Software Development

Opera Software Thursday launched the public beta test Opera Mobile 9.5, its full-blown, native Web browser for smartphones.

At the beginning of its massive legal fight against Linux in 2003, The SCO Group imagined a day when companies like IBM, Novell and others would pay it large amounts of cash for alleged infringements on SCO-owned Unix code.

A Google employee working on the Android mobile phone operating system made a gaffe that has some developers saying they've had enough and plan to focus their efforts on the iPhone, instead of Android.

Seeking to bolster Flash and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) application development, Adobe is working on "Gumbo," the next version of the Flex platform.

The eye of tech-artist Benjamin Males' custom-made surveillance camera is engineered for a black and white world.

Web-based office suites are coming into their own at last. For quite a while, Web-based suites -- which offered word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other tools associated with desktop office suites -- were extolled not because they did these things well, but because they could do them at all. But the three major competitors, Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho, have all made major improvements in recent months. They're becoming both broader, with more applications, and deeper, with more features and functionality in existing apps.

Yahoo's Flickr unit reported yesterday that the latest update to the photo sharing Web site went live with 9 changes made by three of its developers. The "deployment" was the 36th new release in a week where 627 changes were made by 21 developers.

Is R&D in the US losing focus, or just shifting focus?

With a skyrocketing stock price, fanboy hysteria and -- most importantly -- really useful products, Google is the prima donna of tech for the new millennium.

If blogging is all about self-expression, why do so many blogs look so blah?

Tabcorp has increase staff productivity and consolidated and standardised IT platforms by migrating its finance, HR and procurement to shared services model.

Jorge Villagran supervises one of the most important and sensitive projects in Guatemalan history: preserving and digitizing a massive trove of documents from the National Police files so that the country can gather evidence about human-rights abuses and bury the last vestiges of a brutal civil war.

Back in 1999, Avnet's senior managers realized things had to change. A series of acquisitions had left the electronic components distributor with a glut of applications and platforms whose lack of interoperability was complicating operations. That problem stood directly in the way of the company's new goal of providing e-commerce services to its clients and expanding the company beyond traditional order management and delivery. Making good on the e-commerce promise required consistent results for clients, no matter where they might be or what channel they used.

Meridian Credit Union -- Ontario's largest credit union -- recently rolled out a range of new software tools that allow its tellers to look customers in the eye.

This interview is dedicated to the investigation of YACC, and to chatting with AT&T alumni Stephen C. Johnson. Johnson is currently employed at The MathWorks, where he works daily with MATLAB. Computerworld snatched the opportunity recently to get his thoughts on working with Al Aho and Dennis Ritchie, as well as the development of Bison.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame, and to Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth. In this interview, Computerworld ventures down a less series path and chats to Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, and Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, and Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash. We have also spoken to Charles H. Moore about Forth. In this interview, we chat to Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame about the design and development of C++, garbage collection and the role of facial hair in successful programming languages.

The launch of Microsoft's new interoperability principles have been both cautiously welcomed and sceptically scrutinised as the company goes about convincing the IT industry that it is genuine in its pursuit to provide interoperability with rival products, more consumer choice, less vendor lock-in and greater collaboration with the open source community.

Have you ever experienced a software bug and thought to yourself, "I could fix that"? If you could, would you? How could that even be possible?

Over at the Open Sources blog, Savio Rodrigues calls attention to two critical security vulnerabilities in the Spring Framework for Java. They were discovered by security consultancy Ounce Labs, which disclosed the exploits in a detailed report. If you use Spring for critical business applications, you'll definitely want to be aware of the threats and take appropriate measures.

IT service companies, like many of the Second Life solution providers, will be happy to help you build a virtual-world environment for your network operations or data center.

The proliferation of Web technologies has been much on my mind lately. Last week, I talked about the continuum of Web development tools, ranging from traditional browser-based technologies all the way to applications deployed as binary executables. The interesting thing is that all of these tools are designed to achieve similar goals. So which do you use?

I'm developing mobile applications -- for the iPhone. Considering all of the mobile platforms available to programmers, why would I select the development platform for the Apple device when I could have chosen Symbian, BlackBerry, or Android?

The Ruby on Rails site bills its eponymous project as "Web development that doesn't hurt." I'm not really sure what that means, but it certainly sounds good.

It's the feature everyone loves to hate. Windows Search, the busy little background service that chews up your CPU cycles and thrashes your hard disk, is alternately revered and reviled, yet it rarely gets the attention it deserves.

I like to define a five-point touch system for my database upgrades. If the new version doesn't change my life in five ways, then it's not a significant upgrade. I'll typically quantify my need by approximating how many hours I spend each week performing certain tasks, and then estimate how much time the upgrade will save me. If I spend five hours every week dealing with resource usage and the new release will do it automatically, then I figure the upgrade will save me five hours a week. Now all I have to do is quantify four other features the same way, and I can sell it to management.

We have watched Xythos mature impressively over the years, starting as a highly usable, economical document manager through Version 6.0, then broadening its appeal with records management. Enterprise Document Management Suite (DMS) has now reached Version 7.0, and with the number bump comes some important enhancements.

One of the joys of being a Web programmer is heading to a dinner party, a haircut, or a reunion and fielding the pitches for everyone's dream for a brilliant Web application. Everyone is always happy to cut you in for 5, 10, maybe even 15 per cent of the equity if you just build out the Web site that's sort of like a combination of Twitter, AltaVista, Eliza, TurboTax, and the corner pharmacy, but cooler.