Application Development Trends' News


Debian Distros Form Alliance

Nine commercial distributors of Debian-based products have formed an alliance to maintain a set of essential programs, or packages, that will serve as a common foundation for each member’s distribution.

CopperEye Looks into a New Repository

CopperEye introduced a business event repository that allows companies to store hundreds of terabytes of data indefinitely and retrieve it when necessary.

Consumers Fly Through Checkout with PayPilot

Accelitec, a transaction management systems provider, has unveiled PayPilot, an end-to-end RFID payment system. Using Automated Clearing House’s credit and prepay systems, PayPilot allows for faster, more secure, and convenient payment methods, while reducing interchange transaction costs and giving retailers greater control, Accelitec says.

Big Blue Offers BI Help to AIX Users

IBM introduced business intelligence software aimed to allow AIX users to archive, integrate and analyze vast amounts of historical data.

IT Staffing Is On the Way Up, but Finding the Right People Is a Downer

Although a majority of enterprises plan to boost IT staffing this year, it will be difficult for them to find the talent they are looking for. The most difficult-to-hire positions for IT organizations include project manager, Web applications programmer, security analyst, database administrator and network engineer.

Liberty Alliance Certifies SAML Interoperability

The Liberty Alliance Project, a global consortium for open federated identity standards and identity-based Web services, announced that products from eight companies passed testing at Liberty’s most recent interoperability conformance event.

SPSS Revamps Its Flagship Stat Software

SPSS, a predictive analytics software provider, has unveiled what it says is a significantly enhanced version of SPSS 14.0, its flagship statistical software package.

SOA Software XML VPN Validated for IBM Tivoli

SOA Software said yesterday that IBM has validated SOA Software's XML VPN product as WS-Trust "Ready for IBM Tivoli Software." SOA Software XML VPN employs WS-Trust to integrate with IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager, allowing the enterprise to exchange secure B2B transactions sharing trusted, end-user identities, SOA says.

Airgas Receives Tracking Help from AppLabs

Airgas recently underwent a rapid expansion, but its workflow was done the old-fashioned way—manually. Manual processing is always painstaking, but entering data for 80,000 SKUs for specialty gases is especially tedious.

OASIS Working on SOA Blueprints

An OASIS committee has announced a project to create technical blueprints for businesses vying for a reliable way to develop applications for a service-oriented architecture.

Evans Data Reports on SMB Development Projects

The top three development projects planned for the next year for small and medium businesses are: B2B e-commerce, Customer Relationship Management and Work Flow Management, according to Evans Data's new Summer 2005 Small and Medium Business Development Survey.

JetBlue Adds SOA Management

JetBlue Airways plans to secure and monitor what the airline anticipates will be a growing number of Web services with the help of SOA Software’s Service Manager.

If You Build BI, You Must Maintain BI

Custom-built BI applications need tune-ups. And if the rate at which new features are added to shrink-wrapped BI releases from major vendors is any indication, BI consumers, in particular, aren’t shy about asking for more. As a result, there’s a good chance custom-built BI apps will require more attention than other kinds of homegrown software.

Business Objects adds Linux to its BI Portfolio

Business Objects announced yesterday that BusinessObjects XI, which includes Crystal Reports Server XI, now supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server platforms. To simplify deployment, BusinessObjects XI on Linux features guided installation and Web-based management, BO says.

Red Hat Sets the Base for the Fedora Foundation

At a LinuxWorld press conference yesterday, Red Hat provided an update on the Fedora Foundation, RH’s effort to share control of Fedora’s future development with the open-source community. RH is creating the Fedora Foundation with the intent of moving Fedora project development work and copyright ownership of contributed code to the foundation, says Mark Webbink, deputy general counsel at Red Hat.

IBM’s Grid Computing On-Ramp

IBM has unveiled a new packaged set of software, hardware and services designed to provide an entry-level system for companies getting into grid computing.

The Next Front in the Build-vs.-Buy BI Debate

Owing to a variety of factors, enterprises will increasingly give up their homegrown ETL solutions in favor of more sophisticated commercial ETL packages.

HP’s Fink Challenges IBM and Sun on Open-Source Licensing

Hewlett-Packard’s VP and general manager of the NonStop Enterprise Division, Martin Fink, challenged IBM and Sun Microsystems to drop their open-source licensing schemes and adopt the GNU General Public License during his keynote speech at the LinuxWorld 2005 conference in San Francisco.

IBM Releases an Upgrade for WebSphere

IBM today unveiled WebSphere Extended Deployment Version 6.0, which the company says delivers greater business value through effective use of an existing IT infrastructure, support for mixed workload and server types, support for new advanced data caching, and improvements in manageability and monitoring.

Apache Derby is Off and Running

The Apache Derby development community has released Apache Derby 10.1.1.0. Derby graduated from the incubator in July and is now a subproject of the Apache DB project.