GitHub, the popular code repository service, has to serve two masters. It's well-known for hosting popular open-source projects, but it's also working to acquire more large and small business users to privately store and manage their proprietary code.
'Occupy HTML5' movement shows Flash still has ardent support, but the web tool's best days are over
Tools masquerading as languages, maddening syntax, dusty code that won’t die -- here's what has us shaking our fists
Microsoft and Google are fighting yet another public relations battle, this time over the HTML5 video standards to be used in the next generation of Web browsers.
Some early programmer names are familiar to even the most novice of software developers. You may never have seen a line of code written by Bill Gates, or written any application in BASIC (much less for the Altair). But you know Gates' name, and the names of a few others.
A few years ago, self-proclaimed non-developer Kevin Smith worked for a software company that tried to build a project tracking tool using Microsoft .Net. Some 15 developers spent a year with little success. "After burning though a million dollars and still without a product, the company called it quits," says Smith, now managing partner of NextWave Performance, a consultancy in Denver, Colo.
With the advent of multicore processors such as the Intel Core Duo, which is now commonplace in PCs, software developers must deal with a new wrinkle -- getting software to be processed across multiple cores -- in order to ensure the maximum performance from their software. But this is much easier said than done, with developers having to tackle issues with concurrency and potential performance bottlenecks. Already, 71 percent of organizations are developing multithreaded applications for multicore hardware, according to a recent IDC survey sponsored by tool vendor Coverity.
One thing that the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) development community has aplenty is choice. Want a free, open source AJAX framework? We have (alphabetically) Dojo, Ext, Google Web Toolkit, jQuery, MooTools, OpenRico, Prototype, Scriptaculous, and the Yahoo User Interface Library, and frankly they're all pretty good. There are hundreds more, but unfortunately I can't keep up with them all.
A career as a Cobol programmer might not be as sexy as slinging Java code or scripting in Ruby, but if you buckle down and learn hoary old Cobol, you could land one of the safest, most secure jobs in IT.
Now that the desktop revolution is largely over, most of the excitement lies in the counter-desktop revolution that is bringing all the flair developed by the desktop programmers back to the safe world of the server. Caspio is one of the most prominent players seeking to lure the desktop database builders away from Microsoft Access and back into the datacenter's fold. The company has been around since before the last bubble burst, and now it boasts a number of prominent companies as customers.
With its ambitious Oslo software modeling platform, Microsoft seeks a new application development paradigm that raises the level of abstraction. But the effort has brought up questions about whether Oslo crowds the modeling landscape and whether Microsoft can achieve its lofty goals.
Several weeks ago, Lynn Greiner's article on the state of the scripting universe was slashdotted. Several people raised their eyebrows at the (to them) obvious omissions, since the article only covered PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl and JavaScript. As I wrote at the time, Lynn chose those languages because hers was a follow-up to an article from three years back. Plus, most IT managers are familiar with at least one of those well-known scripting languages, even if they haven't personally written a line of code in one of them.
What will the world of dynamic programming languages and Web applications look like in five years? This is one of those highly personal and deeply philosophical questions best saved for after dessert is served, the drinks are poured, and the sidearms are safely locked away.
The power of Web-based applications continues to burgeon as they take on the art of application building itself. In a number of online tools, the old compile-link-deploy loop disappears, and editing a Web application becomes as simple as editing a comment for Slashdot. (Notice I used the word "edit," not "program.") Just click a few times in the browser and your application is up and running.
Back in 2004, InfoWorld's then-CTO Chad Dickerson polled the best and brightest to reveal 20 IT mistakes that were surefire recipes for cost overruns, missed deadlines, and in some cases, lost jobs.