Lightweight approaches to developing software have been around for years, coalescing in early 2001 under the term "agile" with the publication of the "Manifesto for Agile Software Development," and influencing virtually every phase of the software development life cycle. The primary focus of agile development has been, not surprisingly, developers and their use of an evolving set of principles and practices. But what about project managers? Is there a way to apply agile practices to their part in the process?
Seeking to provide programmers with the open-standard, copyright-free, event-processing equivalent of SQL, iSpheres announced last week that it has developed the Event Processing Language (EPL).
If there's one lesson to be learned from this month's set of Microsoft security
patches, it's that letting data into your system is rife with danger.
Finding that the majority of coders using its Java server are working with Eclipse, Systinet is coming out with a set of tools specifically designed for the popular open-source IDE.
A group of technology vendors that includes AMD, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, last week published a new Web services specification designed to simplify network administration across a range of devices. Dubbed Web Services Management (WS-M), the spec describes how to use Web services as a remote management access protocol.
Sun Microsystems has agreed to pay Eastman Kodak $92 million to settle an intellectual property dispute between the two companies, Sun disclosed last week. The announcement came just days after a federal jury found that Sun had infringed on three of Kodak's object-oriented software patents when it created Java.
Positioning its NetWeaver platform for enterprise Java applications, SAP plans to offer a "virtual machine container" in 2005.
Totally rewriting legacy logic for Web-enabled applications is risky business, says Gorge Altanirano, project manager for Antargaz, a French supplier of bottled gas for rural home owners and farmers in France.
Who says you can't use agile software development methodologies for large, complex projects with high assurance requirements? Certainly not the members of Lockheed Martin's flight software development team, who employ agile principles in combination with traditional, plan-driven processes to develop guidance software for the Atlas V rocket.
The first major release of IBM WebSphere in two years offers self-healing capabilities to provide failover for business transactions conducted via the Internet.
Seeing an opportunity to help companies deal with Sarbanes-Oxley, nLayers is offering an IT network appliance that helps with compliance. The San Jose, Calif.-based start-up's first product, nLayers InSight, is a passive -- as in non-invasive -- plug-in appliance that provides IT departments with an optimization tool that looks at the infrastructure and finds ways to streamline business processes.
Three former BEA Systems executives have launched a company they hope will become the Dell of open-source software.
Sun Microsystems last week released the long-awaited overhaul of the Java 2 Standard Edition. Sun is calling J2SE 5.0, code name "Project Tiger," the most significant upgrade of the Java platform and programming language in nearly a decade.
Sun has proposed some pretty silly patents lately. I wonder if they still think
they're a good idea after last week?
A San Francisco database solutions provider is applying it to the daunting task of managing the burgeoning data that threatens to bury the enterprise.
The concept of providing businesses with compute pools of network-attached processing power is the brainchild of Azul Systems, a Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up.
When a toolmaker known for its almost Zen-like focus on developers begins turning its attention toward the business needs and concerns of management, it's fair to ask: "Where will this new strategy leave programmers?" The toolmaker in question is Borland Software, whose recent unveiling of the next phase of its evolving product strategy, dubbed Software Delivery Optimization (SDO), raises that question.
Wikis are Web sites that anyone can edit. This seems like a recipe for disaster,
but in fact they can be surprisingly resilient.
Marius Roets, an integration architect at Woolworths Holdings Ltd. runs a Microsoft shop with developers used to working with Visual Studio .NET. The retail chain with 180 stores in South Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australasia, had requirements for building a data monitoring and alerting system with a Sybase enterprise portal and a J2EE application server. So at the beginning of this year Roets faced the question of "How can I develop a J2EE application in a Microsoft environment?"
The notion of running IT like a business seems to have established itself as the next big industry idea.