There seems to be a consensus among open-source technology watchers that the Eclipse platform has reached a tipping point in its evolution toward widespread industry acceptance and even popularity. The recent EclipseCon trade show offered plenty of evidence to support the idea--primarily in the form of brand-name companies either jumping on board for the first time or ratcheting up their involvement in the Eclipse Foundation.
Microsoft's acquisition of Groove Networks may have more to do with personnel than with technology.
Sonic Software was one of the first to market with an enterprise service bus (ESB) product. Now the company is nicely positioned to take advantage of that early lead, as more and more companies move to adopt initiatives around Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs), with their promises of lower costs and non-proprietary solutions.
As the quest for seamless real-time data integration on a single platform continues, Informatica Corp. has released the first in a series of updates to its PowerCenter product.
A wave of innovation is sweeping the computer industry into a new era of mobility, says Sean Maloney, EVP and GM of the Intel Mobility Group. In fact, about a third of all the processors and transistors being produced today "end up being carried around by somebody."
Virtualization is fast becoming the must-have server-side capability. In fact, the technology that decouples software from hardware is well on its way to becoming a "standard fabric of the data center," says Raghu Raghuram, director of strategy and market development for VMWare.
Developers who focus on the iSeries platform got a long-awaited boost last week when IBM announced that it is greatly expanding its support for ISVs, tool providers and partners who write applications for its iSeries midrange platform.
IBM again showed that it is nothing if not savvy when it comes to Linux with its recent Linuxworld announcement of Chiphopper. The program, also called the IBM eServer Application Server Advantage for Linux, is a package of support and testing tools to help ISVs port x86 Linux applications to IBM architecture.
Intel's out-going CEO Craig Barrett delivered the opening keynote at this week's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco (March 1-3). Along with the standard trade-show technology touting, Barrett waxed philosophical on a range of issues, from the 40th anniversary of Moore's Law, to the state of the U.S. education system.
IBM has announced that it is investing $100 million over the next three years to expand Linux support and technology across its Workplace software portfolio. The announcement comes as a result of high double-digit growth in 2004 in the number of customers deploying IBM collaboration software on Linux, according to company officials.
There may indeed be situations in which it makes sense to rip out a fully-functioning C or C++ application and replace it with its J2EE equivalent. Given the option, however, most codejockeys would probably prefer to let sleeping applications lie, especially if the programs in question are based on fairly trouble-free code that mostly does what it's supposed to do.
Borland Software confirmed rumors this week that it would be upgrading its membership in the Eclipse Foundation. The Scotts Valley, CA-based toolmaker, which was one of the founding member companies of the organization, has signed on as a strategic developer and member of the board.
In many corporate environments, it helps to know your pointy-headed adversary. So the next time you're presented with an impossible project deadline, unreasonable project requirements, or still another level of bureaucratic indirection, you might want to use a little psychology.
The number of companies jumping on the Eclipse bandwagon has been growing at a furious pace since it gained official independence from IBM last year. Twenty-six companies joined the Eclipse Foundation in 2004, bumping that organization's roster to 82 members, including strategic developers, add-in providers, and associate members.
The top speech technology vendors gathered in San Francisco for SpeechTEK West, the biannual industry conclave (February 21-23). The industry was out in force for the show, with virtually all of the top vendors making announcements.
Although the XML market has so far been focused mostly on data management and Web services, XML also works well for content management. With the right tools, it's a natural for tracking information created by humans, including the contents of product manuals, technical material, Web sites, and program documentation.
The next 18 months will be a make-or-break period for vendors in the speech technology market, say the authors of a new report. For speech to become an effective enabling technology, one that enterprises take seriously, vendors must do more than simply automate touchtone activities, the report argues. They must deliver higher-order business benefits instead of incremental improvements, and they must develop a horizontal technology layer, an abstraction layer that allows the simple interfacing of speech with enterprise IT infrastructure.
One of the more intriguing pieces of news to come out of this week's EclipseCon 2005 conference is the Eclipse Foundation's announcement that it has completed its first-ever roadmap. The roadmap document, which the foundation plans to revise annually, is intended to provide visibility to the open-source community around Eclipse and the Eclipse ecosystem, explains Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich.
Computer security guru Gary McGraw is famous for pushing developers to take responsibility for building secure software. The operations side can only do so much with buggy applications and flawed systems, he has said. It's up to "the guys who build stuff for a living" to stop thinking about security as a feature, and to begin seeing it as an emergent property of a whole system.
Nexaweb Technologies Inc., Cambridge, Mass., has won systems integrator SoftCon AG's benchmark test for its Siemens AG Web-based application project. Siemens engaged SoftCon to plan and implement a very large and complex, Web-based application for its worldwide sales and engineering staff.