Peter Coffee

Its easy to agree that the world needs more software testing, but its much more difficult to turn that desire into a disciplined and cost-effective process. The wrong kind of testing tool is like an automatic transmission in the hands of a driver with no good maps: It will merely make it easier to take […]

Programmers editors such as SlickEdits Visual SlickEdit 10 have become much more than manual tools for working with source code text. The March Version 10 update of Visual SlickEdit, a long-standing eWEEK Labs Analysts Choice, provides impressive real-time analysis and display of program structure. Improvements include expanded tools for code refactoring as well as edit-time […]

Its good that the Internet enables exchanges of any kind of content among consenting nodes. Embracing that principle, though, is not the same as liking the results. Some of the packaging choices Ive seen almost give me second thoughts about content-neutral networks. People routinely overpackage and underprotect content. Ive seen public documents, linked from government […]

Version 4 of the Globus Toolkit, released today with the sponsorship of the Globus Consortium, is a Web services-oriented platform that signals the readiness of grid computing for mainstream enterprise applications as well as research and supercomputing tasks. “GT4 implements the latest standards from WS, OASIS and W3C,” explained Globus Consortium board member Ian Foster, […]

My wife and I accompanied two of our sons this month on a Boy Scout backpacking trip to the Santa Monica Mountains, where Southern Californias near-record rainy season has produced an incredible landscape of green meadows and hillsides overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I figured wed better enjoy that scenery now because by August the only […]

Last weeks acquisition of New York-based Popkin Software and Systems Inc. by Swedens Telelogic AB combines two companies whose products Ive covered for years. I reviewed Version 10 of Popkins System Architect product this past September, having first made the products acquaintance with (as I recall) Version 3: Ever since, its been among my favorite […]

I heard the other day from a user of a highly reliable software development tool set. One of the .exe files in that product was being falsely flagged as bearing a virus and was being automatically deleted from workstations at the users site. This was not OK because local site policies required double-secret-divinity-super-user status to […]

The service-oriented architecture, or SOA, has become a lucrative reality for two quite different companies that both understand the distinction between mere Web services technology and a more general services model of IT. Con-Way Transportation Services Inc. is a $2.6 billion transportation and logistics company based in Ann Arbor, Mich. The companys focus on “less-than-truckload” […]

The tools available to developers for building and deploying Web services can easily lead to the wrong kind of success. Its easy for individual application developers or business units to use new tools and standards to define a function and expose it in the form of a service; its harder to make services talk to […]

In the current issue of eWEEK, I report on a conversation that I moderated late last month among players on the field of service-oriented architecture (SOA). The group included representatives from several vendors of SOA technologies and services, plus an enterprise IT buyer to keep those vendors focused on reality. It seemed to me that […]