Application Development Trends' News


Sun’s Schwartz Promotes FOSS; Defends CDDL

Sun Microsystems’ president and COO Jonathan Schwartz kicked off the second annual Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco on April 5 with a keynote that painted Sun as a fierce friend of the free and open-source software (FOSS) movement.

A New Approach to the Data Usability Problem

Moving data from one system to another is easy; making it usable outside the application that created it is anything but. This is not a new problem, and yet a surprising number of enterprise integration projects underestimate the difficulty of making data fully compatible with the requirements of other applications or systems.

Informatica Adds Virtual Data Integration

Just a month after announcing a series of upgrades to its PowerCenter data integration product, Informatica Corp. has teamed up with an outside company to augment its platform.

The Real Healthcare Challenge

The proliferation of sophisticated information technologies in the healthcare industry is all but universal today. Hospitals, clinics, labs--virtually all medical facilities--are highly computerized, generating mountains of electronic medical records.

New JavaScript Editor

Leading Web design and development tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver can make Web site development much faster and easier but often leave lots to be desired when developers want to actually write new code.

Looping Data Warehouses and Transaction Systems

Traditionally, data warehouses have had a one-way relationship with the transaction systems that supply the raw data. However, with the advent of SOA, the data warehouse and the transaction systems can be looped, each feeding the other. This is key for effective business intelligence and business analytics. In his report," Service Oriented Architecture Assimilates Data Warehousing," Lou Agosta, an analyst at Forrester Research, describes the feedback loop.

Digging into Data with SOAs

Until recently, most IT managers have focused on deploying service-oriented architectures on transaction systems and production apps, but now, some managers are exploring how to apply SOAs to the data warehouse and activities like business intelligence and business analytics.

Seibel Launches New Version of Hosted CRM

Siebel Systems upped the ante in the increasingly competitive hosted customer relationship management (CRM) market with the launch of yet another new version of its CRM OnDemand software. This is the San Mateo, CA-based company's seventh new release of the product in just over a year-which should leave no doubt that Siebel is serious about hosted CRM, says Bruce Cleveland, Siebel's SVP and OnDemand/SMB general manager.

Oracle Expands ID Management Offering with Oblix Acquisition

Oracle's acquisition of identity management vendor Oblix expands the company's ID management capabilities beyond its own products. Oracle has been offering ID and access management solutions for more than two years, but the Redwood Shores, CA-based company's much publicized acquisition of PeopleSoft created a need for an ID solution that could yield an enlarged, heterogeneous product set.

Sun Gives Devs Preview of Thresher Shark

Java developers are getting a chance to test drive some new features proposed for the next major release of Sun Microsystems' Java Studio Creator visual development environment, code-named Thresher Shark. The preview features are not yet fully supported, says Dan Roberts, manager of Sun's developer tools marketing group, but are offered to give developers a chance to try them out and provide feedback.

Have Scripting Language, Will ETL

If you didn't know it already, IBM Corp.'s billion dollar-plus acquisition of ETL specialist Ascential Software Corp. confirmed it: data integration is a big business. Consultancy META Group, for example, says that ETL revenues will grow at a 10 to 20 percent clip over the next three to five years, and market watcher Forrester Research puts 2004 ETL revenues at close to $1 billion.

IDC Directions: The Future is Here, Vendors Now Need to Act

The implosion is over, the future is here, now what are vendors going to do about it? That was the question asked of 900 attendees, mostly vendors, at this year's recent IDC Directions 2005 Conference in Boston.

DOORS XT Debuts in Year of Requirements Management

Will 2005 be the year requirements management (RM) comes of age, goes mainstream, and stops being an underutilized and unloved niche function of the software development process? Telelogic, maker of the venerable DOORS RM product line, thinks so.

IT Must Change to Support Evolving Business Processes

Old-style, monolithic business process models that emphasize tight controls and stability are quickly giving way to new distributed models that depend on openness, flexibility, and constant change. And IT architectures must evolve in several specific ways to support those changes.

EMC's New Documentum Release Crammed with Features

EMC's announcement last week of a huge new release of its Documentum enterprise content management family illustrates the allure of helping companies with growing content and work process management challenges.

WestJet Meets Compliance With IBM Workplace

Meeting compliance requirements is of utmost importance for WestJet, a Canadian low-fare airline. To stay in business, the company must comply with the Canadian Multilateral Instrument 52-109/111 financial governance requirements.

Congress Looks at Enterprise ID Management

If you're not nervous about identity management and security in your organization, you're just not paying attention. Recent ID heists at ChoicePoint and Bank of America lit a veritable bonfire under Congressional behinds, and lawmakers are set to put the onus for safeguarding customer info squarely on the shoulders of the enterprise.

NetManage Moves into Mobility

Few phenomena have changed enterprise computing quite like the recent explosive growth of wireless networks and the subsequent proliferation of mobile devices. Mobile networks now cover 80 percent of the world's population, according to analysts at Forrester Research, which means that more than five billion people are within range of a cellular network. Connected PDAs and a remarkably capable generation of smart phones have linked untethered workers to the company network like never before.

Enterprise Software Aids XML, Web Services and SOA Governance

Web services are supposed to work together to make life easier. Yet they only work well together if they're designed properly. WebLayers in Cambridge, Mass., has introduced an enterprise software tool to aid in effective governance of XML, Web services and SOA to ensure interoperability.

XML Cutting Down Unstructured Data

We tend to think of data as either structured (the roughly 20 percent that fits neatly into the cells of a relational database) or unstructured (the audio, video, e-mail, and Word files that are usually referred to as content, and which constitute the remaining 80 percent). But thanks to the Extensible Markup Language (XML), there's a third category emerging: semi-structured data.