Software Development: Reviews

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (VS08) Service Pack 1 (SP1) took eight months to arrive. Considering the capabilities that have been added, eight months might not seem so long. In some ways, SP1 feels like the completion of what Visual Studio 2008 was supposed to be. It's certainly not just the collection of bug fixes that you'd expect from the term "service pack."

Sun Microsystems recently unveiled the first public beta of its JavaFX framework for RIAs (rich Internet applications). There's a lot to like about the new SDK. It's rich in capabilities, and its Java-like syntax makes it a good springboard to RIAs for Java developers. But even in Java shops, Sun and JavaFX are behind not just one eight ball but two. Heavyweight competitors Adobe and Microsoft, with Flex/AIR and Silverlight, respectively, offer RIA toolsets that are not only far more mature but also include tools that bridge the all-important gap between designers and coders.

JRules, the Java version of ILOG's BRMS (business rules management system), has always run on Microsoft platforms -- and it's done so quite well. Now, with the latest version of original ILOG Rules, ILOG demonstrates that it's truly taken a large gulp of Kool-Aid, having partnered with Microsoft to build a product set that completely embraces .Net.

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.

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.