LibraryLookup. April 13, 5:00 a.m. PDT Styles of Web application intermediation Certain aspects of Web technology continue to surprise me, no matter how well I think I understand them. Intermediation is one of them, and it comes in a couple of different flavors. April 6, 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 Using RSS for data integration Last week at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Jeff Bezos announced OpenSearch, an API that enables third parties to inject their own live search results into Amazon’s A9.com. I didn’t attend ETech this year, but that cloud had a silver lining: I was able to dive right in and do an OpenSearch implementation. March 23, 6:00 a.m. PST Fast-forward learning with screencasting As I continue to explore and develop screencasting, I’m finding new and unexpected uses for it. Here’s one that took me completely by surprise. March 18, 3:00 p.m. PST Service-oriented architectures To understand and apply the principles of SOA, you’d think we would have to agree first on what we mean by a “service.” To a surprising degree, we haven’t, but this is hardly the first time a powerful idea has been tricky to nail down. Definitions of “objects’ and “components” -- the ideas that powered earlier phases of software’s evolution -- were just as elusive. March 11, 3:00 p.m. PST IBM maps its information-management plan IBM later this month plans to release updated versions of its DB2 content- and document-management products, featuring tighter integration among the portfolio. The move sets in motion Big Blue’s longer-term strategy to create an integrated information-management platform that supports customers’ mixed repository environments. March 11, 3:00 p.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 Implementing real-world structured searches In the early days of XML, smart search was often cited as a key benefit. Instead of just trawling for single-celled keywords in an ocean of undifferentiated text, the story went, we'd navigate islands of structure looking for more evolved creatures. Product descriptions, calendar events, and media objects are all examples of the kinds of things we were meant to be finding by now. February 25, 3:00 p.m. PST XForms, three ways HTML’s ongoing affair with XML is producing another love child: XForms. February 25, 3:00 p.m. PST Gates: Future Office to boast workflow Microsoft with the next major version of the Office applications suite will feature built-in workflow capabilities, company Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said on Friday. February 4, 1:50 p.m. PST Microsoft touts XML at Office developer event REDMOND, WASH. -- Microsoft on Wednesday opened the first-ever Microsoft Office System Developer Conference, positioning the productivity suite as a development platform in and of itself and emphasizing XML as the lingua franca for data access in the suite. February 2, 2:15 p.m. PST Edify gets VoiceXML certification Edify on Tuesday is announcing that its Edify Voice Interaction Platform (EVIP) 9.0 system for deploying speech activation applications has received VoiceXML 2.0 Certification from the VoiceXML Forum. December 14, 5:00 a.m. PST Tales from the data entry trenches When a family member underwent a series of minor medical procedures recently, I got a telling glimpse of the hospital’s data-entry systems. As I’m sure is true elsewhere, it isn’t a pretty picture. November 26, 3:00 p.m. PST Whatever happened to SVG? Remember SVG? The acronym stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. In a posting to the xml-dev mailing list back in 2000, XML co-inventor Tim Bray said: “SVG is going to change the face of the Web.” If that prediction had come true, we’d have used SVG to visualize the results of the recent election. Instead, as Macromedia’s Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch noted on his Weblog, the election was closely divided, but developers voted overwhelmingly to use Flash for interactive maps, dynamic tables, and live charts. November 19, 3:00 p.m. PST What do developers want? The watchword of IT today is to make the most of what you've got. Developers are no exception, according to the results of this year's InfoWorld Programming Survey. We asked people who build enterprise applications to tell us how they did business in today's economy, and the response was resounding: Stick with the competencies you have and increase your investment in those tools and technologies that have proven their value to your organization. September 24, 3:00 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 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 Tools to tame XML content IBM later this month will demonstrate Project Cinnamon, the company's content management technology designed to ease document management and storage through XML tagging. July 9, 3:00 p.m. PDT Thin clients and rich data In the rich vs. reach debate, rich usually means a user interface more responsive and more coherent than a browser’s. Prime contenders in the rich-client struggle are Java, .Net, and Flash. All three can be used natively or as renderers for a new breed of tools — from Altio, Digital Harbor, Droplets, Laszlo, among others — which create GUI applications for these platforms. Meanwhile, developers in the trenches know that rumors of the browser’s death are greatly exaggerated. The browser continues to deliver a killer combination of reach plus ease of learning and use, with simplicity of development, no-touch deployment, and continuous update. June 11, 3:00 p.m. PDT Shaping forms for an XML-based future Crediting one person for the work of a group is always fraught with peril. But in the case of the XForms specification, Micah Dubinko's name comes to the fore. May 21, 3:00 p.m. PDT OASIS approves XML business documents specification OASIS has approved Universal Business Language (UBL) 1.0 as a Committee Draft, meaning the XML business documents specification is ready for implementation in commercial and open source efforts. May 3, 1:00 p.m. PDT XML vendors set to unveil gigabit speeds XML acceleration and security vendor DataPower is upgrading its silicon chip to gigabit speed and will release it in the coming weeks on PCI and PMC cards that can be embedded in network infrastructure, according to company officials. April 30, 4:10 p.m. PDT ESB market heats up Once a lone voice in the wilderness extolling the virtues of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology, Sonic Software now finds itself with lots of company. The idea of ESBs is to offer a standards-based integration platform that brings together service-oriented architectures (SOAs), messaging, Web services, and XML with a distributed deployment model. Perhaps the most vocal evangelist for this technology has been Gordon Van Huizen, Sonic's CTO, who has played a central role in developing his company's flagship product. Van Huizen recently spoke with InfoWorld Editor At Large Ed Scannell about the still evolving competitive nature of the ESB market and where his company's technology fits in between the offerings of IBM and Microsoft's still off-in-the-distance Indigo technology, which will be stitched into Longhorn. April 30, 8:30 a.m. PDT Visio schemas link data in diagrams Microsoft has released documentation that allows corporate and third-party developers to take full advantage of the XML-based schemas, called DatadiagramML, in its Office Visio diagramming tool. April 16, 6:00 p.m. PDT Proxy power My e-mail client pulls messages through a local proxy that checks RBLs (real-time blackhole lists) and tags offending messages with a special header. In Web services lingo we’d call that proxy a policy-driven intermediary. The protocol that’s intermediated, in this case, is POP3. The policy, set by me, is to check one or more RBLs. Because the proxy lives in the protocol layer, it works with any POP3 client and any POP3 server. April 16, 3:00 p.m. PDT Compuware takes on Java, .Net with Uniface Bucking the established Java and .Net application camps, Compuware on Monday will roll out Uniface 8.4, an upgrade to the company’s alternative development platform that features enhancements for Web services and SOAs (service-oriented architectures). April 15, 1:00 p.m. PDT Microsoft opens up Visio schemas Microsoft on Thursday announced it has released documentation that allows corporate and third-party developers to take full advantage of the XML-based schemas, called DatadiagramML, in its Office Visio diagramming tool. April 15, 6:00 a.m. PDT OASIS backs reusable content spec for docs OASIS this week said it has formed a technical committee to advance Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), an XML-based document creation and management standard for authoring reusable content in documents. April 14, 3:15 p.m. PDT Microsoft and Sun: The morning after The saga of sniping and legal wrangling between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft is finally over. But is it feel-good posturing or a harbinger of joint development? April 9, 3:00 p.m. PDT > Application development > Data management > XML standards > Platforms > Open source standards > Standards > Open source standards > Standards > XML standards > Web services |
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