Developers enjoy being on the cutting edge of technology, using the latest programming languages, development environments, and tools. Bookstores and conferences are packed full of topics like Java, Ruby on Rails, C#, Ajax and others. Unfortunately a "dirty little secret" of computing exists that is only now becoming a topic of conversation: Cobol, Fortran, and Assembler continue to run a majority of the critical applications in our lives.
CIOs are charged with being agile and responsive to the needs of the business, yet struggle to maintain their legacy applications. How can you become agile when you have a six month development cycle and no-one truly understands the application any more?
While there are volumes of online magazines, blogs, trade magazines, and books written about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), everything I need to know about SOA, I already learned from Linux and the Open Source Software movement.
In 2000, when Theresa Friday, Ray Waldin, and Jeff Luszcz were working for dot-com startup
Cacheon, they saw firsthand the power of open source software to impact a business model. In Cacheon's case, it looked like open source had dealt a death blow to the company, but it was really careless use of third-party code that was the source of the trouble, Friday says. The three colleagues were so impacted by what they had seen that they launched a new business designed to help other companies prevent implosion from software licensing issues.
When you're designing and developing new software systems, it is often hard to see how all the pieces are suppose to fit together. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is one tool that allow developers and architects to ease the process and create a big picture before committing to a particular technology.
Adobe recently created a media buzz with the announcement of a cross-platform Web-enabled runtime environment, code named
Apollo. The environment allows developers to create applications that run directly on the desktop while using content from the Web. Adobe has built Apollo to leverage existing technologies such as Flash, Flex, HTML, and AJAX. Apollo is an amazing concept, but it is not a new idea. Sun Microsystems released Java Web Start in 2001, and the Mozilla Foundation invented XUL when it created Firefox. There are also several startups entering the market. All of their products are geared do the same thing: bring Web applications to the desktop.
The multi-core microprocessor is a single physical integrated circuit chip that combines two or more independent processors into a single package, with independent computing units and shared memory and bus access. These new CPUs gain the ability and economies to run multiple processes within a single chip. Today, dual-core systems are being shipped in mass, and already becoming mainstream in high-performance enterprises and organizations worldwide. Intel plans to ship its first quad-core chips in November, with AMD not far behind in Q1 2007. Soon it will be hard to find systems running just a single CPU. So what's the big deal?
MONROVIA, CA – (January 26, 2006) – Parasoft Corp. announced the opening of business operations in the Netherlands to support the growing European market demand for improved software reliability, security and performance.
OpenPoint Issue Tracker is a free, easy to use, multi-user, Web-based tool designed to monitor and report progress toward resolving issues, bugs, service requests, and enhancements. Issues are organized by project, subproject, and category. Management and issue tracking reports can be viewed online and exported to Excel. Issue detail can be exported to PDF. Other features include the ability to select user-specific issues to track (My Issues) and cross-project issue search. OpenPoint Issue Tracker is very easy to install and includes a built-in Web server. Users need only a Web browser.
As cross-platform development grows, programmers are turning toward open source tools that are not tied to a single platform. Even Windows development is drifting toward open source, as more .Net developers look to tools such as Mono and PHP to develop software for the Microsoft platform.
IT professionals whose only call to fame is XML
certification aren't necessarily likely to impress
someone like Russ Krauss, chief operating officer at
SCAN USA Inc. in Houston, Texas.
SCAN USA, which provides a national alert system that
allows local law enforcement and public safety
agencies to send alerts to persons with PCs, cell
phones, and PDAs, seeks workers with broad ranges of
skills -- including XML -- rather than persons who are
specialists in merely one area, explained Krauss.
"We use programming staff from around the country," he
said. "We have contractors that bring the different
skill sets we need.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... We're looking for a mix of
Linux, PHP, MySQL, and XML.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... We're looking for a
mix versus any [specific] certification."
High-performance software developers may be getting a leg up on the latest hardware advances with a new set of open source software tools for developing scientific libraries created by U.S. university researchers.
They claim the "new breed" of software they've created, dubbed "SPIRAL," could revolutionize how computer code is written, particularly in light of the latest advances in high-performance hardware that is often, as in the case of IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer, running Linux. The automatic code generator, which provides a broad range of solutions to identify optimal signal processing and math functions, spits out high-quality code that is less buggy, saving testing and time, Carnegie Mellon University professor and researcher Jose Moura told ITMJ in a recent interview.
Instead of using new software development technology
each time another computer operating system platform
becomes the flavor of the month, companies should
encourage their software developers to use portable
tools and leverage existing skills, said Geoff
Perlman, president and CEO of
REAL Software Inc. in
Austin, Texas.
"With our product, we make it possible for the
software developer to write software for multiple
platforms rather than learning the platform APIs for
Windows, for Linux, for Macs," he remarked, talking
about his company's REALbasic application. "There are
people who are experts in any one of those platforms,
but [there are] very few that are experts in all. And
even if you want to be an expert, there's a tremendous
learning curve."
I first tried out a virtual reality (VR) helmet in early 2002. With the helmet on, and connected to a Silicon Graphics server, I saw a virtual world filled with cargo boxes and red brick walls, and not a lot more than that. VR has yet to live up to its early hype, but today some of its concepts and ideas have been embodied in various software projects, some open and some closed source. Which is right for your organization?
First, let's take a look at three open source virtual reality applications: DIVERSE, white_dune, and VR Juggler.
Researchers at the Intel R&D Pittsburgh near
Carnegie-Mellon University have created a working prototype of
Internet Suspend/Resume (IS/R), a way to move your computing environment without moving any hardware.
IS/R takes the state of one computer, including operating system, programs, data -- even cursor position -- and "suspends" it all, then sends the whole works, wrapped in a virtual machine, across the network to another computer. The user can then resume his work as if he had brought his own computer.
Anastacia Davidenko writes "Every day millions of new web documents emerge on the Internet, and the amount of web management tools is growing simultaneously. These tools are usually referred to as Content Management Systems, CMS for short. If you have a web site and still do not use any CMS, you will definitely face a choice to buy or to develop an enterprise content management solution in the near future. What would you do if you wanted to develop a CMS, your own software that has a WYSIWYG editor and perfectly meets all your requirements and security standards? Can this task be fulfilled? Which ROI should you expect? You will have to answer all those questions all by yourself. Your chance to success can be increased if you gain an understanding of basics of a web content management system.
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- At the
Mac OS X Conference here Tuesday, Apple Computer tantalized several hundred developers and assorted consultants, IT managers, and media types with a second fleeting look at
Tiger, code name for version 10.4 of the Mac operating system. CEO Steve Jobs introduced it June 28 at the
Apple Worldwide Developer Conference.
Oracle Corp. recently announced a major Linux initiative in collaboration with
Red Hat. The initiative is an enterprise application porting center christened LEAP.
Oracle has been doing
closed-door development on Linux for several years. Its development center in Bangalore, India has been involved in making Oracle software run on Linux since 1998.
Bellevue, Wash.-based VoteHere's release of a reference source code implementation of its VHTi election verification software is highlighting the vital role of an open source approach to electronic voting alternatives, even one that runs on Windows.
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. -- IBM created the term
autonomic computing in the
Autonomic Computing Blueprint it published in April 2003. Autonomic computing is simply a self-management mechanism for a system or systems. This month Big Blue is getting the development ball rolling by releasing the
first autonomic computing SDK. IBM's Chief Research Administrator Dr. John Shedletsky has taken to the road to convince the world that autonomic computing is the wave of the future.
New Year's prediction: Longhorn will never ship, but Microsoft Linux will. Even if I'm wrong, it's clear that software development is headed for a new place, and the end game that most observers saw even five years ago -- that MS would win it all -- doesn't seem as likely on the eve of 2004. That said, Microsoft isn't going to go away, in this author's opinion.
