Application Development Trends' News


Microsoft MVPs Petition for XQuery Support in Whidbey

When Microsoft announced in January that it was dropping XQuery support from the next release of the .NET Framework, the company’s reasoning seemed sound enough: XQuery will not receive final approval from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body shepherding its development, until early 2006. But the .NET Framework 2.0 (code-named “Whidbey”) is due this summer, which means that Microsoft will be finalizing the code well before XQuery becomes a W3C recommendation, “making it impossible,” says Microsoft, “for us to guarantee forward compatibility between any XQuery support in .NET 2.0 and the eventual XQuery 1.0 recommendation.”

2005’s Cool Vendors in Emerging Trends and Technologies

Gartner, a market research company, has tapped seven small technology providers it says has the right stuff to be cool. Anne-Marie Roussel, research vice president and "Cool Vendors" lead Gartner analyst, says these companies share three attributes: innovative, enabling users to do things they couldn't do before; impactful, because have, or will have, business impact; and, intriguing, mainly because Gartner noticed them.

New XML Developer Tools from IBM’s alphaWorks

IBM today added three arrows to its Emerging Technology Toolkit (ETTK) quiver in the form of new software aimed at developers using emerging XML standards—such as XHTML, XForms and VoiceXML—to build Web applications that tie into service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

SOA Software and Oracle Hook Up for BPEL

SOA Software said today its SOA Software's Service Manager is now integrated with Oracle BPEL Process Manager and related products. SOA Software Service Manager enables enterprise to secure, monitor and manage XML and Web services applications and components across distributed enterprises and extranets.

Cross-Platform Porting Tools Speed Development

It’s not uncommon to have development teams who are proficient in a Microsoft environment, but customers who demand applications that run on J2EE, UNIX or Linux. Solutions such as rewriting the code or manually porting it after development can take many months.

Veritas CEO Makes the Case for Merger with Symantec at Annual User Conference

Veritas Software chief executive Gary Bloom used his keynote at his company’s annual user conference, under way this week in San Francisco, to make the case for the pending merger of Veritas and Symantec Corporation, and to assure his customers that their service would not change.

Veritas CEO Makes the Case for Merger with Symantec at Annual User Conference

Veritas Software chief executive Gary Bloom used his keynote at his company’s annual user conference, under way this week in San Francisco, to make the case for the pending merger of Veritas and Symantec Corporation, and to assure his customers that their service would not change.

Rotech Fills Prescription for Service-Oriented Architecture with Sonic ESB

Rotech Healthcare, a provider of home respiratory care and durable medical equipment, has deployed an SOA to automate order management and enable near-real-time visibility of patient information across disparate systems. Rotech used Sonic Software’s Sonic ESB, Sonic Orchestration Server and Sonic XML Server to build the SOA.

Will SAP’s Entry into BPO Cause the Market to Explode?

SAP's entrance into the business process outsourcing (BPO) market marks a major turning point in the outsourcing industry, according to market researcher Yankee Group. SAP's ERP model of the 1990s is finally transforming to adapt to the growth in outsourced services, with human resources at its center. Yankee Group says the HR BPO market is growing wildly and forecasts revenues will grow to $14 billion by 2009, up from $4.6 billion this year.

IBM and Cisco Join Forces to Deliver Speech to Contact Centers

IBM and Cisco Systems are set to announce today a joint effort to combine IBM's WebSphere Voice Server and Cisco's Internet Protocol-based Customer Voice Portal to deliver speech-enabled, self-service solutions for enterprise contact centers.

Intellitactics Unveils Tool to Help Ease Compliance Costs

Companies that comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, FISMA and Basel II must have effective log monitoring to meet auditing requirements. The volume of data generated to comply with regulations is quickly overwhelming some companies. External firewalls and network intrusion devices may generate more than 100 million events per day, and may require one full-time employee to perform log reviews. Manually sifting through logs and compiling reports is nearly impossible because the data is so vast, it distracts IT from business critical projects and stalls productivity.

New Software Licensing Model Proposed for Multi-core Chips

Software sellers generally base their pricing on the number of CPUs that will run their software. The recent arrival of processors with two or more cores, however, has prompted some software sellers to reassess their licensing models.

NetApps and VERITAS Collaborate on Data Protection Solutions

Network Appliance and VERITAS Software have introduced data protection and management solutions for multi-vendor environments, which the two companies say will enable their enterprise customers to reduce backup times, simplify management and decrease disk consumption.

Microsoft Launches 64-bit Windows

Microsoft launched new 64-bit versions of its Windows operating system this week. Bill Gates announced the release of the long-promised, much-delayed OSes during his keynote address at the 14th annual Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC 2005) in Seattle.

When Offshore App Dev Projects Go Bad

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that application development tasks are among the most likely to be sent offshore by U.S.-based firms. What is surprising, even though it probably shouldn’t be, is the uptick, anecdotally, at least, in offshore app dev horror stories: Application deliverables that don’t satisfy project requirements; are characterized by poor, sloppy or incoherent coding; or are simply unusable.

Elie Tahari Discovers Business Intelligence

High-end fashion retailer Elie Tahari was recently faced with a nice problem: the company was growing so fast—a 70-percent growth rate last year alone—that it needed to upgrade its operations.

Business Rules: Tips, Traps and Other Pratfalls

As you might expect with any emerging technology, business rules, even when implemented in tandem with a high-performance business rules management system (BRMS), are anything but turnkey.

The Business Rules Approach—a Zero-Sum Game?

Proponents stress that the business rules approach isn’t a zero-sum proposition for developers, and to the extent that few companies today embrace business rules without also involving IT, this is true.

Borland Bridges UML Gap for .NET Developers

Borland Software launched a major update of its Together modeling platform last week. With this release—Together 2005 for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET—the software development toolsmaker breaks new ground in two areas: it provides Microsoft coders with support for the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and it marks Borland’s first foray into role-based modeling.

The Search for Extra-Relation Business Intelligence

Don’t look now, but the next big frontier in enterprise data management is one most IT organizations probably feel they’ve already licked: search