Application Development Trends' News


Florida courts look to Semantic Web for disparate data on desperados

Systems that can retrieve snapshots from a photo database and display them on a notebook PC screen may seem almost trivial to an IT manager setting priorities for application development. But to Judge Charles Francis, chief judge, second judicial court in Florida, it is serious business when it comes to criminal law.

Methodology guru applies agile principles to project management

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?

iSpheres hopes EPL becomes the SQL of event processing

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).

Inputs are dangerous

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.

Systinet plugs into Eclipse

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.

Vendor group publishes new Web services management spec

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's Kodak moment: Patent suit settled out of court

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.

SAP: New NetWeaver technology solves Java enterprise reliability issues

Positioning its NetWeaver platform for enterprise Java applications, SAP plans to offer a "virtual machine container" in 2005.

French project manager puts in a word for legacy translation

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.

An agile approach to rocket science

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.

IBM announces new 'self-healing' WebSphere

The first major release of IBM WebSphere in two years offers self-healing capabilities to provide failover for business transactions conducted via the Internet.

Start-up offers appliance for SarbOx compliance

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.

Former BEA execs launch 'The Dell of open source'

Three former BEA Systems executives have launched a company they hope will become the Dell of open-source software.

Sun unleashes Tiger

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.

Live by the patent, die by the patent

Sun has proposed some pretty silly patents lately. I wonder if they still think they're a good idea after last week?

Managing the life cycle of a database

A San Francisco database solutions provider is applying it to the daunting task of managing the burgeoning data that threatens to bury the enterprise.

Azul jumping into compute pools

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.

Borland's SDO strategy: Implications for developers

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.

Vandals at the wiki

Wikis are Web sites that anyone can edit. This seems like a recipe for disaster, but in fact they can be surprisingly resilient.

Architect finds a way to develop in .NET and port to J2EE

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?"