Software Development

The latest rewrite of the Web's mother tongue won't recommend the use of specific audio and video encoding formats that could make it cheaper and easier for people to distribute multimedia content.

CSIRO has sold its Funnelback search engine technology business to open source content management company Squiz.

Looking to focus on the budding -- and game-changing -- HTML 5 specification, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) said Thursday it plans to increase available resources for the effort by discontinuing further development of XHTML 2.

For developers, Oracle's Fusion Middleware 11g rollout on Wednesday emphasizes Java technologies, particularly the company's JDeveloper IDE, along with concepts including declarative programming and ALM (application lifecycle management).

If only it were as easy to build a Web application as it is to design one in Illustrator and Photoshop. Maybe it will be someday, and maybe that someday is closer than we might think. Adobe has certainly succeeded in shrinking the distance between design and development with its latest batch of RIA tools: Adobe Flex 4 SDK, Adobe Flash Builder 4 (the Flex Builder IDE renamed), and Adobe Flash Catalyst, all recently made available in public beta.

Despite its complexity, the software development process has gotten better over the years. "Mature" programmers remember how many things required manual intervention and hand-tuning back in the day. Today's software development tools automatically perform complex functions that programmers once had to write explicitly. And most developers are glad of it!

The Linux community has a message to Microsoft: Back off

Komodo IDE 5 from ActiveState is the most comprehensive code editor and debugger available for enterprise teams that develop applications using a range of dynamic languages. Komodo's strong debugging skills are blended with broad-based coding support for Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, not to mention Tcl, Java, C, C++, Visual Basic, and many more. With powerful HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and XML support, Komodo is a great Web 2.0 companion as well.

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.

The idea of an application that supports third-party extensions and add-ons users can download and install in one click may be more applicable to Web browsers than office suites, but the developers at the open source KOffice project have developed such an architecture where all components are modular. TechWorld interviews the marketing coordinator for KOffice, Inge Wallin, to find out where this lesser-known of the open source office suites is headed now version 2.0.0 has arrived and what excites its developers. Building an easy, intuitive, cross-platform, and extensible platform like Firefox is high on the agenda.

Our series on the most popular programming languages continues as we chat to Tcl creator John Ousterhout.

Computerworld's investigations into the most widely-used programming languages continues as we chat with Giancarlo Niccolai the creator of the Falcon programming language.

On this occasion we speak to Steve Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell, or sh. In the early 1970s Bourne was at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge, England working on a compiler for Algol68 as part of his PhD work in dynamical astronomy. This work paved the way for him to travel to IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in New York in 1973, in part to undertake research into compilers. Through this work, and a series of connections and circumstance, Bourne got to know people at Bell Labs who then offered him a job in the Unix group in 1975. It was during this time Bourne developed sh.

Mozilla has given US$100,000 to improve and develop Ogg Theora, an open source video codec being developed by the Xiph.org Foundation. Wikimedia will disburs funds over a six-month period. Although not the best-known video format, Ogg already has some major support from web developers. Theora will be built into Firefox 3.1, which is currently in Beta 2, as well as into Norway's homegrown browser Opera. Theora is also the video format of choice for all Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Are we having a recession yet? Ask and ye shall receive. If the bad news keeps rolling in from Wall Street, coded phrases like "economic downturn" won't stop companies from acting as if the recession is already here.

It's official: The next version of Windows will be called (drumroll, please) ... "Windows 7!"

For the last several months Microsoft has been pushing for their Office Open XML (OOXML) office suite file specification to be accepted as an international standard by ISO, presumably to help them gain traction for future government contracts (look, this file specification is an ISO standard, it must be good).

Although not without problems, Microsoft Visual Studio is the premier IDE for developing applications with the Microsoft .Net Framework and at least a contender for the best Windows-hosted C/C++ IDE.

Hot on the heels of Microsoft's Silverlight 2 release, Adobe AIR 1.5 adds impressive new features to the desktop extension of Adobe's Flex RIA (rich Internet application) platform. This is the second update since AIR's debut earlier this year, a testament to Adobe's seriousness about owning a piece of the desktop.

Day Software may be best known for its CRX (Content Repository Extreme) Java Content Repository. But after testing the general release of its Communiqué 5.1 (CQ5) modular CMS, I think it's time to get reintroduced to the rest of what the company offers. This notable Web content manager will impress business users with drag-and-drop page design, in-context content editing, and a component library that includes Flash elements, form builders, and Google Gadget support. And it will impress IT with a nice complement of enterprise bells and whistles -- from integrated BPM to hot backup, disaster recovery, and clustering capabilities.

Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash and Flex and several other RIA (rich Internet application) and AJAX frameworks, Silverlight arrived with a flourish just over one year ago. Silverlight 1.0 manipulated its multimedia-savvy, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) user interface using JavaScript. Silverlight 1.1, which added support for compiled .Net languages and supported more of the .Net API, was available at that time only as an alpha test.