Peter Coffee

Does this sound to you like an accurate statement? “Developers gravitated to Java because they could focus on writing business logic. The run time handled everything else. A lot of people want to return to that level of simplicity, even for multinode, enterprise applications. Thats the goal.” Im quoting a comment made today by Ari […]

As I noted in a summary blog from last weeks OReilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, the competition there to launch new Web services APIs seemed like a software-centered version of the new-hardware blitz that used to characterize the Las Vegas Comdex show each fall. Adobe, for example, broke significant news at ETech on […]

The preannouncement hype surrounding Microsofts “Origami” reminded me of the TV ads that preceded the launch of the Infiniti brand. Those ads never showed the cars, but instead showed pictures of surf and mountains while talking about the experience to come. Microsofts coy video clips at www.origamiproject.com were like those Infiniti messages, albeit with two […]

In any scene from any “Star Trek” episode or movie, the most futuristic things we see are the wireless communication devices. Who needs a starship when you can just give the order, “On screen!”—and watch, by unexplained means, what would otherwise take several light-years flight to observe? Consider those little badges on every Starfleet crew […]

Formerly the priestly language of Webmasters incantations, Perl is being adopted across a broadening spectrum of tasks. Perl 6, a major re-engineering of the Perl technology, promises to preserve Perls legendary productivity in simple tasks while being built on a formal specification. The result, its hoped, will prove more suitable for construction of complex and […]

Introduced to enterprise developers more than 10 years before Java, the Smalltalk language established key ideas of object-oriented language design and implementation. It also committed the rarely forgiven sin of being ahead of its time, demanding memory budgets and processor speeds more often found on a high-end workstation than on a commodity PC before the […]

Traditionally, a major new mass-market operating system release sends a “refresh” command to the hardware base as well. Users have accepted the costs of more memory, more processor speed and more graphical horsepower as enablers of new capability and convenience—but Microsoft seems uncharacteristically hesitant about the ability of Windows Vista to trigger the next such […]

In a week when the tech communitys attention is focused on the notion of an “attention economy,” notably in sessions at the OReilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, its no small coincidence that AOL is opening its formerly limited-access instant messaging network to third-party application developers. Its been said, probably first by Turing Award […]

As this month began, it became public knowledge that Apple has filed two patent applications under the title “Gestures for touch sensitive input devices.” That title, of course, is wrong: The “invention” is not the act or manner of gesturing but, rather (as the applications later make clear), “methods and systems for processing touch inputs,” […]

When I got the invitation to keynote this months Software Security Summit in San Diego, I proposed “Mediocrity Is Malpractice” as a title for my remarks. I was thinking of this as a general statement about rising expectations. As it got to be time to prepare the talk, however, I realized that I should take […]