2/5/2008
The Apple Developer Connection has launched a new collection of videos targeted toward IT professionals via its ADC on iTunes service. Dubbed the "ADC Video Collection for IT," the collection features topics ranging from best practices in Mac OS X administration to IT development.
2/4/2008
Microsoft isn't the only company courting virtualization and app delivery infrastructure vendor Citrix Systems. VMLogix is joining forces with the Fort Lauderdale, FL-based company to make its virtual lab automation solutions available on Citrix's newly acquired XenServer.
2/4/2008
Klocwork last week announced the debut of a new static analysis tool that aims to ensure quality and security in the code development process, both at the level of the desktop and organization wide.
1/28/2008
IBM announced last week that it would open up its Jazz.net development platform to developers. Jazz.net is an open commercial software development community that helps to create global collaboration solutions based on IBM Rational technology. Jazz was originally open only to IBM staff, academics and customers. Now, any registered Jazz contributor can influence projects using the open standards, Eclipse-based Jazz platform.
1/24/2008
Zend Technologies Wednesday launched its PHP-based Web application server, Zend Platform 3.6, as a general-availability product, while simultaneously announcing the immediate availability of Zend Studio for Eclipse, its IDE plug-in for PHP development.
1/23/2008
Web developers who use the increasingly popular combo of the Ruby programming language with the Rails framework, better known as Ruby on Rails, now have an open source framework for providing and/or consuming Web services. WSO2's newly released Web Services Framework for Ruby (WSF/Ruby) is the first Ruby extension to support the WS-* specifications, which include the SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM), WS-Addressing, WS-Security, WS-SecurityPolicy, and WS-Reliable Messaging.
1/22/2008
In December, I wrote about Internet Explorer 8's ability to properly render the Acid2 test. Many current or upcoming browser releases are able to successfully process Acid2. However, the bar is about to be raised again. Since April 2007, the Web Standards Project has been designing Acid3 to be the next rendering milestone for modern browsers.
1/21/2008
Mindreef released a new version of its collaborative flagship server solution for testing service-oriented architectures (SOAs). SOAPscope Server 6.1 lets architects, developers, testers and support engineers collaborate in the creation of Web services and composite applications.
1/21/2008
DataSynapse has upgraded its FabricServer application virtualization product, which is part of the company's suite of solutions that help businesses attain high availability for their applications.
1/16/2008
Xignite is offering subscribers an on-demand service that lets users create custom business applications via a Web services mashup platform. The platform, called Xignite Splice, enables composite Web services applications to be built using a visual development environment.
1/9/2008
SpringSource is offering the final release of Spring.NET 1.1. The framework, which apparently was released early last month, lets .NET developers use some of the features that are currently available in the open source Java-based Spring Framework.
1/4/2008
Project Zero (an IBM incubator project) is an extension of the Eclipse open source Java programming IDE. It allows Java programmers to use a familiar development environment to create dynamic Web applications. While the project is supported by a "community," much like open source efforts, the aim of Project Zero is commercial, with IBM counting on getting feedback from developers in the mean time.
1/4/2008
Eclipse and Java coders are being offered a helping hand with their component assembly challenges from a new company with a fledgling free service. The Web-based Cloudsmith service, from the company of the same name, is designed to streamline component assembly across multiple sources. It helps developers cobble components directly from the Internet, or "the cloud"--that global pool of connected computers drawn as lump on countless whiteboards.
1/3/2008
The Creative Commons foundation recently released the CC+ protocol, which allows authors and other content makers to release their work for free (under the Creative Commons noncommercial license) and charge a fee for commercial use at the same time.
12/13/2007
Google has released Google Web Toolkit 1.4.61, a minor update to its open-source AJAX development framework. The company has also released an unofficial build for Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") that includes changes to the hosted mode for improved compatibility.
12/13/2007
ELC Technologies, a Santa Barbara, CA-based application development company, has partnered with FiveRuns to support enterprise-grade Ruby on Rails (RoR) applications. The partnership will help enable ELC's enterprise customers to actively monitor the performance of their RoR applications.
12/12/2007
Active, collaborative learning is a laudable goal in the classroom, but with individual students at computers throughout the room, it's not always easy to achieve.
12/12/2007
IBM has added two new Web services to its alphaWorks Web site, which provides "sneak previews" of the kind of technologies that are being contemplated at IBM research and development labs. The new Web services include IBM Sharable Code, a platform for managing Web 2.0-type mashup applications, and IBM Web Highlights.
12/11/2007
Red Hat today began shipping a new application integrated development environment (IDE) that combines both tooling and runtime. JBoss Developer Studio Eclipse is an Eclipse-based IDE bundled with the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Network. It also includes tooling for Java EE, the JBoss Seam app framework, AJAX, Hibernate, Persistence, JBoss jPBM, Struts and the Spring IDE.
12/4/2007
The NetBeans community has released the latest build of its open source, Java-based integrated development environment (IDE) with, among other new features, a dual-licensing scheme. NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 is licensed under both the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2 with ClassPath exception and Sun Microsystems' Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). NetBeans creator and primary corporate sponsor Sun Microsystems proposed adding the GPL license option.
11/29/2007
Five years after the initial pilot of MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative, it's now making its way into secondary education with the launch this week of "Highlights for High School," which aims to bolster high school STEM education through free and open course materials, from complete curricula and syllabi to videos, lecture notes, and animations.
11/28/2007
Collaborative science gateways, also known as hubs, are opening up new possibilities for researchers.
11/28/2007
The eardrum-rupturing buzz around Ruby on Rails (RoR or just "Rails") among Web developers is understandable. Even the luminaries are singing its praises. James Duncan Davidson, creator of Tomcat and Ant, has described RoR as "the most well thought-out Web development framework I've ever used." Tech book publishing titan Tim O'Reilly thinks it's "a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming." Agile programming expert Martin Fowler calls Rails "a standard to which even well-established tools are comparing themselves."
11/27/2007
Nvidia has released a public beta of CUDA 1.1, an update to the company's C-compiler and SDK for developing multi-core and parallel processing applications on GPUs, specifically Nvidia's 8-series GPUs (and their successors in the future). While the 1.1 beta was originally released to developers Nov. 12, an update was posted last week that includes new public beta Linux display drivers. In addition, Nvidia has announced that more than 20 universities around the world have adopted CUDA for multi-core and parallel processing programming, with several more also exploring CUDA for inclusion in their parallel programming curricula.
11/21/2007
The non-profit National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) will award $25 million to 12 universities in the United States in an effort to boost the number of teachers with "enhanced math and science teaching skills." The grants will be awarded to universities whose teacher preparation programs are modeled after the UTeach program at the University of Texas at Austin--a program that has doubled the number of math and science majors being certified at the university.