Peter Coffee

Space-based systems are the last bastion of handcrafted, custom-built technology. The unit volumes are small. The intervals between one procurement cycle and another are long. The rigors of launch and the hostile on-orbit environment are severe. These factors make it hard to take advantage of mass-market economies or gain leverage from previous engineering efforts. Challenging […]

Users rarely behave as planned unless thats the easiest thing for them to do. Alfresco Softwares enterprise content management platform, released today, applies this basic lesson in an open-source, service-oriented architecture approach that makes content management a path of least resistance — instead of creating a parallel process that asks users to do extra work. […]

Next month will see the next chapter of a saga that began with Microsofts Visual Basic (through Version 6.0), took a dramatic turn with the early 00s Visual Basic .Net and will reach a climax with the forthcoming Visual Basic 2005. If youre not a developer, you probably dont know that these names refer to […]

Microsoft Corp.s wooing of developers to build custom applications by extending its Office “12” platform is as crucial as any such campaign in the companys history. Microsoft can reasonably hope to engage application developers with core technologies such as its WWF (Windows Workflow Foundation), with obviously useful ideas such as shareable repositories of PowerPoint charts […]

Federal agencies and contractors have until Oct. 27 to define a new standard of personal identification. Thats the deadline for compliance with the first phase of Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-12, which called in August of last year for the creation of a federal standard that was issued this past February as FIPS 201. That […]

When 216 Java development managers were asked this summer about their biggest frustrations in deploying high-quality code, 40 percent of them admitted that they dont even measure code quality in more than half of their projects; in the projects where code quality is being measured, the same group estimated that almost a third of those […]

Enterprise applications access data and enable business processes. That may seem thoroughly obvious, but a recently arrived extraterrestrial looking at developers tools might easily get a different impression. The languages and tools that are used to build most applications put much of their expressive power and productivity enhancement into other areas. Transparent access to data, […]

Making data more directly accessible to developers, with greater freedom to use it in ways not anticipated when it was compiled, is the hottest fashion statement in development technology. With rapid refinement of tools for working with XML on datas supply side and with data manipulation becoming better integrated with mainstream code on the demand […]

Theres not much point in writing efficient code that robustly supports an ineffective or irrelevant business process. The most crucial opportunity for improvement in developer tools, paradoxically, may therefore be in areas that most directly serve the nondeveloper participants in project teams whose members will increasingly come from many specialties. Not surprisingly, proprietary and standard […]

Although next spring marks the 10th anniversary of Java integrated development environments, toolmakers still find innovative ways to make developers more productive in that language and on its associated platforms. Even familiar tasks such as source code editing are fertile ground for continuing tool improvements. Click here to read the full review of IntelliJ Idea […]