Hit by recession Microsoft’s profit continues to fall at an accelerating speed. For the quarter ending June 30, Microsoft’s revenue […]

AMD, the second largest global supplier of microprocessors, has announced it has just shipped 500 million x86 processors. The company […]

RSA has launched a new SecureID token for iPhones that can be used to authenticate enterprise applications and resources. Available […]

The Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), among the most popular Eclipse projects, have reached a high level of maturity with the latest release 2.1. Michael Spector explains what´s new in the Galileo version of PDT and what we can expect in future releases.

Gmail’s much anticipated sibling Google Wave is getting ready to enter semi-public beta phase. The tool that blends email and […]

A new coalition has come into existence to promote open source software in the United States government. OSA (Open Source […]

Application architectures have evolved greatly over the last 30 years of computing. They’ve shifted back and forth from proprietary character-mode terminals with centralised processing to client-server applications with distributed processing. Then, they shifted to the centralised hosting of applications but this time with open standards-based, web-delivered front-ends. Each of these trends included a variety of methods to connect disparate systems—many proprietary, some without any re-usable characteristics and all typically requiring the developers, operators and maintainers to learn a new set of skills and the organisation to put new processes in place. These upheavals invariably created friction and frustration for the individuals and the organisation involved.

In his keynote at the SpringOne at the end of April in Amsterdam Rod Johnson introduced Spring Roo as the new project of SpringSource, the manufacturer of the well-known Spring Open Source Framework. What is behind that?

Finally it’s in the market: version 6.7 of NetBeans, the popular programming environment. The history of the latest release of NetBeans is quite eventful. After a change in the project’s management, far-reaching modifications regarding the release cycle were announced. The release number was pushed back from 7.0 to 6.7 and both the releases were said to follow one another closely. But as the personnel resources ran short, the schedule was not met. So, is the new release worth the wait? Does NetBeans live up to its credo, “The only IDE you need”? Let us look at these issues.

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. Software projects tend to fail because usually they are designed in a complex and over engineered way. Internet is full of articles on how projects become over complicated and fail. J2EE was a very promising platform with new set of tools to make developer’s life easier. XML configuration files were also introduced for same reason, ease of configuration. However J2EE failed to simplify things in many Aspects.

Dynamic languages are getting more and more popular. New dynamic languages are emerging with a frequency never seen before. The aim of the Eclipse Dynamic Language Toolkit (DLTK) is to facilitate development of high standard IDEs for these languages. We talked to Andrey Platov, Project Lead for the Eclipse DLTK project, about the recent developments in the project.

Richard Gronback is project lead of the Eclipse Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) that provides a generative component and runtime infrastructure for developing graphical editors based on EMF and GEF. Richard gives an overview to the project and describes the new features of the Galileo version of GMF.

Programming Cocoa with Ruby brings together two enthusiastic development communities.

The runtime projects at Eclipse are getting stronger. OSGi- and Equinox-based solutions make up an important part of the latest Eclipse Galileo release. Jeff McAffer, project lead of the Equinox OSGi, RCP and Orbit projects at Eclipse, explains what is new at Equinox in Galileo and what eclipse runtime holds for the future.