- It's JavaOne, but where's Scott?
- Mono dev tool offered
- ActiveState upgrades IDE
- Serena plans SaaS products
- Leap year birthday bug fix offered
- Microsoft plans app dev boosts
- Microsoft opening APIs
- Microsoft unveils giveaway program for students
- Microsoft moves on MVC
- Microsoft readies Unity for software development
May 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)
It's JavaOne, but where's Scott?
Scott McNealy, who was the longtime CEO of Sun Microsystems and still is company chairman, has been absent from the company's JavaOne conference in San Francisco this week.
A longtime fixture at the event even after stepping down as CEO in 2006, McNealy instead is in Washington, DC on business for Sun Federal, a Sun subsidiary that works with federal government accounts. McNealy is president of Sun Federal.
McNealy had been known for presentations that injected humor into the event, such as offering in 2006 a Top 10 list of advantages to no longer being CEO.
Posted by Paul Krill on May 7, 2008 05:22 PM
March 14, 2008 | Comments: (0)
MonoDevelop, an IDE for Mono, was released Friday, the leader of the project said.
Miguel de Icaza, who has shephered the Mono project, said the IDE has shipped after being in development for four years. Mono is an open source version of Microsoft's .Net Framework.
"MonoDevelop 1.0 is designed mostly for Linux developers creating Gnome and ASP.Net applications but MonoDevelop is also available for MacOS users that download our Mono installer and will still be useful if they are building Mono-based applications on OSX," de Icaza said in a blog entry.
MonoDevelop 1.0 is accessible here.
Posted by Paul Krill on March 14, 2008 05:00 PM
March 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)
ActiveState released its Komodo IDE 4.3 for dynamic languages this week, with improvements in areas such as code-finding.
Komodo IDE 4.3 enables developers to build applications using dynamic languages and "open" technologies, the company said. The company also announced an open source version of its Komodo Edit editor for dynamic languages.
Version 4.3's "Find and Replace" functionality, for finding code snippets and making changes, has been redesigned. Also, new features have been added including Find in Project, Replace in Files, multi-line Find and Replace and fixes for regular expression searches. A new Find back end handles Unicode-encoded files and skips binary files.
A unit testing interface has been added for Perl, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), Ruby and Python, enabling developers to run test suites within Komodo IDE to find failure points in source code. Control of source code is featured in the release.
An Abbreviation feature inserts snippets from the toolbox. Default snippets are included and additional snippets can be added.
Version 4.3 also features bug fixes and performance improvements for Perl, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), Python, Ruby, Tcl and JavaScript. Firefox-style extensibility is featured.
Version 4.3 costs $295.
Komodo Edit is a free editor supporting major scripting languages and offering capabilities such as in-depth auto-complete, multi-language file support, syntax coloring and syntax checking. Vi emulation and Emacs key binding are highlighted also.
Built on the Mozilla code base and based on the Komodo IDE, Komodo Edit is now licensed under the Mozilla Public License, GNU General Public License and GNU Lesser General Public License.
Posted by Paul Krill on March 7, 2008 10:16 AM
February 29, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Serena Software on Monday will tout plans to offer several of its products via SaaS.
The first product to be offered via this format will be Serena Mariner, the company's project and portfolio management (PPM) tool. Mariner offers visibility into project status and metrics to ensure the right persons are on a project at the right time, the company said.
Users can try the SaaS version free and buy it online. Pricing will be half the price of alternative PPM offerings for the first six months, Serena said.
Also planned for a SaaS implementation are solutions for Business Mashups and the agile space.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 29, 2008 05:50 PM
February 22, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Leap year birthday bug fix offered
The Honor Society of Leap Year Babies, which describes itself as the world's largest Internet birthday club, has released free software to correct the "invalid birth date" bug that can impact those born on February 29.
Persons born on that date, which only shows up on the calendar once every four years, can encounter this bug whenever they enter their birth date on a Web site registration screen, the Honor Society said. The software also can be used in automated birth date response systems that usually ignore people born on February 29, according to the society.
"I think the main [impact of the software] will be that when we get a birthday, it will sort of be treated like everybody else's birthday," said Peter Brouwer, a society representative who was himself born on February 29. He wrote the software as a six-line Perl program.
Intended for Web designers, the software determines if any year is a leap year and can be used for birth date verification. The code is posted on the organization's Web site. The society was formed in 1997 and has more than 6,000 members worldwide.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 22, 2008 04:11 PM
February 22, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft plans app dev boosts
Fresh from the delivery of its Visual Studio 2008 toolset and .Net Framework 3.5 this past fall, Microsoft is readying enhancements to these technologies in the area of client development, a Microsoft official said in a blog this week.
"We have put a lot of effort into addressing some of the biggest areas of customer feedback, while also trying to really push the envelope on the capabilities developers have when building Windows applications," said Scott Guthrie, general manager in the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog. "All of these improvements build on top of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, and will make .NET client development even better going forward."
Enhancements planned for the next few months include:
• Improved .Net Framework setup for client applications. Due this summer, the improvements will make it easier to build optimized setup packages and can be integrated with existing installation frameworks such as InstallShield. Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation applications will be able to use the setup framework via a bootstrap utility.
• Improved working set and startup improvements for .Net client applications. This is intended to enable .Net client applications to launch faster in "cold startup" situations, in which no other .Net client applications are running and the OS must load lots of pages from disk. Also due this summer, the improvement will be made available via an update to the Common Language Runtime that features significant internal optimizations to data structures. An improvement of 25 percent to 40 percent is anticipated for cold startup performance.
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) improvements. A service update to WPF this summer will include performance optimizations for text, graphics, media and the data stack. A new WriteableBitmap API will enable real-time bitmap updates from a software surface. Support for a new effects API also is planned for building richer graphics scenarios.
• WPF control improvements. Due later this year, new controls being worked on include DataGrid, Ribbon and Calendar/DatePicker controls
• Visual Studio 2008 WPF Designer improvements. A servicing update to Visual Studio 2008 is planned including feature additions to the WPF Designer. Included are tab support within a property grid for control events, toolbox support within source code and other enhancements.
"The above improvements should make it easier to build great desktop applications," Guthrie said.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 22, 2008 07:26 AM
February 21, 2008 | Comments: (0)
In a dramatic move, Microsoft is opening up documentation for it APIs and communications protocols, the company announced Thursday.
Developers do not need a license or pay a royalty or other fee to access this information, the company said. Open access is intended to ensure that third-party developers can connect to Microsoft high-volume products just as other Microsoft products do.
Interoperability principles announced by Microsoft apply to Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007 and OfficeSharePoint Server 2007. Future versions of these products also will be covered.
More than 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols previously available only under a trade secret license will be published on MSDN.
Microsoft also will indicate on its Web site which protocols are covered by Microsoft patents and license all of these patents under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms at low royalty rates, the company said.
Additionally, Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementation of these protocols. Developers can use the documentation for free to develop products.
Also, Microsoft will design new APIs for Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 to enable developers to plug in additional document formats and enable users to set these formats as their default for saving documents.
Microsoft also is launching an open source interoperability initiative to enable more interoperability between commercial and community-based open source technologies and Microsoft products.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 21, 2008 09:20 AM
February 19, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft unveils giveaway program for students
Looking to entice a new generation of software developers, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates unveiled Monday a software giveaway program for college and high school students to access Microsoft developer and designer tools, the company said.
Available now to 35 million college students in several companies including China and the United States, the Microsoft DreamSpark program makes available a broad range of tools, the company said.
Tools included in the program include the Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 Professional Editions, XNA Game Studio 2.0, Microsoft Expression Studio tools and SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition. Also available through the program is Windows Server Standard Edition.
Global coverage and an expansion of the program to high school students could enable the program to reach as many as 1 billion students worldwide throughout the next year. The program will be expanded to additional countries as well, including Australia and Japan.
“Microsoft DreamSpark provides professional-level tools that we hope will inspire students to explore the power of software and encourage them to forge the next wave of software-driven breakthroughs," Gates said in a statement released by the company.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 19, 2008 10:58 AM
February 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft plans early next month to release the next public preview of ASP.Net MVC (Model View Controller) Framework, said Scott Guthrie, a general manager in the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog this week.
The framework is set to be released at the Mix08 conference, which is being held in Las Vegas March 5-7; it will be downloadable off the Web so users do not need to attend the conference to get it.
The technology will add to ASP.Net support for developing Web applications using an MVC architecture. MVC features models, which are components of an application maintaining state; views, which are components for displaying an application user interface, and controllers, for handling end user interaction, manipulating the model and choosing a view to render to display UI.
A prior preview of the framework was offered as part of ASP.Net 3.5 Extensions CTP Release in December. Improvements in the March release include the ability to deploy the framework in the \bin directory and work in partial trust; enhanced routing and infrastructure and improved Visual Studio 2008 tools support. Also featured are HTML helpers and refactoring and design improvements.
Source code for ASP.Net MVC Framework will be downloadable as a buildable Visual Studio project solution, for viewing and debugging source code. A license will be included permitting users to patch the framework source code although they will not be able to redistributed their patched versions.
"But [the license] will enable developers who want to get started building ASP.NET MVC applications immediately to make progress - and not have to worry about getting blocked by an interim bug that they can't work around," Guthrie said.
The framework has been slated to ship as part of ASP.Net by the first half of this year.
Microsoft in March plans to discuss enhancements to ASP.Net AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) libraries, Guthrie said.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 15, 2008 02:24 PM
February 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft readies Unity for software development
Microsoft's patterns and practices group has released a February Community Technology Preview of Unity, a lightweight extensible dependency injection container for software development.
Dependency injection is a technique for building loosely coupled applications.
Offered on CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project site, Unity Application Block, or Unity for short, addresses the issues faced by developers using component-based software engineering, according to a CodePlex Web page on the project.
Modern business applications feature custom business objects and components that perform specific or generic tasks in addition to components that address cross-cutting concerns such as logging, authentication, caching and exception handling. The key to building these applications, according to Microsoft, is to achieve a decoupled or very loosely coupled design. These applications are more flexible and easier to test.
Dependency injection can handle dependencies between objects, such as an object that processes customer information, which may depend on other objects that access that data store, validate the information and check that the user is authorized to perform updates.
Unity is geared to Visual Studio 2005 but can work with applications built in Visual Studio 2008 if users set a reference to the binary assemblies. The final release of Unity is planned for March 15.
The CTP is accessible here.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 15, 2008 10:22 AM
February 13, 2008 | Comments: (0)
The "early-look" release of the Android SDK, for building mobile applications for the Google-backed Android platform, has been updated this week.
Release m5-rc14 is available now, featuring a new user interface that replaces the previous placeholder interface, according to a blog by Jason Chen, Android developer advocate. Also, developers now can build layout animations for their applications using capabilities introduced in the android.view.animation package.
A new version of the ADT (Android Development Tools) plug-in is available, featuring improvements to the Android developer experience. ADT enables developers to use the Eclipse IDE when building applications.
A "geo-coding" capability enables developers to forward and reverse geo-code, meaning they can translate an address into a coordinate and vice-versa as well as search for businesses.
Media codecs have been added for following formats: OGG Vorbis, MIDI, XMF, iMelody, RTTL/RTX and OTA.
A general release of the SDK is planned as an open source offering once the first Android-based consumer devices ship in the second half of this year, a Google representative said.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 13, 2008 12:41 PM
February 12, 2008 | Comments: (0)
XML 10th anniversary celebration set
The World Wide Web Consortium this year plans to mark the 10-year anniversary of XML 1.0 as a formal W3C Recommendation.
The now-ubiquitous markup language has found its way into multiple standards, including XSLT, for transforming XML content; XQuery, for querying XML databases and XML Signature and Encryption.
"There is essentially no computer in the world, desktop, hand-held or back room, that doesn't process XML sometimes," said Tim Bray, an executive at Sun Microystems and a co-editor of the XML standard, in a statement released by W3C. "This is a good thing, because it shows that information can be packaged and transmitted and used in a way that's independent of the kinds of computer and software that are involved. XML won't be the last neutral information-wrapping system; but as the first, it's done very well."
As part of the W3C XML10 Celebration, W3C plans to offer video interviews of people in the XML community and distribute XML10-related items at events this year. W3C also is seeking feedback on XML experiences via its XML10 Greeting Card initiative.
The W3C XML Core Working Group on February 5 published a Fifth Edition of XML 1.0, as a Proposed Edited Recommendation, inviting community examination of the latest round of changes.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 12, 2008 12:05 PM
February 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)
The Ruby.Net compiler project to bring the Ruby language to the .Net environment is set to continue as a extension to Microsoft's IronRuby project, which also involves running Ruby on .Net.
The leader of Ruby.Net, Wayne Kelly, this week announced he would instead be supporting IronRuby. But another Ruby.Net advocate, M. David Peterson, in an email said he believed the Ruby.Net project now should center on extending IronRuby. Peterson said would be interested in taking over as Ruby.Net project lead but that the matter is open for discussion on the Ruby.Net list.
"If there is any one message I believe must be broadcast above all else it's that the Ruby.Net project should continue forward shadowing the work of the IronRuby project as it relates to the language features and syntax, not as an alternative Ruby language implementation for the .Net platform but as a complementary extension to IronRuby."
"In other words," Peterson said, "if as a developer I write code targeted towards IronRuby that same code should run exactly the same via Ruby.NET when compiled into a .Net assembly, whether that be an executable or DLL."
The primary focus of the Ruby.Net project could be on static compilation of Ruby code targeted at IronRuby while a secondary focus could be on experimental language and platform features, Peterson said.
Ensuring one-to-one compatibility with IronRuby also is a priority. Another area to ponder is concurrency via Actors/Agents, in which Actors or Agents, or objects, pass messages from one to another. This could become a core part of the Ruby language, Peterson said.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 8, 2008 08:27 AM
February 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Ruby.Net lead backing alternative
The maintainer of the Ruby.Net compiler project for running the Ruby programming language on the .Net platform is now supporting an alternative, IronRuby, according to a blog post.
In a Ruby.Net Compiler Discussion blog this week, Wayne Kelly, who has maintained the project, cited the Microsoft Dynamic Language Runtime, which is leveraged by IronRuby and supports dynamic languages on .Net.
"The release of IronRuby last year obviously caused us to question this unstated goal [of a production-quality release of Ruby.Net]. At the time we didn't know if the IronRuby project and the DLR would succeed, so we decided to continue with Ruby.Net at that stage."
"I've come to the conclusion that the DLR is clearly here to stay - it's becoming an even more important part of the Microsoft platform. I also believe that to obtain production-quality performance, Ruby.Net would need to reinvent (or adopt) something equivalent to the DLR. If we were starting the project today, there is no way we wouldn't use the DLR," Kelly said.
"Whilst Ruby.Net initially had a good head start on the IronRuby project, by incorporating the Ruby.Net parser and scanner and by leveraging the DLR, I now believe that IronRuby is more likely to succeed as a production-quality implementation of Ruby on the .Net platform. I believe that ultimately, there is no need for two different implementations of Ruby on .Net."
If Ruby.Net is not going to be that implementation, then Ruby.Net participants should not waste further developer effort, he said.
"Microsoft did not in any way suggest or encourage us to kill the project and we thank them again their support of the project," Kelly said.
In an emailed response to questions, Kelly on Thursday left open the possibility that the Ruby.Net project could carry on with other persons leading the way.
"Others are talking about picking it up. I haven't received any negative reactions to my announcement or support of IronRuby," Kelly said.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 6, 2008 12:25 PM
February 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft, BT host aspiring developers
Twenty-four aspiring software developers from around the world are in Silicon Valley this month with the mission of developing solutions to real-world problems and creating a business venture.
Sponsored by BT and Microsoft, six teams of developers are showing their work at the third annual Imagine Cup Innovation Accelerator program. Demonstrations of the six projects were held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. on Tuesday evening, as part of the 2007 Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals.
Teams include:
• From Ireland, the project Signal team, offering a sign language learning environment that teaches sign language and allows users to chat online using sign language.
• From Jamaica, Team Icad, with project Cadi, an e-learning solution that features a centralized learning environment that connects teachers, students and resources.
• From Korea, the En#605 team, with project Finger Code, featuring an educational system for people who are both deaf and blind. Users wear gloves that are wired to a computer and allow communication. The Braille system is incorporated into the application.
• From Mexico, Team Wisdom Spice, with project Wisdom Spice, offering software for students to share experiences solving homework problems or working on a project. Students can use video as part of their projects and then show their work in the Wisdom Spice environment.
• From Poland, Team Input, with project OneSpace, with software to enable users to work on a project at the same time by providing audio, video and data connections.
• From Thailand, the 3KC team with Project LiveBook, with software that converts a text-based book into an illustrated digital book.
A member of the Irish team cited his project's goal. "Basically, we're trying to teach sign language to friends, family and colleagues of people who are deaf," said team member Eric McLean, an interface developer.
During the workshop, Microsoft, BT and others will provide the teams with guidance to help develop their software applications into commercially viable projects. The teams also can interact with venture capitalists.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 6, 2008 07:04 AM
February 05, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Adobe Systems announced Tuesday the promotion of Kevin Lynch to chief technology officer.
Lynch, who has served as Adobe senior vice president and chief software architect, will oversee Adobe's experience design and core technology across business units, the company said. He will continue to "drive" the Adobe technology platform for designers and developers; this platform includes the Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), which enables Web applications to run off the network on desktop systems.
Adobe last had a CTO around early-2001 when John Warnock served in the post. The new CTO position reflects the progression of Adobe's technology evolution, the company said.
Lynch joined Adobe in 2005 when the company acquired Macromedia. At Macromedia, Lynch served as chief software architect and president of products. He led the initial development of the Macromedia Dreamweaver Web development product line and the transformation of the Flash Player from an animation focus to being a rich Internet application and dynamic media runtime.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 5, 2008 04:10 PM
January 29, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Sun researches Lively Kernel effort
Sun Labs is proceeding with its Lively Kernel project, a programming environment supporting desktop-style applications with rich graphics but without the installation or upgrade "hassles" of desktop applications, according to Sun.
Written in JavaScript, the intent is to have the environment run in commercial Web browsers without installation or plug-in components.
"The main goal of the Lively Kernel is to bring the same kind of simplicity, generality and flexibility to Web programming that we have known in desktop programming for 30 years, but without the installation and upgrade hassles than conventional desktop applications have," Sun said on a Web page on the project.
"The system leverages the dynamic characteristics of the JavaScript language to make it possible to create, modify and deploy applications on the fly, using tools built into the system itself," Sun said. Lively Kernel also can serve as an IDE to make the system self-sufficient.
Lively Kernel emphasizes treating Web applications as "real applications" as opposed to the document-oriented nature of most Web applications today, Sun said. "In general, we want to put programming into Web development, as opposed to the current weaving of HTML, XML and CSS documents that is also sometimes referred to as programming," Sun said.
Currently, Lively Kernel is recommended for use on the Safari browser but the project is still in the research stage. The system also has been tested on the Firefox browser.
With the project still a lab effort, it may never, in fact, come to market, according to a Sun representative. Lively Kernel is being made available as open source software to encourage further exploration.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 29, 2008 10:37 AM
January 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft sets dynamic analysis project
Microsoft Research is working on a project for dynamic analysis and test generation for .Net-based software development projects.
Pex, for Program EXploration, is an intelligent assistant to a programmer, according to a Microsoft Research Web page. It automatically generates unit tests to help find bugs early and also suggests to how to fix bugs.
The project enables a new development experience in the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System application lifecycle management platform by taking test-driven development to "the next level," Microsoft Research said.
"From a parameterized unit test, it automatically produces traditional unit tests cases with high code coverage. Moreover, when a generated test fails, Pex can often suggest a bug fix," Microsoft Research said.
With Pex, a systematic program analysis is performed, with detailed execution traces of existing test cases recorded. The software learns the program behavior from execution traces and a constraint solver produces new test cases with different behavior.
"The result is a minimal test suite with maximal code coverage. When a test fails, Pex uses detailed dataflow information to determine the root cause and a potential bug fix," Microsoft Research said.
Microsoft has not set any date for release of any product based on Pex, a Microsoft representative said.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 28, 2008 07:37 PM
January 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft offers code portal for developers
Microsoft has launched a portal for developers to find code snippets, sample applications and other resources, a company official said Monday.
Called the MSDN Code Gallery, the portal also offers pages that describe samples, supporting documents, screen shots and design documents, said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog.
"One of the most requested things we have heard is that developers want snippets, samples, sample applications and other resources," Somasegar said.
"Code Gallery is, at its core, simply a community-enabled site where we share developer-enabling information and resources that will be integrated into the MSDN experience," he said.
Developers also can find hosted conversations about samples and sample projects and can offer their own contributions, he said. But the site is purely for storage and offers no project management capabilities, said Somasegar. Projects that need management can be offered to Microsoft's CodePlex site, he said.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 28, 2008 01:12 PM
January 27, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Mobile developer alliance discussion to continue
The possible formation of a mobile developer alliance, an idea discussed at a developer conference last week, remains a topic of interest but more investigation will be necessary, said a Sun Microsystems official spearheading the effort.
Attendees of last week's Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days Conference at Sun headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. were invited to stay around an extra day on Friday to ponder formation of such an alliance.
"As expected we did not come to any definitive conclusions or action items but we agreed there are a lot of opportunities we need to investigate and that the discussion will continue online in a yet-to-be-determined open forum," said Terrence Barr, Sun evangelist for the mobile and embedded community, in an email.
This alliance would deal with the multitude of issues facing developers and mobile content providers, such as having to accommodate different technology platforms, carriers and original equipment manufacturers.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 27, 2008 07:02 PM
January 23, 2008 | Comments: (0)
IBM at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla. Wednesday unveiled Web 2.0 and collaboration tools intended to enable development of enterprise mashups and social software.
Conference attendees had an early look at the IBM commercial mashup maker, called IBM Lotus Mashups, which the company said allows non-technical users to build enterprise mashups. Ad hoc visualizations can be developed featuring enterprise and Web data.
Features in Lotus Mashups include a browser-based tool for assembling mashups, a set of business-ready widgets, a catalog for finding and sharing widgets and a builder for building widgets to access enterprise systems.
Also unveiled by IBM was the next release of its IBM Lotus Connections social software for business. Due in the first half of this year, Lotus Connections 2.0 is slated to include a new homepage that aggregates and filters data from the five services of Lotus Connections. Users can see what has changed in their professional network and search for information. Widgets can be developed to link information to other social networks such as Yahoo or LinkedIn.
The Lotus Connections community component is slated to be enhanced with discussion forums and the ability to link wiki services from IBM Lotus Quickr, SocialText and Atlassian.
Additionally, IBM demonstrated Lotus Quickr 8.1, a collaboration environment allowing teams to more effectively work together. Version 8.1 plans call for inclusion of content libraries, team discussion forums, blogs and wikis. IBM plans to integrate Quickr with content management systems such as IBM FileNet P8.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 23, 2008 03:13 PM
January 11, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Rails stack inks $3.5 million deal
Engine Yard, a startup that allows businesses to outsource their Ruby on Rails app deployment needs, today received $3.5 million in Series A funding from Benchmark Capital, providing further evidence that Rails is a Java alternative to be reckoned with.
The open source Web framework provides organizations with a quick way to develop database-driven Web apps. As such, its relative development ease has made it the darling of the startup set; yet it and fellow dynamic languages, PHP and Perl, are fast finding their way into the enterprise as strategic tools to cut down the development backlog fast, as InfoWorld contributor Andrew Binstock outlines in "Dynamic languages: More than just a quick fix."
That said, don’t expect Rails and other scripting languages to replace programming mainstays such as Java anytime soon, despite the hype. As Binstock cautions in "The shortcomings of scripting," such programming tools do present limitations in terms of scalability and performance.
Much of Rails' momentum has thus far been fueled by its community-driven roots. But investments such as Benchmark’s into Engine Yard suggest at least some believe there is money in the model -- in this case, offloading the mess of deploying applications away from those developing them, and providing those businesses the means to scale operations quickly.
Engine Yard's cluster computing platform is the company's core asset. Cluster resources are either dedicated or shared along slices, depending on customer needs.
Related articles:
• Dynamic languages: More than just a quick fix
• The shortcomings of scripting
Posted by Jason Snyder on January 11, 2008 01:52 PM
January 09, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Google Fellows discuss parallel processing model
Google Fellows Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat have published a paper in this month's Communications of the ACM, a publication of the Association for Computing Machinery, detailing the programming model Google leverages to process more than 20 petabytes of data per day on commodity-based clusters.
The paper is an update of a prior article on the process and includes deeper insights into the effect the model has had on operations at Google in the time since first publication.
The methodology, known as MapReduce, allows users to break computations into a map and a reduce function, which the runtime system automatically parallelizes across large clusters, navigating machine failures and honing the efficiency of network and disk use in the process.
Inspired by similar primitives in Lisp, the methodology abstracts parallelization, fault tolerance, data distribution, and load balancing into a library. More than 10 thousand programs have been implemented at Google using MapReduce, which can also be used to parallelize computations for multicore processing on a single machine.
The model has been used for large-scale graph processing, text processing, data mining, machine learner, and statistical machine translation, among other algorithms, Dean and Ghemawat write.
The clusters on which MapReduce jobs run consist of thousands of commodity PCs connected by Gigabit Ethernet. The Linux-based dual-processor x86 machines have between 4GB and 8GB of memory per machine, with two 160GB IDE disks directly attached. Google's homegrown GFS (Google File System) manages the data stored to the disks.
Computations are submitted to a scheduler, which maps tasks to available machines. The MapReduce library splits input files into pieces typically between 16MB and 64MB and implements a master/worker model to perform tasks across the cluster.
MapReduce use has scaled significantly in its first four years of use at Google, with map input data topping 403 petabytes in September 2007. More than 11,000 machines were used that month to process 2.2 million jobs, with an average of 394 machines taking 395 seconds on average to complete each job.
As Dean and Ghemawat note in the paper, the most significant use of MapReduce has been a rewrite of the indexing system used for Google search. The MapReduce system has reduced computations from approximately 3,800 lines of C++ to 700 lines.
Posted by Jason Snyder on January 9, 2008 05:59 PM
January 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Is Java partly responsible for a neglect of basic skills in computer science education?
Two professors emeritus at New York University, who also happen to be executives at AdaCore, which specializes in the Ada programming language, criticize Java in an article entitled "Computer Science Education: Where Are The Software Engineers of Tomorrow?" in CrossTalk - The Journal of Defense Engineering, this month.
"It is our view that computer science education is neglecting basic skills," particularly in the areas programming and formal methods, according to the article, written by Robert Dewar, AdaCore president, and Edmond Schonberg, AdaCore vice president.
"We consider that the general adoption of Java as a first programming language is in part responsible for this decline," they wrote.
Java, the authors said, has been used in introductory programming courses in a "misguided attempt" to make programming more fun.
"The irresistible beauty of programming consists in the reduction of complex formal processes to a very small set of primitive operations. Java, instead of exposing this beauty, encourages the programmer to approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store: by rummaging through a multitude of drawers (i.e. packages) we will end up finding some gadget (i.e. class) that does roughly what we want," the article stated.
"The result is a student who knows how to put a simple program together, but does not how know how to program," according to the article.
The authors did give Java points for concurrent programming and reflection, which is the understanding that a program can be instrumented to examine its own state to determine its own behavior in a dynamically changing environment.
At Sun Microsystems, which created Java, representatives scoffed at the article, noting that the authors have an interest in Ada.
"If you look at these guys, they specialize in Ada," said Tim Bray, Sun director of Web technologies. Ada, Bray said, was "the most expensive, embarrassing failure in the history of computer languages."
"I felt like I was reading something out of the '80s," given the article's Ada emphasis and its lack of discussion about Ruby, Python and agile methodologies, Bray said.
Java, according to Sun, is being used at more than 869 universities. Additionally, the BlueJ environment has been developed for the purpose of teaching object orientation with Java.
In an emailed response, Schonberg stood up for the authors' involvement with AdaCore.
"Of course, if we are involved in Ada software it is because we are convinced of its technical superiority in many areas, but our opinions do not come from business interests but from decades as academics, teaching across the curriculum, and participating in long-term language design and implementation projects. Our negative views of the impact of Java on early CS education come from experience (ours, and that of colleagues at NYU) teaching more advanced courses," Schonberg said.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 8, 2008 03:49 PM
January 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft is offering the beta version of its Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack, enabling development of applications with the look and feel of popular Microsoft products, Microsoft's S. "Soma" Somasegar said in his blog Tuesday.
The Feature Pack extends Visual C++ libraries that shipped with Visual Studio 2008. That product first shipped in November.
Somasegar, corporate vice president of the company's Developer Division, said the beta release features a major update to Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) and an implementation of the TR1 (Technical Report 1) library. TR1 specifies additions to the C++ library.
"Using the new MFC library, developers will be able to create applications that feature the 'look and feel' of Microsoft’s most popular products – including Office, Internet Explorer and Visual Studio. With the TR1 library, developers gain access to a number of important features such as smart pointers, regular expression parsing and new container classes," Somasegar said.
Some of the new capabilities include support for development of applications with the Office Ribbon-style interface and the Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP look and feel.
The feature pack is downloadable here.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 8, 2008 03:10 PM
January 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Spring framework offered for .Net
SpringSource, keepers of the Spring series of open source application development technologies, announced Monday the final release of Spring.Net 1.1, an application framework for building .Net applications.
Rooted in the Spring Framework programming model for Java, Spring.Net features dependency injection. This is an application configuration concept that makes it easier to switch between alternative implementations of a service type and then specify which implementation is to be used via a configuration file. Dependency injection bolsters unit testing by enabling a mock implementation of a service to be injected into the service being tested.
Other key features of Spring.Net 1.1 include an inversion of control container for configuring application classes; an ASP.Net framework for Web development and an aspect-oriented programming framework complementing object-oriented programming. Declarative transaction management via XML configuration and attributes also is offered to provide a consistent programming model across different transaction APIs.
Other features include ASP.Net AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) integration and portable service abstraction, to export plain .Net objects via .Net Remoting and other technologies.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 7, 2008 01:38 PM
January 07, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft Silverlight going to the Olympics
The 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China this summer will be broadcast on the Web using Microsoft's Silverlight 2.0 technology, a Microsoft official said in his blog on Monday.
"We have signed an agreement to partner with NBC Universal to build a Silverlight 2.0-based Web broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympic games," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division in a blog entry.
"As a part of this, we will provide users with exclusive access to over 3,000 hours of live and on-demand video content via Silverlight streaming. This means that viewers can access every minute of every event," he said.
Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in technology was unveiled last year and is widely viewed as a competitor to the Adobe Flash multimedia platform for the Web. But Microsoft has not announced a release date for Silverlight 2.0, which features a subset of Microsoft's .Net Framework programming model. A beta release of version 2.0 is due early this year.
"It is exciting to see Silverlight be the catalyst to turn 'NBCOlympics.com on MSN' into a groundbreaking site and video experience that will redefine sports content online and in some small way we can be part of this historic event," Somasegar said.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 7, 2008 12:39 PM
January 03, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft ponders Emacs effort
Microsoft is looking at Emacs text editor technology to help enable model-driven development as part of its Oslo project.
Acknowleding recent references to an Emacs.net-like environment, Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division, said in a statement released by the company that this referred to research and development on model-driven development.
"While it's too soon to announce any specifics in terms of product offerings, this generally referred to some of the early thinking we're doing around Oslo's modeling platform currently in development at Microsoft, specifically focused on how developers will want to edit and create declarative models," Kawaski said. "We'll share additional updates as we have them."
In a recent blog entry, Douglas Purdy, a product unit manager on Microsoft's Connected Systems Architecture team, said the company was looking for developers and testers to build a tool described as "Emacs.net."
Unveiled in October, Oslo involves model-driven design and features a set of technical investments to be delivered in the next major versions of Microsoft platform products such as Visual Studio and BizTalk Server. Beta releases of Oslo technology are planned for release this year.
With Oslo, models become the applications, rather than just describing applications.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 3, 2008 12:52 PM
January 02, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Bolstering its application lifecycle management platform, Microsoft has released Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools, intended to improve the Team Foundation Server user experience.
Featured is a set of enhancements, tools and command utilities.
Team Foundation Server offers services such as version control, work item tracking and build management. The Visual Studio 2008 software development platform was released in November. Microsoft previously has offered Power Tools for the predecessor Visual Studio 2005 platform.
"We did not want to just deliver a warmed over version of the VS2005 Power Tools, so we included lot of new goodies in this release," said Ed Hintz, a member of the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System team, in his blog.
Among the new tools is a Find in Source Control tool that serves as an addition to the Team Explorer menu that provides the ability to locate files and folders in source control, Microsoft said. Files and folders are located by the item's status or wildcard expression.
Another new feature is the ability to open a selected folder in Windows Explorer straight from Team Explorer. Users can go straight to a mapped folder location from within Source Control Explorer.
Tools installed in the package include: a command line tool, Team Explorer IDE menu additions, a new Build Notification tool, a Team Foundation Server Best Practices Analyzer, Process Template Editor, Work Item Templates and Custom Check-in Policies.
The package is downloadable here.
Posted by Paul Krill on January 2, 2008 11:25 AM
December 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The first major upgrade to the Perl dynamic language in more than five years was released this week, the Perl Foundation said.
Version 5.10 of the open source language adds language features and improves the Perl interpreter itself. While used in Web application development, Perl also can be found in bioinformatics applications such as gene-sequencing, said Perl representative Andy Lester.
A key feature is a smart match operator, which will compare variables in an array and makes it easier for programmers to perform functions such as finding an element in an array or an element in a hash, Lester said. Also featured is a switch statement capability.
Regular expressions have been made more powerful and programmers can now use named captures in regular expressions rather than counting parentheses for positional captures. Recursive patterns are supported for making many useful constructs especially in parsing.
Also included in version 5.10 is state variables allowing variables to persist between calls to subroutines. User-defined pragmata allows users to write modules to influence the way way Perl behaves. Better error messages are highlighted as well.
The Perl interpreter is faster and has a smaller memory footprint. The installation of Perl can be relocated, which benefits systems administrators and operating system packagers, the foundation said. Source code is more portable as well.
Also featured are a defined-or operator, which relates to how Perl keeps track of true or false statements, and field hashes for inside-out objects, for implementing data-hiding in Perl. Data can be hidden so users cannot modify data in an object.
Perl 5.10 can be downloaded here.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 21, 2007 08:59 AM
December 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Nvidia launched a community Web site Wednesday for HPC (High Performance Computing) developers working with the company's GPUs.
The CUDA Zone site is geared to developers using CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). CUDA is a C language environment for CUDA-enabled GPUs. The environment has helped engineers, scientists and others find ways to process the vast amounts of data required by their work and boost speed, Nvidia said.
CUDA Zone will serve as a global meeting point for anyone wanting to know about CUDA and Nvidia's GPUs, including Tesla as well as Quadro models, according to a company represenative. Featured will be white papers on programming techniques, customer spotlights and forums. Users also will be able to download CUDA tools and code samples.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 19, 2007 11:28 AM
December 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)
IBM mashup maker uses Ruby on Rails
IBM has released IBM Sharable Code, an online development platform for the Ruby on Rails Web framework, the company said on Wednesday.
Sharable Code and another new tool, Web Highlights, are free services for entry-level developers and users to utilize Web 2.0 resources, IBM said. Sharable Code is a mashup maker leveraging Ruby on Rails. Web Highlights, for highlighting content on the Web, was built with Sharable Code. Both Sharable Code and Web Highlights are available on IBM's alphaWorks site.
Geared toward Web application developers, Sharable Code offers scaffolding, or a skeleton framework, for building situational applications that can be quickly updated or changed, IBM said. These applications also can be downloaded onto a desktop or local database.
Situational applications such as one to manage calendars can be built, aggregating events from sources such as Facebook and RSS feeds. A news item aggregator also could be developed, with the gathered information presented on a single Web page.
With Sharable Code, a domain-specific language (DSL) is used to represent a mashup and its design. This DSL then is converted into a Ruby on Rails application. Sharable Code can be used with Ruby on Rails 1.4.5 or above, according to IBM. Ruby on Rails 2.0 was released last Friday.
Web Highlights, meanwhile, makes it easier to share relevant information. It simplifies the tasks of using Web 2.0 social tools, such as digg, IBM said. A user, for example, could post a news article to the Web Highlights Web page and highlight sections he wants everyone to read.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 12, 2007 03:14 PM
December 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)
A Google official stressed Monday that Google is progressing with mashup technology, using it for more professional purposes than what has been the norm.
"I'm kind of anti-mashup, I don’t like the name, I don’t like what it stands for," said Mark Lucovsky, Google technical director of engineering, at the Web Builder 2.0 conference in Las Vegas.
Lucovsky said a lot of people when they hear the term, mashup, think of applications such as budget applications. But demonstrating how the New York Times uses Google technology to add news to its site, Lukovsky said this was a more professional use of mashup technology, even if the Times was indeed mashing multiple sources of data. Google AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) APIs were used in the Times application.
"So they're mashing up but it's not the kiddy kind of mashup that I think was associated with v1 mashups like housing maps," Lucovsky said.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 3, 2007 04:33 PM
December 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The OpenAjax Alliance plans to vote on its OpenAjax Hub 1.0 in December and expects to release it shortly afterward, an official with the organization said Monday.
The alliance tackles issues with interoperability in the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) market. Version 1.0 of the hub enables use of multiple AJAX toolkits on the same Web page.
Version 1.1 of the hub, due in 2008, adds capabilities for secure mashups.
"The OpenAjax Hub 1.1 will go beyond 1.0 because it will do publish/subscribe across browser frames and that will allow you to sandbox a third-party, untrusted component within a frame," said Jon Ferrraiolo, a Web architect at IBM who is in charge of operations for the alliance. Ferraiolo presented on OpenAjax Alliance at the Web Builder 2.0 conference in Las Vegas.
The alliance has not yet started any formal activity dedicated to offline AJAX yet, Ferraiolo said. There are Google APIs that enable this but some may be reluctant to adopt them; the alliance possibly could come up with a standard API for this, he said.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 3, 2007 04:01 PM
November 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft eyes developers with portal launch
Microsoft on Friday launched its Unified Communications Developer Portal, featuring SDKs and APIs to help developers build applications on Microsoft's unified communications platform.
This platform features Microsoft's Office Communications Server, which provides capabilities such as on-premise Web-conference and enterprise voice for Microsoft Office system applications and upcoming Microsoft ERP and CRM applications. Also featured in the platform is Office Communicator 2007, offering client communications options such as instant messaging, voice and video.
Through the portal, accessible here, developers can build solutions for contextual collaboration, business process communication and "anywhere" information access, according to an interview with Microsoft's Kirt Debique, general manager for the Microsoft Office Communications Platform & Solutions Group, on the Microsoft PressPass Web site, found here.
"Developers will take unified communications in directions that we haven’t even imagined yet. Going forward, we’re focused on delivering even more powerful APIs based on .Net and Web services supported by easy-to-use, familiar and integrated tools," Debique said in the PressPass interview.
Contextual collaboration enables collaboration within applications and processes. Business process communications refers to automated communications in the context of business workflows. Anywhere information access extends the reach of business information and services to phones and mobile devices.
Posted by Paul Krill on November 30, 2007 02:51 PM
November 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft readies parallel development tools
Recognizing the growing prominence of multi-core processors and its effects on application development, Microsoft released Thursday a preview of Parallel Extensions to the .Net Framework (ParallelFX), according to a Microsoft executive's blog on Thursday.
"The shift to multi- and many-core processors that is currently underway presents an exciting opportunity for everyone in the software industry," said the executive, S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog. " With an expected increase of 10 to 100 times today’s compute processing power, the opportunities to deliver powerful and immersive new user experiences and business value are just awesome.
"Today we released an early preview of the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework (ParallelFX) technology, available for download on MSDN. This release contains new APIs to make programming on the .Net Framework simpler as well as supporting documentation and samples," Somaseger said.
ParallelFX runs on .Net FX 3.5 and relies on features available in C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0. Among the features are parallel data and task parallelism APIs and a concurrency runtime to enable lightweight tasks and map and balance concurrency expressed in code to concurrent resources on the execution platform.
Microsoft also has released an MSDN dev center dedicated to concurrent programming. Featured is a collection of whitepapers, including one that describes Microsoft's broader vision for parallel computing.
"Although we understand the shift to parallel computing is a gradual road ahead for our whole industry, we are excited by the prospect and believe that the ParallelFX library is a large step in the right direction," Somasegar said.
Posted by Paul Krill on November 29, 2007 02:41 PM
November 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Krugle adds former Borland executives
Krugle, which offers code search technology, has brought aboard several former Borland Software officials, Krugle said on Wednesday.
Former Borland CEO Dale Fuller has been added to Krugle's board of directors. Also, Matt Graney, who was a product management official at Borland, has joined Krugle as senior director of product management.
Mike Rich, a former sales director for Borland, is now Krugle vice president of sales. Former Borland engineer Rashmi Jagada is now working for Krugle as a senior software engineer.
Borland has shifted its emphasis from software development tools to the application lifecycle space. But Krugle's hirings do not mean Krugle plans to become a full-fledged ALM vendor apart from offering its search technology, said Krugle rerpresentative Mike Maney. Instead, Krugle's code-searching participates in the ALM space by aiding efforts of companies such as IBM, Yahoo and CollabNet.
In an internal email, Steve Larsen, Krugle CEO, said the company was attracting attention from senior managers and executives in ALM because they understand Krugle's significant contribution in the space and know Krugle customers.
Posted by Paul Krill on November 28, 2007 03:22 PM
November 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft's .Net software development platform is more popular than Java in the enterprise, according to one industry analyst firm's report detailed on Wednesday
Info-Tech Research Group said its research found .Net the choice over Java among enterprises of all sizes and industries. Entitled, "It's Official: .Net Roasts Java's Beans," the study explored the relative prevalence of Java and .Net across different types of enterprises and found .Net has gained considerable market share and become the favorite of many enterprises.
In conducting its study, Info-Tech said it recently surveyed more than 1,850 organizations of different sizes. Info-Tech's research is not sponsored, a company representative said.
Almost half of all enterprises responding to the survey focus primarily on .Net with an additional 12 percent focused exclusively on .Net, the research found. This compares with just 20 percent of enterprises focusing primarily on Java and only 3 percent standardizing solely on it, Info-Tech said.
Java is not out of the game yet, the company said. But in offering hope for Java devotees, Info-Tech likens Java to legacy code. The company said .Net may emerge as a means of stitching together diverse applications but the immense amount of Java code will remain in the tradition of other legacy systems such as Cobol. Java also has "incredibly strong allies" in Sun Microsystems, IBM and Oracle, Info-Tech said.
Sun, which developed Java, declined to comment on the Info-Tech report. Sun recently decided to change its identification on the Nasdaq stock exchange from SUNW to JAVA, in recognition of its bread-and-butter brand.
Posted by Paul Krill on November 28, 2007 01:07 PM
November 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Test tool readied for agile development
ThoughtWorks Studios, the product arm of the ThoughtWorks software development consultancy, plans to offer a testing tool tuned to the agile and lean software development space.
Codenamed Tide and due in February, the product is unlike existing testing tools, which are built for testing at the end of the process, said Cyndi Mitchell, managing director for ThoughtWorks Studios. With Tide, ThoughtWorks is acknowledging that testing is done more frequently in the short iterations of development used in agile development processes.
"[With agile] testing is very much more at the center of the process. It plays in at the very beginning, it plays in at the middle and it's [important] in the maintenance of the system as well," Mitchell said.
Tide is a tool to do refactoring and restructuring of tests as software is being developed, she said. "It's for writing specifications, writing the tests for those specifications and writing the code that fulfills those specifications and being able keep the three of those in sync," Mitchell said.
Tide resides on top of the open source Selenium project, for functional testing. ThoughtWorks developed Selenium; ThoughtWorks Studios plans to expand Tide for use with other open source testing tools as well.
ThoughtWorks Studios currently offers Mingle, a tool for project management. Also on the agenda for ThoughtWorks Studios is a proprietary version of CruiseControl, for continuous software integration. The product will support large test suites and different software environments.
Posted by Paul Krill on November 26, 2007 12:16 PM
November 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Spring founders rename company
Interface21, the consulting firm that has been the developer of the open source Spring Framework for Java, has changed its name to more closely associate with its bread-and-butter technology.
As of Monday, the company is now known as SpringSource. "We created Spring. Now our name says it all," says the company's Web page.
SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson cited the success of Spring in explaining the name change in his blog.
"When I founded Interface21 in 2004, I had to pick a name. I believed Spring to be the future of enterprise Java, and 'Interface21' reflected those feelings—the framework for the 21st century," Johnson said. "Now we’re well into the [21st] century. Spring has proven to be more successful than I could have dreamed, and has become a de facto standard for enterprise Java."
Spring also is becoming popular with .Net developers and millions worldwide have downloaded Spring Portfolio products, he said.
"All the major Spring committers work here," Johnson added. It has been confusing to have a company name that is distanced from the product the company created, he said.
Posted by Paul Krill on November 19, 2007 03:23 PM
November 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft Foundation Classes update planned
Microsoft's C++ team is working on a "significant" update to the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), enabling developers to build applications with the look and feel of Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and Visual Studio, a Microsoft executive said in a recent blog.
"We will be delivering this as an update to Visual Studio 2008 in the first half of 2008," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division. "We will have a preview of the same sometime around the early part of the new year."
The Visual Studio 2008 software development platform is due to ship by the end of this month.
Some specific features of the MFC update include the Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon bar look, Internet Explorer look with rebars and task panes and the Visual Studio look with sophisticated docking functionality, Somasegar said. "You can also enable your users to customize your application through live drag and drop of menu items and toolbar buttons," he said.
Also planned is support for Technical Report 1 (TR1), which is a draft document specifying additions to the C++ Library such as regular expressions and random number generators.
Posted by Paul Krill on November 15, 2007 07:03 AM
November 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Sun Microsystems has revealed two updates this week to JRuby, which is an open source implementation of the Ruby programming language for the Java virtual machine.
JRuby 1.1 beta 1 is the first pre-release of JRuby 1.1, which focuses on speed and refinement, according to Sun. With the compiler in version 1.1, Ruby code can be compiled in "Ahead of Time" or "Just In Time" mode. Also, less memory is used than in previous releases.
The final release of JRuby 1.1 is planned for December.
Also offered is JRuby 1.0.2, a minor release of the stable 1.0 branch of JRuby, according to Sun. Featured are fixes to low-risk compatibility issues. Periodic point releases of JRuby are designed to support production users of JRuby.
Release 1.0.2, according to Sun engineer Thomas Enebo, one of the project's developers, takes care of the following concerns:
* Fixed several "nasty issues" for users on Windows. One issue involved problems that occurred when JRuby was installed in a location that contained spaces.
* Fixed network compatibility issues.
* Includes support for Rails 1.2.5.
* Offers a reduced memory footprint.
* Improves file IO performance.
Posted by Paul Krill on November 8, 2007 10:46 AM
November 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)
ActiveGrid, which has billed itself as the enterprise Web 2.0 company, has changed its name to WaveMaker Software and is announcing this week a new corporate brand and product strategy.
The strategy will address the growing demand for technology to simplify the assembly of Web applications, the company said. The strategy also is intended to meet the architectural, security and governance policies of CIOs.
Under the leadership of new CEO Christopher Keene, the company will integrate current technology with capabilities gained through the acquisition of TurboAJAX. The new WaveMaker offering eliminates the competing priorities of business-level developers who require visual assembly tools and rapid deployment, as well as CIOs, who need solutions that comply with architectural, security and data policies, WaveMaker said.
The company's vision is to be the PowerBuilder of Web 2.0, providing an easy-to-use visual tool for building Web applications. WaveMaker products include WaveMaker Developer Studio, which is a visual builder featuring pre-built Web 2.0 components, and WaveMaker Deployment Server, featuring a deployment platform for Java or LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python/PHP) environments.
Posted by Paul Krill on November 6, 2007 09:38 PM
November 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft readies Visual Studio 2008
Microsoft will ship Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 by the end of November, the company revealed on Monday.
Visual Studio 2008 is considered the release of Microsoft's software development platform that is geared to developing for the Windows Vista OS. .Net Framework 3.5 features core development technologies such as Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation. Language Integrated Query (LINQ), which simplifies how database and XML queries are written in C# and Visual Basic, and ASP.Net AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), for building Web experiences, also have been planned for version 3.5.
Microsoft also is changing the Visual Studio 2008 licensing terms to provide better support for interoperability with other developer tools and cross-platform scenarios, the company said. Partners are no longer limited to building solutions on top of Visual Studio for Windows and other Microsoft platforms only.
A shared source licensing program for Premier-level Microsoft partners in the Visual Studio Industry Partner program will let partners view Visual Studio source code for debugging purposes and simplify integration between Visual Studio 2008 and partner products.
The release of Sync Framework CTP, meanwhile, empowers developers to build solutions that enable peer-to-peer collaboration and online/offline synchronization.
Also, Microsoft also touted the availability of Popfly Explorer, which adds integration into Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008 and provides a way to add Silverlight gadgets built in Popfly to Web pages and publish HTML Web pages to Popfly.
Popfly features online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups.
Posted by Paul Krill on November 5, 2007 06:48 AM
November 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Sun touts virtualization, OpenSolaris
Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz in a speech at the Oracle OpenWorld conference on November 14 will unveil a Sun virtualization strategy, xVM, and new products to bridge the gap between virtualization and management, according to a Sun source.
Schwartz will talk about virtualization and how it will drive efficiencies across the enterprise. Sun xVM is intended to help customers better manage "virtualization sprawl." Also, industry partners will endorse Sun xVM and Sun will dedicate additional resources to virtualization.
Sun also has begun offering an OpenSolaris Developer Preview as part of its Project Indiana effort to release Solaris open source binaries to make Solaris more palatable to the Linux community. Sun had pledged to offer the preview in October. It is accessible here. The general release is expected in the first half of 2008; Sun previously has targeted March for the release.
The OpenSolaris Web site gave this description of the project: "The OpenSolaris Developer Preview is the first milestone of Project Indiana. It is a single CD combined live/install image: a core operating system, kernel, system libraries, a desktop environment and a package management system. It is not a final release and is intended for developers to try, test, and provide feedback."
OpenSolaris is about re-engineering OpenSolaris technology and making it more accessible to students, developers and startups.
The LiveCD of the preview only supports x86 now but SPARC support is coming soon, according to Sun. The CD includes a basic core operating system, the GNOME desktop environment and a new graphical installer, with the option to install an the operating system from the Live CD, Sun said. Following installation, additional packages can be downloaded by using the new Image Packaging System (IPS).
Posted by Paul Krill on November 2, 2007 06:46 AM
October 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Spring Java framework progresses
The Spring 2.5 framework for Java development is moving forward.
A release candidate was published this week, according to Juergen Hoeller, a co-founder of the Spring Framework, in the Interface21 Team blog. Interface21 oversees development of Spring.
"Spring 2.5 is in many ways the release that completes Spring 2.0's mission: providing the most flexible and most comprehensive configuration model for both Java 1.4 and Java 5. Spring 2.5 focuses on particularly comprehensive support for Java 5, introducing various further annotations options," Hoeller said.
Comprehensive support is featured for configuration annotations in application components, Johnson noted. Web controller support also is highlighted.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 26, 2007 04:33 PM
October 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The NetBeans community, featuring Sun Microsystems, this week released the latest build of NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2, which is now being licensed either by the GNU General Public License version 2 with ClassPath exception or by Sun's Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) License.
GPL is new for the NetBeans open source development platform.
"The community believes that releasing NetBeans under the GPL license will help align NetBeans with the Linux community and major open source projects," according to a Sun blog post.
Version 6.0 is to add features such as support for JRuby, a version of the Ruby language that runs on the Java virtual machine. JavaScript support is boosted as well. Sun has targeted late-2007 for the general release of NetBeans 6.0.
Also available is the NetBeans plug-in for DTrace, for running DTrace scripts. DTrace provides a dynamic tracing framework for Solaris, to gauge behavior of the operating system and user programs.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 26, 2007 01:23 PM
October 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)
IBM touts Info 2.0 for Web 2.0
IBM is promoting its twist on Web 2.0 with a concept called Info 2.0, which involves technologies such as mashups and makes data more accessible, an IBM representative explained at the Zend/Con conference on Tuesday afternoon in Burlingame, Calif.
Info 2.0 involves multiple concepts, such as collaboration, media sharing, situational applicatons and blogs, said Robert Picciano, IBM vice president of worldwide information management sales.
"Info 2.0 is going to bring together a variety of information sources," Picciano said. As part of its Info 2.0 push, IBM on Tuesday introduced a preview of IBM Mashup Starter Kit, for building mashup applications and bearing Info 2.0 characteristics.
"We're putting Web 2.0 to work with Info 2.0," Picciano said.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 9, 2007 02:33 PM
October 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)
IBM posted on its alphaWorks site Tuesday its IBM Mashup Starter Kit, which is a preview of a Web 2.0-based mashup platform for business professionals.
Geared to enterprise usage, the toolkit enables users to assemble Web 2.0 mashup applications and solve business problems without aid from IT specialists, the company said.
IBM with the preview seeks user feedback; a general release of the product is planned for the first quarter of 2008, said David Boloker, chief technology officer in the IBM Emerging Internet Technology Software Group.
Mashup Starter Kit is intended for both line-of-business professionals and IT persons, Boloker said when interviewed at the ZendCon conference in Burlingame, Calif. on Tuesday morning.
"What we're aiming for is someone who is in the line of business or in IT can build a next-generation user appplication and that user application would have all the paradigms of what’s considered a Web 2.0 application," including drag-and-drop capabilities and a much more vibrant UI, said Boloker.
Various components could be dragged and dropped onto a screen, including RESTful services or ATOM feeds, he said. The US EPA used Mashup Maker to develop an application to theoretically track Avian flu, Boloker said.
The kit consists of two technologies: IBM Mashup Hub, which is a mashup server storing information feeds such as RSS and ATOM, and QEDWiki, providing a user interface for non-IT users to mash information from any data source.
Mashup Hub and QEDWiki are Web applications written in PHP and running on Apache Server. The two components use a database to manage assets and user-specific structured data. The interface uses the Dojo toolkit and the AreaEdit WYSIWYG editor.
Internally, the applications use REST (Representational State Transfer), AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).
IBM's kit can combine information from databases, departmental information, personal information or the Web, IBM said. Information and Web services can be blended, including weather reports or maps and enterprise content and services.
"I look at this [as being] akin to what was done with spreadsheets 20 years ago," in which CFOs were given the power to take information and manage it, said Boloker.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 9, 2007 06:41 AM
October 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Visual Studio code analysis heightened
Having recently noted performance improvements planned for the upcoming Visual Studio 2008 software development platform, a high-ranking Microsoft official this week touched upon code analysis enhancements planned for the product.
The code analysis team, said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, has added features including "Code Metrics" and "Code Analysis Policy Improvements."
"[Code Metrics] is a new tool window that allows you to not only get an overall view of the health [code-wise] of your application, but also gives you the ability to dig deep to find those un-maintainable and complex hotspots," Somasegar said in his blog.
Code Metrics will ship with five metrics: Cyclomatic Complexity, Depth of Inheritance, Class Coupling, Lines of Code and Maintainability Index.
With Code Analysis Policy, developers get the ability to ensure that Code Analysis is run before every check-in.
Other analysis improvements include support for analyzing anonymous methods and lambda expressions and reduced noise in existing analysis. Developers also can skip over tool-generated code.
Also in Visual Studio 2008, suppression support, for suppressing and instance of a warning, has been extended, giving developers more control.
Visual Studio 2008, also known as "Orcas," is due to ship later this year.
Posted by Paul Krill on October 5, 2007 01:26 PM
October 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)