Warnings abound about spaghetti code, especially in legacy COBOL programs, but Michael Herr, senior director of IT at Germany’s Deutsche Post, says watch out for "spaghetti infrastructure."
Aiming to get more developers outside the company involved in the process of refining the Java platform, Sun Microsystems last week posted an early-release of version 6.0 of its Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE), code-named "Mustang."
Zach Cox is a software engineer at Charles River Analytics, Inc. Cambridge, Mass.-based development shop that for the past 20 years has built intelligence and decision support applications for military, government and commercial business use. Most recently it developed software NASA scientists used for planning treks for the Mars Rover. Cox is the chief developer of BNET Builder, an IDE designed to make it easy to build Bayesian networks for making predictions and diagnoses based on available information.
As enterprise trends go, few are as likely to keep the network security guys up at night as the growth of telecommuting. According to a study release this fall by the International Telework Association & Council, the number of employees who performed any kind of work from home grew from 41.3 million in 2003 to 44.4 million in 2004.
ObjectWeb, the open-source infrastructure consortium, announced this week that it has added eXo Platform SARL to its roster. The privately held French company provides support and services for the eXo Platform, an open-source enterprise portal, which will now be hosted by ObjectWeb.
Sun Microsystems launched the much-anticipated new version of its Solaris operating system this week, and announced an overhauled pricing model designed to compete with Linux.
The big brains on the Java team at Sun Microsystems have what Graham Hamilton, Sun's VP and Fellow for Java Platform and Architecture, calls "a secret obsession." "The Java developer base is large, and we're happy about that, but we want to grow that base even more," he says. "To do that, we believe that we have to simplify development to make it easier for all developers to write large, rich applications."
Oracle Corp. is poised to make what a company executive calls a “big push” in the business intelligence market in an effort to get customers to take advantage of as much functionality as BI tools have to offer.
Novell unveiled the latest version of its Linux OS last week. Built on technology the Waltham, Mass-based software maker picked up with its recent acquisition of SuSE, Novell Linux Desktop 9 is aimed squarely at enterprise users.
Geographically distributed software development projects are fast becoming the norm, and managing far flung dev teams is shaping up to become one of the biggest challenges faced by enterprise IT today. Conference calls, email, and instant messaging are basic to the process, but the increasing complexity of the software being developed is stirring up demand for what industry icon Grady Booch has described as "new development environments that support interactions between geographically disparate stake holders."
Supercomputing isn't just for science any more--it's not even just for supercomputers. So-called high-performance technical computing (HPTC) is spreading beyond traditional academic and governmental environments, and emerging as a serious option for enterprise IT.
Requirements are the foundation of every software development project. Good, bad, or ugly, everything gets built on them. Karl E. Wiegers believes that developers can put a little rebar in that foundation by recognizing a set of nearly universal requirements principals he calls "cosmic truths."
Universal Business Language (UBL), the standard for XML business documents in B2B applications, was approved this week by OASIS, the Boston-based international standards consortium.
Providing law offices and citizens with specific data on court schedules and other judicial information without compromising security was the challenge Robert McDonald faces as chief architect of Court Services Online.
Windows-based enterprises are taking their sweet time implementing the newly available Windows XP Service Pack 2 (XPSP2). The reason for this foot dragging? Expectations that XPSP2 migration will negatively impact business continuity in their organizations.
SOAs have arrived, but building and managing them is still a challenge for most organizations. That's a challenge IBM Global Services is taking on with a newly created practice aimed at helping enterprises migrate to service-oriented architectures. Unveiled this past week, Big Blue's new SOA Management Practice will seek to help customers with Web services management capabilities as they scale to enterprise-wide SOAs.
Architected Rapid Application Development (ARAD) is a new category of tools with a proven ROI edge, according to a recently completed user survey by Gartner, Inc.
One of the leading vendors of operating systems, development tools, and middleware for devices, Wind River Systems, jumps on the lifecycle bandwagon.
Some noteworthy enterprise-focused announcements found their way into the usual cacophony of consumer-oriented gizmo news that characterizes the annual CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment conference
Intel Corporation pushed its WiMAX strategy another step forward this week with the announcement of a partnership deal with Clearwire, Inc. a wireless broadband services company founded by cellular pioneer Craig McCaw.