Peter Coffee

More than just tools that roll new code from scratch, the open-source arsenal also offers enterprise developers a wide range of prebuilt components and application skeletons that can be used to jump-start an in-house application or a vertical-market solution. Sophisticated CRM (customer relationship management) suites are among the highlights of what we might call the […]

Suns Netbeans-based JSE 7 achieves the most transparent interaction that weve seen among UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams and source code. Any change to diagram or code is immediately and clearly reflected in other views. Click here to read the full review of Java Studio Enterprise 7. 2 Suns Netbeans-based JSE 7 achieves the most […]

The road to platform success is paved with strategic development technologies. IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. are responding to that reality with Java environments that are not merely competitive but actually set a fast pace for the Visual Studio update that Microsoft Corp. wont ship until late this summer. IBMs Rational Web Developer 6.0 speeds […]

IBMs Eclipse 3.0-based RWD 6.0, released in November, emphasizes the connection between the user experience and the source code in much the same way that JSE 7 emphasizes the connection between the source code and UML visualizations. Layout and modification of Web sites in RWD was intuitive and quick; database connection aids were versatile and […]

If I wanted to spoil my wifes attempt to surprise me on my birthday, Amazon.com would have made it easy for me to do that—but only because she tried to use Amazons services to make my gift keep on giving. Developers who plan to deploy a “personalized” Web service should consider the implications, and make […]

In the controversy over IBMs sale of its PC business to a company in China, we find an important message about the changing nature of enterprise information security. We used to get along with simple hierarchies of trust, providing a straightforward increase in privilege—from 0 to 100 percent—as we moved from the outside in. Whats […]

Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow once warned of the hazards of oversimplification, saying that one could call it the occupational hazard of being an economist—except that it was actually the occupation. In the same way, one could say that its the occupation of the Web services developer to make a companys intellectual property available to […]

My snake-oil detector was screaming at me, “This cant be right.” That happens when someone tells me that everything I think I know is wrong, especially in an area like getting information into and out of a radio signal—something that Ive thought I understood since I got my first ham radio license 35 years ago. […]

Today marks the entry deadline—really, we mean it—for eWEEKs Fifth Annual Excellence Awards. Full information is available at www.excellenceawardsonline.com. As we prepare for the annual flood of last-minute entries, I find that eWEEK newshound Darryl Taft has pretty much written the rest of this column for me with his coverage of last weeks announcements of […]

Online retail enjoys the mixed blessing of extremely tight coupling between the means of advertising a product and the means of buying it. A mechanism that calls a product to possible buyers attention, such as Amazons reader rankings, is just a few clicks away from the mechanism by which a buyer can act on that […]