Software Development: Features

The power of Web-based applications continues to burgeon as they take on the art of application building itself. In a number of online tools, the old compile-link-deploy loop disappears, and editing a Web application becomes as simple as editing a comment for Slashdot. (Notice I used the word "edit," not "program.") Just click a few times in the browser and your application is up and running.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison appears to be taking a lesson out of the playbook of his buddy, Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

One of the major selling points for Macs and Mac OS X Leopard these days is their ability to work well in a largely Windows world. Apple offers two ways to accomplish this task: Leopard's ability to share files and printers with Windows machines, and the ability of Intel-based Macs to run Windows using either Boot Camp (which is included free as part of Leopard) or third-party virtualization tools.

On stage at DEMO: A computer algorithm that uncovers media bias, and new ways to watch television, create music, manage money, and spy on IT workers.

The release of Adobe's AIR runtime platform was supposed to inspire the development of sophisticated business applications to take advantage of its media-rich capabilities.

The former second-class citizens of the programming world have leaped to the fore, changing the face of enterprise software development. With the rise of Web 2.0, scripting languages (also called dynamic languages) are now often considered important tools in a developer's arsenal. That's a far cry from than their old reputation as lesser tools for those who can't handle "real" programming.

The programmers in the trenches of Web development can breathe a bit easier now that a major committee planning the future of the JavaScript standard has decided to focus on small, incremental changes that will improve the performance in Web browsers. Some members of the ECMA International standards committee still have bigger dreams to enhance the language, known more formally as ECMAScript, to tackle more complicated projects, but these plans receded as the group focused on clearer and more present needs.

With its new JavaFX technology for rich Internet applications, Sun Microsystems hopes to leverage the strength of the Java development base and Java's ubiquitous presence on devices to make a strong run in a race it has entered very late -- and where Adobe Systems and Microsoft have a huge head start.

Once upon a time at a NASA space flight center a long way away, I was an e-mail administrator. At the time, the 1980s, e-mail was still chaotic. The RFC 822 standard was only beginning to bring rhyme and reason to e-mail. One of RFC 822's competitors, the Common Messaging Calls (CMC) X.400 standard, wasn't making much progress, but then Microsoft adopted it in 1992, added the concepts of folders to it, and re-named the result Mail Application Programming Interface (MAPI). And, ever since, the e-mail world can broadly be divided into two camps: the RFC 822 Internet compliant e-mail group and the MAPI-compliant Microsoft Outlook/Exchange pack.

Standardization efforts for the next version of JavaScript have taken a sharp turn this month, with some key changes in the Web scripting technology's direction. JavaScript creator Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla, has helped forge a consensus on how to proceed with the direction for JavaScript's improvements. "JavaScript was sitting still. It was stagnant," he says.

Connecting your application into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) isn't complicated, particularly if you've done Web service programming on other projects.