IBM today entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Rational Software for about $2.1 billion in cash. -- December 6
SCO Group has unveiled Version 7.1.3 of its UnixWare operating system software.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center is creating a "multi-agency" hub that will gather information from a variety of government sources for "futuristic" Web services applications.
OASIS this week ratified a new version of the ebXML-based standard used to define e-business partners' technical capabilities and agreements, according to officials at the Boston-based standards organization.
Psion Teklogix has signed an OEM agreement to integrate security software from Certicom Systems into its Netpad line of Windows CE .NET-based handheld computers.
A summary of happenings around the industry.
As the number of available Ada developers continues to dwindle, the language is staging something of a small comeback, according to software industry observers.
In an effort to discourage its customers from jumping onto the open-source bandwagon, Microsoft unveiled plans last week for a new licensing option. Scheduled to launch early next year, the Open Value plan will allow small and medium-sized customers (those with between five and 500 PCs) to spread payments over a period of three years for purchases of software products such as the Windows OS and MS Office.
Sun Microsystems is contributing the XML file format specification utilized in the OpenOffice.org 1.0 project to a new technical committee recently formed by the OASIS standards body. The new committee (called the OASIS Open Office XML Format Technical Committee) was formed to ''advance an open, XML-based file format spec for office applications.''
Floating-point processors have altered the embedded development world, but not always for the best. These digital signal processing powerhouses consume power and increase cost. This has led some to look for ways to migrate designs with less robust but still quite able fixed point alternatives.
After nearly ten years, it's time to upgrade forms on the Web. So says the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which last week published a "candidate recommendation" version of the XForms 1.0 specification. An upgrade of the HTML-based forms that have been the standard since 1993, XForms 1.0 is intended to make forms on Web pages more dynamic and powerful, and to allow them to be read on a range of new devices, according to the W3C.
Don't count out struggling Sun Microsystems Inc. in its battles with IBM, Microsoft and others, contends James Gosling, the creator of the Java programming language and one of Sun Microsystems Inc.'s best known engineers.
Noting that UDDI ''has been beaten up in the press and the industry for a lot of reasons,'' a Web services toolmaker still remains optimistic about the future of the standard. Charlie Ungaschick, senior product marketing director at Systinet Corp., Cambridge, Mass. said that to date several problems have slowed the acceptance and adoption of UDDI registries.
The Boston-based OASIS consortium (http://www.oasis-open.org) has formed a technical committee charged with creating an open, XML-based file format specification that officials promise will allow communication between office applications from multiple vendors.
Metrowerks, Austin, Texas, moved to boost corporate mobile development efforts with the unveiling of CodeWarrior Wireless Studio for PDA devices.
Organizations integrating business information services are increasingly demanding that providers upgrade from HTML to XML, according to Mary McCabe, senior vice president, OneSource Information Services, Inc.
Compuware Corp. (http:www.compuware.com), Farmington Hills, Mich., has signed an agreement with chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (http://www.amd.com), Sunnyvale, Calif., to build a version of its SoftIce 64 debugger for systems running the AMD x86-64 processor.
Undaunted by the ongoing IT spending freeze, IBM (http://www.ibm.com) launched the latest version of its DB2 Universal Database last week. The new Version 8.1 adds new self-managing and self-tuning functions designed to lower the cost and time of managing database systems.
The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), a standards group for the mobile and wireless industry, unveiled eight new technical specifications for
mobile data applications during last week's Comdex trade show in Las Vegas.
Microsoft's .NET Compact Framework for building XML Web services applications deployed on mobile devices is ready to "Go Live."