Application Development Trends' News


RFID surge prompts Oracle to unveil sensor-based services plan

Oracle Corp. formally unveiled a new product/services initiative last week, along with what amounts to what some observers call a new product category built to more easily adjust to changing retail technology needs.

Macromedia ships Flex rich interface server

Macromedia is shipping Flex, its much-anticipated presentation server and application framework for enterprise developers. The product has been in beta since November 2003 and began shipping at the end of March 2004.

News Analysis: Sun-Microsoft deal: Now for the hard part

The surprise announcement last week of an agreement between arch-rivals Sun Microsystems and Microsoft Corp. to settle their long-running legal dispute seems to herald a new era of cooperation and enhanced interoperability between widely implemented technologies

Macs discover new life in sciences

Although the Apple Mac platform was long ago counted out by a lot of corporate IT managers, it has morphed and continues to find adherents -- the graphic arts in particular have persisted as a major stronghold. And the Mac platform may even be thriving again in the science sector where it once held some dominance on the desktop.

Borland brings RM to the masses

Borland last week began shipping the latest version of its requirements management tool, CaliberRM 6.0. Part of Borland's application life-cycle management portfolio, CaliberRM is designed to help software development teams align application changes to an organization's business needs, said Borland product manager David Walker.

Openness can be good business

Microsoft just released some software under a legitimate open source license. Has the company lost its collective mind, or is this just more good business?

Microsoft and Sun bury the hatchet; Sun cuts workforce

Steve Ballmer, CEO at Microsoft Corp., and Scott McNealy, chairman and CEO at Sun Microsystems Inc., agreed to bury the hatchet after many years of hostility. This ushers in a new era of cooperation with enhanced interoperability between software products,

Free enough hardware?

It was widely reported recently that Bill Gates thinks hardware will be practically free in 10 years. What does that mean to us as developers?

IBM agrees to acquire Candle

IBM has agreed to acquire privately held Candle Corp., a longstanding force in mainframe and distributed systems management software for an undisclosed sum.

ADT at Gartner ITxpo: Gartner on RFID

The sensor network, already emerging from applications of RFID chips, will transform computing and life as we know it by 2014, predicts Gartner fellow Tom Austin.

ADT at Gartner ITxpo: Analyst sees SOBA emerging as next trend in Web services

In an industry with no shortage of acronyms, Gartner is touting a new one, SOBA, or Service-Oriented Business Applications.

ADT at Gartner ITxpo: Another vote to endorse offshoring

IT management needs to embrace offshore outsourcing, despite the "genuine threat" of job losses, because the trend is not going to go away, asserted Michael Fleisher, chairman and CEO of Gartner. In his welcoming address to attendees at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2004 in San Diego on Monday, he argued that two popular responses, protectionism and blaming others, including the people of India and China, are doomed to failure.

ADT at Gartner ITxpo: Gates sees more modeling, less coding

Microsoft head Bill Gates, speaking at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2004, emphasized the role of visual modeling as the foundation for future software engineering advances.

How Not to Promote Your Software

Some software firms don't seem to understand that their customers have to justify their purchases. I've put together a partial list of ways to mess up your software marketing.

Microsoft ruling draws fire from U.S. lawmakers

A group of U.S. lawmakers last week roundly criticized the European Commission's decision to fine Microsoft Corp. a record 497 million euros ($611 million) for anticompetitive practices.

VoiceXML 2.0 reaches W3C milestone

The Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 2.0 has received final "recommendation" status from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

At SD West: Microsoft’s Sutter heralds C++ standard

Microsoft Corp. is moving to assure developers that its next-generation Longhorn operating system software doesn’t signal the end of the C++ programmer.

At MDC/VSLive: Whidbey makes it to Technical Preview stage

"The focus today will be on how mobility-, Web services-, speech- and location-type capabilities are going to come in and be aspects of applications," Bill Gates told the audience at third annual Mobile Developer Conference (MDC) in San Francisco, which shared space at the Moscone Center with the VSLive and Avios-SpeechTEK events.

Useful Tool: Microsoft Log Parser

This little-known tool can help you make short work of a bevy of log file analysis problems. If you've got data in some sort of structured file that you need to slice and dice, Log Parser can be just the tool for the job.