Stories by: InfoWorld staff

The past 30 years of InfoWorld's existence have seen a series of future shocks, from the ascent of the personal computer to horrifying strains of malware to the sizzling sex appeal of the iPhone. In honor of InfoWorld's 30th anniversary, we've decided to take a playful look ahead at the future shocks that could occur in the next 10 years (30 years seemed a little too sci-fi).

With an upgrade to its software development framework for PHP scheduled for release today, Zend Technologies is mixing in client-side AJAX capabilities with server-side PHP functionality.

Whether they're performing an analysis of an attack or observing the network traffic for large corporations, security professionals deal with a lot of data. Charged with protecting the electronic crown jewels, the task of sorting through the mountains of recorded information can seem daunting at times, but help appears to be on the horizon.

Microsoft on Thursday plans to delve deeper into Ruby programming, with plans to ship Ruby libraries and participate in a testing project for the language.

Enterprise apps for the iPhone

Despite an outpouring of demand -- including more than 210,000 people who signed InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition, Microsoft held firm and Monday discontinued sales of XP in most cases. So, we bid adieu to Windows XP.

Despite trailing rivals in several individual categories, IBM's RAD (Rational Application Developer) nonetheless had the highest user satisfaction rates among several IDEs rated in an Evans Data study released on Wednesday.

In the four months since InfoWorld asked businesses and individuals to sign a petition at SaveXP.com asking Microsoft to keep Windows XP for sale beyond the planned June 30 general end-of-sales date, more than 200,000 have signed up to add their voices. As of May 15, the count was 200,805 signatures, excluding duplicates and fake signups.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday that the company may reconsider its decision to stop selling Windows XP on June 30. At an event in Belgium, Ballmer told reporters, "If customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter," according to an Associated Press report.

An innocent change to an AutoCAD file format has cut sharply into the ability of some WAN acceleration solutions to speed the transfer of these files, and caused grumblings in some widely distributed AutoCAD shops over slowed WAN performance. The problem affects users of AutoCAD 2007 and 2008 (specifically those who open and save the design program's files over a WAN) and stems from a change to the DWG file format for AutoCAD 2007.

A new storm worm with an April Fool's Day theme is targeting the Web, according to security software firm PC Tools.