Software Development: Reviews

The success of a BPM (business process management) initiative hangs on a good plan. Spend too little time developing a snapshot of your company's inner workings, and the resulting system of misfiring rules and unhandled exceptions will find you mired in costly troubleshooting. But, sure enough, you can also lean too far in the other direction. Spend too much time charting workflow definitions, control points, and exception management, and the delays will start whittling away at your ROI.

Parasoft continues to send its Jtest Java testing suite out to hunt down bad Java code. And Jtest knows that the definition of bad Java code continues to expand: One bit of code might be bad because its developer didn't follow best practices for coding style, making it difficult for other programmers to understand and interface with it. Yet another bit might be bad because it is poorly factored and overly complex, or because it crashes when executed. A different bit of code might be bad because it was written with no consideration for security and could be easily compromised by a malicious hacker.

The market-share leader among Java IDEs is unquestionably Eclipse, the platform freely available from the Eclipse Foundation. Its success stems from several factors: the foundation's vendor independence, its considerable ability to forge partnerships, and a key product design decision.

Detail-oriented structured rules, new domain Experts streamline newest vesion of Agitar's code testing tool.

Cross-platform toolkits have always been a market unto themselves. In the heyday of Unix, products such as Galaxy, XVT, and Zinc provided a solution for IT and for ISVs that could not afford to rewrite code for all flavors of OSes. When Java took over much of the cross-platform workload, these tools were relegated to the sidelines.

Enterprise CMSes (content management systems) do a fine job helping business users update Web page text and rollback changes when necessary. But that's just one facet of maintaining an engaging site. Unfortunately, few tools currently exist for overseeing changes to intricate applications such as shopping carts and Web-enabled self-help. True, most IT shops employ systems management tools such as Microsoft Application Center to deploy custom programming of this nature. These products, however, usually work with particular file types and often lack controls mandated by Sarbanes-Oxley and other legislation.

Developers usually do their diagramming in the design phase. After code is written, it's unlikely that any diagramming will ever take place, even though it could be useful for code maintenance. Why? If programmers have little time to create class diagrams and the like in the design phase, there's scant hope that time pressures will ease enough for them build class diagrams when the code is in source control.

When I first heard about Mainsoft's Visual MainWin for J2EE, I thought the concept was a harebrained idea. Just skimming some of the product's help topics sent me reeling: "Developing ASP .Net applications on J2EE." Give me a break.

Microsoft’s flagship software development suite -- Visual Studio.NET -- has now been updated and enhanced with a new version, 2003. David Williams takes a look at what's new.

A few recently introduced products round out the modern Mac user's arsenal.