Borland Dumps Core SDP U.S

A BZ Media Publication BEHIND THE CODING: THE MAKING OF A ‘ROCK STAR’ APPLICATION

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OCTOBER 15, 2006 • ISSUE NO. 160 www.sdtimes.com • $7.95 Borland Dumps Core SDP U.S. Names Four-way product offerings replace single ALM platform First Czar Of BY ALEX HANDY newest products. These pieces Cybersecurity Borland Software is abandoning can be combined into a single Core SDP, formerly the center- ALM solution, and Johnson IT trade association piece of its application life-cycle pointed out that the products executive Garcia fills management approach to soft- that made up Core SDP are long-vacant position ware development, according to being portioned out into the officials at the company. appropriate new package. BY JENNIFER DEJONG The role-based Core SDP, Marc Brown, senior director Filling a post that has been which had been released to much of product marketing, said that vacant for more than a year, the fanfare in March 2005, has been Core SDP’s roles-based tooling U.S. Department of Homeland pushed aside by a new four-way did not reflect the roles that exist- Security has named Gregory solution, led by Borland’s new ed within clients’ companies. Garcia to be the nation’s first Lifecycle Quality Management “Everyone defines those roles dif- assistant secretary for cybersecu- (LQM) suite. ferently,” said Brown. When asked rity and telecommunications. Brad Johnson, Borland’s if the Core SDP would be DHS Secretary Michael director of product marketing, chopped up and rebranded under Chertoff last month plucked Source: Borland Software said that Core SDP would soon the four new ALM solution lines, Garcia from the Information be phased out in favor of the four Brown said, “Yes.” Borland’s LQM suite encompasses the testing and requirements tools needed Technology Association of Amer- different life-cycle management The decision to dump Core to integrate testing and development teams under one communication and ica, a trade group where he has solutions based on the company’s continued on page 21 > planning framework. served as vice president for information security policy and programs since 2003. “Greg brings SPECIAL REPORT: the right mix of experience in ECLIPSE PROJECTS W3C Giving Sites to the Blind government and the private sector to continue to strengthen our Before the next Working on accessibility standards for rich Internet apps robust partnerships that are release train is ready essential to this field,” Chertoff BY ALEX HANDY the W3C, said that the new Accessibility Initiative’s Accessi- said in a statement. for consumption, a few The blind may soon be able to guidelines and road map, which ble Rich Internet Application Paul Kurtz, executive director tasty morsels will be better access AJAX widgets in were released in late September, suite. That suite, said Brewer, will for the advocacy group Cyber ready to serve Web sites. The World Wide Web will expand significantly over comprise best practices docu- Security Industry Alliance and a Consortium has published the time. “We’re calling them the ments that will give developers critic of the way DHS has han- beginnings of new acces- start of the WAI-ARIA guidelines for making their RIAs dled cybersecurity issues, praised sibility standards aimed at A HUB OF Suite. That includes one amenable to use by the blind and the appointment. “Greg is an AJAX rich Internet applica- document that’s essen- physically handicapped. excellent choice for the position, ACTIVITY tions. The guidelines are PAGE 6 tially a road map, and Brewer said that the initial bringing both his solid knowl- a first step toward the two documents that set of three documents—the edge of information security establishment of best practices include work in specific areas,” road map, states and properties, issues and strong relationships in for making RIAs accessible to said Brewer. The latter of these and roles documents—are now the private sector to [DHS],” he screen readers and alternate two documents seeks to lay out open for review and comment. said in a statement. forms of computer interface how roles, states and properties Later, the Web Accessibility Ini- Earlier this year, Kurtz, navigation. should be defined in accessible tiative will expand and refine among others, criticized DHS page 25 Judy Brewer, director of the rich Internet applications. these and other accessible RIA- for its failure to fill the assistant Web accessibility initiative for WAI-ARIA stands for the Web continued on page 17 > continued on page 21 > IN THIS ISSUE STPCon BEA Comes Full Circle With SOA ...... 3 Makes Tracks A Global View of Development ...... 7 On Testing page 16 Analyst Says Red Hat Stack Comes Up Short ...... 8 Microsoft Refreshes Office Beta ...... 12 O’BRIEN: Test-First Tactic Trounces Thread Threat . . . .29 Toad Hops Onto Mainframes ...... 15 BINSTOCK: The Language of Lua ...... 29 CountDown to Universal Device Testing ...... 22 RUBINSTEIN: Mercury and Points Offshore ...... 30 www.sdtimes.com Software Development Times October 15, 2006 NEWS 3 BEA Pulls a 360 With Consolidated SOA Offering

BY ALEX HANDY and incorporate some new a real-world scenario.” In addition, the company BEA Systems used its annual bits of code that tie every- But Mike Wienick, consul- announced the formation of a conference to announce the thing together under this tant and analyst for European partnership with Web services circling of its product lines. Eclipse control panel. firm Pierre Audion, said that reseller StrikeIron. The part- The mid-September event Bill Roth, vice president he was still waiting to see just nership will bring new data was highlighted by the of BEA’s Workshop Group, how much of SOA 360 is mar- integration services for harvest- announcement of SOA 360 said the WebLogic Work- keting hype, and how much is ing information from Excel (as in 360 degrees), the shop development environ- actual innovation. “Obviously spreadsheets and making it company’s new name for ment will become a part the idea’s very interesting, but available to an AquaLogic its integrated SOA platform. of the WorkSpace 360 to me it’s not very different than deployment through the data Comprising WebLogic, platform. Additional tool- what they’ve talked about services platform. AquaLogic and Tuxedo, SOA ing will arrive in 2007, and before. It makes sense for cus- BEA also used the confer- 360 will offer a single man- will include a relationship tomers who are using all three, ence to introduce its Guardian agement and development Source: BEA layout tool, PHP develop- but how much is it going to support service. This new tool environment for service-ori- ment facilities and possible cost to upgrade?” wondered offers real-time suggestions to ented architectures. SOA 360 brings together the SOA, transaction expanded support for Wienick. He went on to say that administrators working with Alfred Chuang, chair- and development solutions of BEA. REST. Roth demonstrated BEA has been saying all along WebLogic or AquaLogic instal- man and CEO of BEA, took one of these tools, Web- its products would be integrat- lations. Guardian, said Chuang, the keynote stage of BEAWorld state that SOA allows difficult Space Architect, which dia- ed and cohesive. will keep users up to date with to discuss the potential of SOA business processes to be better grams the XML associated with current patches and inform in the enterprise. During his managed and executed upon. code held in the repository for- MORE WORLD NEWS them when they are moving into speech, he said that BEA now The newly titled platform merly known as Flashline. Also announced during BEA- areas that could cause problems earns 20 percent of its revenue will materialize in 2007 with the Noel Yuhanna, senior ana- World was the release of the down the line. The system can from AquaLogic sales, despite first release of WorkSpace 360, lyst at Forrester Research, said AquaLogic Data Services Plat- download and install updates the product being just over a an Eclipse-based collaborative that BEA’s SOA 360 offers a form 2.5. The software is specific to situations encoun- year old. “SOA puts business development environment. broader perspective of SOA. “I designed to access and present tered during daily administra- back in charge of business,” SOA 360 will also include the think they are taking the right any form of data available with- tion. No date for the delivery of said Chuang. He went on to existing BEA SOA products, steps toward…getting this into in an enterprise. Guardian was given. T i d r a n o e L a r a M :

Sumero-Akkadian n o i t a r t s u l l I o t o

Recognized Here h P s e m Unicode 5.0 adds scripts from ancient languages i T D S BY P.J. CONNOLLY an encoding standard, which incorpo- Sumerian is virtually Fifteen years after its first publication, rated characters from Akkadian, nil, the Unicode stan- the Unicode standard has reached a Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian and dard includes archaic milestone with Unicode 5.0.0, the latest Sumerian. scripts in support of version of the character encoding Unicode is important in the interna- academic and anti- scheme. The new version includes tionalization and localization of applica- quarian research. 1,369 new character assignments, with tions; ideally, translatable strings such The bulk of the three new contemporary script families as dialog boxes and menu items are sep- new characters are and two ancient: Balinese, N’Ko and arated off into resource files, while vari- from the added Phags-Pa; Phoenician and Sumero- able formatting and searching, sorting scripts; the cuneiform entries Akkadian Cuneiform, respectively. and other processing are designed to be alone account for 982 addi- The cuneiform characters represent language-independent. This interna- tions. A number of minor addi- the effort of a multidisciplinary team tionalized application is then packaged tions to Western and Asian based out of Johns Hopkins University, with appropriate resource files, becom- character and symbol sets make known as the Digital Hammurabi pro- ing localized versions that cost less to up the rest of the changes to the ject. Much of the project’s efforts and produce than those built by translating character database. full text of the Unicode its National Science Foundation grant the entire application into other lan- The files that constitute the Unicode standard, including the were devoted to hardware solutions guages, one at a time. Character Database are already avail- complete Unicode Standard Annexes, that addressed the problems of scan- Mark Davis, president of the Uni- able online at the Unicode Consor- for the first time. ning three-dimensional clay tablets, code Consortium, explained, “Compa- tium’s Web site (www.unicode.org Unicode 5.0 tightens the confor- and displaying them in a format that nies tended to toss their products across /versions/Unicode5.0.0). A hard copy mance requirements for bidirectional allows users to magnify, pan, rotate and the wall to some subsidiary in Japan or edition, titled “The Unicode Standard, implementations, used in Semitic lan- tilt the images, and generate three- France or someplace, and that group Version 5.0” (ISBN 0-321-48091-0), will guages such as Arabic and Hebrew. A dimensional models as well as two- would have to make sense of what all be published by Addison-Wesley in the number of behavioral specifications dimensional drawings that represent this code was.” He observed that “you’d fourth quarter of this year; the text will be and property values for character, the precious originals. end up with something that was diffi- available online in the early part of 2007. word, line and sentence separation But software concerns also played a cult to maintain because you had multi- Changes in the book’s physical for- were tweaked for accuracy; case-fold- part: The first cuneiform e-mail was ple versions of code floating around,” mat and paper stock will result in a ing stability is considered improved sent in 2001, and in 2004, both the with expensive barriers to doing busi- lighter, easier-to-use publication. Nev- over Unicode 4.1, and support for pat- Unicode Consortium and the ISO ness in foreign markets. Although the ertheless, there’s actually more content tern syntax characters and stable iden- 10646 WG2 working group approved market for software in Phoenician or than ever: The book will provide the tifiers is now included. T wwww.sdtimes.comww.sdtimes.com Software Development Times October 15, 2006 NEWS 5 s m e t s y s o r c DTrace: Anatomy of i M n u S f o y s e t r u o

A ‘Rock Star’Application C o t o h The makers of the mega-hit dynamic tracing P framework discuss changes in development BY ALEX HANDY processor, one thread, and most likely Adam Leventhal, Mike Shapiro and written in one language. And probably Bryan Cantrill are rock stars at Sun only using the base system, so it might Microsystems. The three have spent access three libraries. almost the entire new millennium working on DTrace, the ground-breaking Cantrill: It was entirely static. So it was dynamic tracing framework in Solaris 10 in C, or C++ or Pascal or Fortran. that has won a dedicated following and much praise in the industry and press. Leventhal: And the libraries were all DTrace gives developers a view from from one vendor. The Fab Three: Adam Leventhal, Mike Shapiro and Bryan Cantrill came together over DTrace. the top of an application to the bottom. Using either prewritten probes or those Cantrill: Life was simple. And the tools also have to look more at who is actually tion from all of these different sources. written in the tool’s D language, DTrace for understanding software reflected using these things. follows a process or thread from its initia- that simplicity. Then in the ’90s, the Shapiro: The reason why the old tools tion to its termination. That gives develop- promise of componentization that had Leventhal: We are taking a very differ- were very much focused...around a lan- ers a view into what resources are being been fringe became mainstream. And ent tack than previous tool makers. Pre- guage, is because they were written by used, where slowdowns occur, and where that happened, arguably first with Java, vious tool makers have been focusing on the same people that wrote the compiler. serious errors enter the data stream. but really it was the advent of the Web, developers in development, which puts We sat down with staff engineer Lev- where you could suddenly start really very different constraints on the prob- Cantrill: With a compiler, it’s like, “This enthal, distinguished engineer Shapiro, realizing distributed computing goals. lem, and they’ve been focusing on one input needs to produce that output.” and senior staff engineer Cantrill to dis- You had multiple applications now, or particular aspect of the system, like And if it doesn’t, it’s busted, and if it cuss the genesis of the DTrace project, multiple processes that form a single debugging Java, or debugging C or even does, it works...the development tools and to talk about how software has application. So an application became analyzing kernel statistics. We were try- were aimed at understanding applica- changed over the past 10 years. What not just a binary. But then you had a ing to make a tool that had a systemic tions that were that simple. And the follows is an excerpt of that discussion. Web server and an app server and a scope, that would let you gather informa- world is just a lot more complicated. T database server, and now you don’t have Adam Leventhal: DTrace…was designed one language—you’ve got three or four to be able to answer arbitrary questions or five. You’ve got these different envi- with concision. There are two aspects to ronments, different protected domains, the power of DTrace. One is the dynamic and the problem is that the problems in nature of it: being able to ask arbitrary software didn’t really show up in devel- questions from any place in the system, opment. They started showing up from the lowest levels like the I/O subsys- increasingly in production…. And the tems and scheduling, through the kernel existing tools were kind of barely keep- and system calls, all the way up to areas of ing up in the simple world. Java and userland and things like that— aspects of any piece of the system. The Shapiro: I think the other consequence other is that you can gather arbitrary data of what Bryan is talking about that’s that is not just a predetermined payload, important to also see is that it’s not just but rather anything you can think of. It the same people with different tools, but was designed for production systems, that the people roles and what the roles meaning that it needs to always be safe. are have totally changed as well. A lot of There can never be some way you could the people you talk to probably...run the instrument the system in a way that could gamut from someone who might be crash it or cause data corruption. Which is writing one of those components to very different than any other tracing someone who might be more like an framework that’s been designed in the integrator. And so the componentization past, or any sort of analysis tool that was drives productivity because you can sort designed in the past. of have people who focus on assembly activities, or the business logic or the Bryan Cantrill: The key observation that glue. And that changes roles as well, we had is the nature of software has because it means that there’s no notion changed. It used to be that you would of, “Well, if I have a problem, only the generate a binary and ship it, and if there guy who wrote this had this great tool to was a problem with the binary, you could figure out what was going on,” because just go back to development and fix it. there’s not just one guy anymore. There’s this huge stack of stuff that was Mike Shapiro: Also that binary was your assembled, and you don’t even have the whole application. One binary, one source code for all of it, right? Even if you had the world’s greatest source level FOR THE COMPLETE debugger, it doesn’t really apply to a lot DISCUSSION, GO TO of these new roles. And that’s why the www.sdtimes.com tools not only have to be different, but 6 NEWS Software Development Times October 15, 2006 www.sdtimes.com Alliance Is a Hub of AJAX Activity Organization puts effort into making tools work together smoothly

BY ALEX HANDY AJAX Hub is a project aimed at spent the summer writing this The alliance also took time control the direction of the The OpenAJAX Alliance is hop- removing some of the conflicts hub, while others worked on in early October to elect a sev- alliance, and head up efforts to ing a new hub will bring harmo- that exist between various AJAX white papers and a newly en-member steering commit- refine the OpenAJAX Hub. ny to AJAX tooling. The Open- tools. Some alliance members unveiled Web site for the group. tee. This governing body will Better steering is a good thing, said Gary Horen, program manager of BEA Systems’ compiler team. He is BEA’s current representative to the alliance, which counted more than 50 members as of mid-September. The organization began work in February, and after a second burst of participation in May, some members went to work chasing short-term goals. Those goals, said Jon Fer- raiolo, IBM employee and act- ing director of the alliance, were to establish standards, build a central site for information, and create paths to understanding for CIOs. That last bit was accom- plished through the publication of a 20-odd-page white paper at the organization’s openajax.org Web site. That first goal of establishing standards, however, is taking more time and work than the others. Current- ly, the first stab at standardization comes in the form of a ref- erence implementation known as the OpenAJAX Hub. “The OpenAJAX Hub is this effort that’s under way to allow multiple AJAX toolkits to work together on the same Web page,” said Ferraiolo. The first- generation AJAX products assume full control of the browser runtime. Our goal with this technical work is to allow you to use multiple toolkits. That took a summer’s worth of work.”

COLLISION PREVENTION Using multiple JavaScript tools at once requires a hierarchical framework in which they don’t collide with one another. Said Ferraiolo: “To minimize JavaScript collision, the hub has a registration facility such that each toolkit can register the additions it makes to the browser’s standard runtime. The hub, when running in debug mode, will flag that.” The hub seeks to put into code some of the best practices that are being advocated by alliance members. In October, every member of the alliance, prior to the group’s first elec- tions, signed a contract to work toward and to support these best practices. T www.sdtimes.com Software Development Times October 15, 2006 NEWS 7

such things as knowledge man- A Global View of Software Development agement, source code management, testing and deployment.” It also has a dashboard for col- Merger creates company focused on agile development of third-party products laborative management of soft- BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN son off a team once that person with pregnant pauses due to the that supports the company’s ware assets and of the develop- Don’t call it an outsourcer, has been assigned to a project. time differences.” distributed agile product engi- ment process, he added. because the company creates a Also, everything about the pro- With the merger and renam- neering method. Velocity, Har- “The reality is that people tight partnership with the ject is placed into a knowledge ing, GlobalLogic also is rolling rison said, is “an amalgamation are getting more product to client. And certainly don’t call it base, so “people aren’t waiting out a new platform, Velocity, of open-source products for market faster,” Harrison said. T an offshoring company. It has development offices in the United States as well as in East- ern Europe and India. Besides, according to Peter Your best source for Harrison, CEO of the newly software development tools! ® named GlobalLogic, “those are

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Round-the-clock support offering is not tied to an application and service costs $8,499 per server. T

COMPANIES RTOS developer Enea introduced Optima, an Eclipse-based development environ- A new Web site has appeared inviting ment for its OSE real-time operating sys- developers and software enthusiasts to tem. Working with Eclipse (3.1.2) and C/C++ post their beta code for others to see and Development Tools (CDT 3.1.1), the environ- use. Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Site On Spot ment performs system-level browsing, on Sept. 11 launched BetaMarker.com, a debugging, profiling and analysis of large free community Web site at which users distributed systems across multiple can judge which beta applications to down- processors and operating systems. Enea load based on ratings of other users. also is offering plug-ins for run-mode According to the company, visitors to the debugging, an OSE-specific object browser, site will know which software is best and a pool profiler for system memory because poor software “will get voted analysis . . . Also at ESC, Enea said it would against and buried.” begin shipping Element 2.0 later this year, an update to its middleware for high-availability distributed systems. Version 2.0 will NEW PRODUCTS be compatible with systems running Monta Vista Carrier Grade Linux, Red Hat Enter- Canoo has released the free and open- prise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora Core, and source ULC XML, an add-in to its Ultra- CentOS (Community Enterprise Operating LightClient user interface software that System), a free redistribution of Linux gives Swing developers a rich Internet based on RHEL 2.1. application option. ULC XML is similar to the open-source UPDATES SwiXML project, in that Java classes are mapped to ele- Troux has released version 6 of its Metis ment names and property names become enterprise architecture solution with the attribute names. The hierarchies of the ability to create data marts from which XML and the UI components mirror each information can be extracted and reported other, allowing developers to quickly create for use in establishing strategic business user interfaces. It costs US$1,499 per plans. Metis Server, one of the core pieces, developer . . . At the Embedded Systems includes the enterprise asset metadata Conference in Boston in late September, continued on page 16 >

10 NEWS Software Development Times October 15, 2006 www.sdtimes.com

Source: Coral8 Coral8’s event processing server helps create business intelligence. Coral8 Engine 4.4 Speaks Native XML BY EDWARD J. CORREIA take XML in your engine and process it The ability to connect with and consume natively, without having to shred or and native XML data streams and to process, transform it into another format. That publish and repurpose that data as rich saves you a lot of coding,” he said, adding content are among the new features in that, in most cases, the application winds Coral8 Engine 4.4, released on Sept 18. up being a lot faster. The engine, avail- According to John Morrell, Coral8’s able now, works with standards-based product marketing director, its namesake SOAs and ESBs. complex event processing solution offers A full-featured predeployment version benefits over competitive XML proces- is available for free at the company’s Web sors that flatten XML structure. “If your site. Licensing starts at US$20,000 for the XML stream is highly hierarchical, you’d professional edition and $60,000 for the have to rip [the stream] apart to process enterprise edition, which adds clustering, it, and that can drive latency up and high availability, service guarantees and reduce throughput,” he said, adding that state persistence for disaster recovery. only then can processing begin. “To do Also new in Coral8 4.4 is the addition complex event processing on top of [that of variables to its SQL-like language. flattened] XML would require a lot of Morrell said that developers can now extra code and time to process.” build an application that watches the 50- Since data sources such as those in day moving average of a stock, he said, SOAs and ESBs are streamed using and when the figure reaches a certain XML, Morrell said, it made sense to point, “set a variable as the current stock modify the engine. “You can now just price and pass it to another module. T Writing Apps That Fix Their Own Flaws

BY JENNIFER DEJONG nections are open to the Web server, he What if developers could write applica- said, offering an example. “The applications smart enough to diagnose them- tion can fix itself by changing the config- selves, and prescribe fixes accordingly? uration settings in DB2.” That’s what IBM researchers have in The application essentially creates its mind with The Build to Manage Toolkit own catalog of symptoms, and associated for Problem Determination, expected to fixes, and carries that catalog with it debut later this year on the company’s from coding to testing and deployment, emerging technology Web site, develop- said Telford. The ability to do that eases erWorks. support burdens for developers of com- The toolkit teaches a Java application mercial software. “They capture prob- to recognize common errors, encoding lems and fixes and ship that information information on how to fix the problem, with the product,” he said. said IBM vice president of autonomic The toolkit also can record bugs computing Ric Telford. It’s a matter of found during the testing phase, retain- telling the application: “If you see this, ing that knowledge throughout the then do that.” For instance, an error development cycle, said Telford. “Oth- recorded in a DB2 log file could be a erwise, the deployment team has to symptom that not enough JDBC con- reinvent the wheel.” T www.softwarefx.com Your Information In Focus. Focus OnYour Data with enterprise-level data visualization for .NET, COM, IT|SQL & Java.

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©2006 Software FX. All rights reserved. Chart FX is a registered trademark of Software FX, Inc. All other brands are owned by their respective owners. 12 NEWS Software Development Times October 15, 2006 www.sdtimes.com Office Beta Refreshed, With New VS Tools BY P.J. CONNOLLY Office Second Edition. VSTO A so-called “technical re- Quick Customize Menu, and is PowerPoint and Visio, joining Sometimes, code names are 2005 SE was released in beta fresh” of Office Beta 2 also optimized for testing with Win- Excel, InfoPath, Outlook and better, or at least simpler. Take last month and is expected to became available for download dows Vista RC1, which was Word. The feature Microsoft is Cypress for example, which be ready around year’s end last month. Mostly consisting of released at the beginning of last touting the most is applica- is a lot easier to type than and available at the same time bug fixes, the refresh also month. tion-level add-in support, the actual product name: Visu- as the 2007 Microsoft Office added some last-minute UI “fit- The new add-in tools for allowing the management, safe al Studio 2005 Tools for System. and-finish” changes, including a Visual Studio add support for loading and unloading of managed add-ins. According to product manager Mike Hernandez, VSTO 2005 SE “really supports the whole notion of Office as a development platform.” He pointed to features built into VSTO 2005 SE Beta, including a programming model and runtime support for new Office features such as custom task panes, Outlook form regions and the Ribbon UI. Developers can now use VSTO 2005 SE’s design-time features to build InfoPath 2007 forms from within Visual Studio.

GATEWAY TO VISUAL STUDIO “We wanted to provide a tool set that was literally a gateway between Office developers and Visual Studio developers, so that Office developers would have a means of getting into a professional environment like Visual Studio,” Hernandez observed. For smaller projects, noted Hernandez, “VBA’s a great tool. When you get into more enterprise line-of-business applications [with requirements for centralized support, centralized deployment, collaboration capabilities and security], “then you definitely want to go with VSTO.” At the time VSTO 2005 SE was announced in June, KD Hallman, Microsoft’s general manager for the developer side of the project, admitted in a blog post that it wasn’t going to provide exactly the same feature set as the VSTO 2005 tools for Office 2003. Certain Excel and Word project features are being hived off into the VSTO release planned to ship around Visual Studio Orcas. That VSTO release will also incorporate visual design- ers for custom task panes and the Ribbon UI. Applications written with the original VSTO 2005 and Office 2003 in mind will run under the new versions of VSTO and Office. The VSTO beta is available for free to all users of Visu- al Studio Tools for Office 2005, or Visual Studio 2005 Profes- sional Edition, and can be downloaded from Microsoft. T www.sdtimes.com Software Development Times October 15, 2006 NEWS 1313

complement the feature set of DatabaseSpy. MapForce allows Spying on Your Own Data With Altova on-the-fly conversions from database, EDI, text and XML BY P.J. CONNOLLY that would otherwise be diffi- tents in the appropriate va’s XMLSpy product. CSV files, and provides for offline Last month, Altova released cult, if not impossible to recycle. scheme. DatabaseSpy’s content export and import are also pos- conversions as well, while Style- DatabaseSpy 2007, a new data- Applications that require migration tools allow users to sible, as is data export to Vision’s drag-and-drop interface base design, management and data in XML format are often export databases to structured HTML or Microsoft Excel files. simplifies the task of designing query tool that the company hindered by the inability of or flat XML files for stand- Altova’s MapForce and the output from XML documents claims can handle any ADO or databases to present their con- alone use, or directly into Alto- StyleVision report generator also and databases. T ODBC database. DatabaseSpy plugs into a variety of database platforms; the first release works with the current crop of IBM DB2, Microsoft, MySQL, Oracle and Sybase products, and runs on the Windows NT family of operating systems. Altova’s previous products such as the MapForce Web services creation tool had touched databases, so this isn’t new ground for the company. Tim Hale, Altova’s marketing director, observed: “We already had some expertise in working with databases [from the existing tools], and we decided to leverage that to introduce this new tool.” DatabaseSpy 2007 includes a built-in SQL editor that provides auto-completion, color coding, drag-and-drop editing and syntax checking to assist users in getting SQL statements right the first time. Users can define collapsible sections of code for faster browsing and editing, according to Hale. The QuickConnect wizard allows users to select specific rows in a database table for inspection, or retrieve all rows; users can also simultaneously access multiple databases of different types with QuickConnect. In addition, DatabaseSpy offers a visual database designer that lets users create databases from scratch or modify them as needed without hand-coding the SQL syntax. The design pane offers drag-and-drop construction from existing tables, and a preview function lets users see the effect of changes that the generated SQL statements would have, before com- mitting them to the database. A project manager in Data- baseSpy lets users organize fre- quently accessed connections, design files and SQL scripts into project files for faster reloading and reuse, Hale said. Another feature in DatabaseSpy allows users to access the many stand- alone databases that business software applications create and use without any thought given to management or access by other applications; this allows the maintenance and reuse of data i

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Infragistics Sales - 800 231 8588 r e d Infragistics Europe Sales - +44 (0) 800 298 9055 www.sdtimes.com Software Development Times October 15, 2006 NEWS 1515 Quest’s Toad Now Can Take on Mainframes BY P.J. CONNOLLY DB2 allowed people with skills gives users a master detail performance tuning to the Pro- advanced development and Quest Software announced the on other database platforms to browser, pivot table analysis fessional Edition’s code com- modeling, the Toad for DB2 release of Toad 2.0 for DB2, more easily apply their knowl- and report generation options, pletion, debugging, import and Suite adds developer editions of which now allows users to work edge in an otherwise unfamiliar and which runs in a read-only source control features. All Benchmark Factory for Data- with the same feature sets environment. mode. The Professional and three of these editions work bases, DataFactory and the against DB2 for z/OS as they do Toad for DB2 2.0 adds a so- Expert Editions continue from with DB2 for z/OS. Toad Data Modeler, but does against DB2 for Linux, Unix and called “Analyst Edition” that the first version; the latter adds For users interested in not support DB2 for z/OS T Windows implementations—a first, the company claims. The software now offers a streamlined installation with embedded DB2 client software and DB2 Personal Connect for connections to DB2 mainframe and AS/400 installations. When Toad for DB2 first shipped last year, according to product manager Amit Argarwal, the company had to turn away many people because the original product didn’t work with the mainframe DB2. Users can now “connect to the z/OS system, and do all the same types of things that they’re used to doing” with other Toad releas- es, he said. “Mainframe has traditionally been a very closed environment,” Argarwal continued, “where a lot of the development that goes on is done through green-screen-type, esoteric interfaces.” He went on to observe that Toad for Oracle Gives ‘Sleepycat’ a Jolt BY EDWARD J. CORREIA Oracle in late September released Berkeley DB 4.5, which it claims is a faster, easier-to-use version of the popular application-specific database. It’s the first Oracle- branded release of the software once known as Sleepycat. Oracle has added a snapshot feature to version 4.5, which it says provides concurrency control for databases used in highly concurrent, mixed read/write systems. Also new is the ability to perform upgrades of replicat- ed databases without stopping the system. Aiding this feature is a replication framework, including a set of predeveloped and supported functions for building high-availability or fault-tolerant systems. As when owned by Sleepy- cat, Berkeley DB 4.5 is available under a dual license. The software and its source code may be used free of charge as long as the application build around it also is available as open source. Pricing for commercial licensing was not disclosed. T 16 NEWS Software Development Times October 15, 2006 www.sdtimes.com STPCon Makes Tracks on Testing MORE UPDATES BY EDWARD J. CORREIA veteran of the software and < continued from page 8 Management, performance systems engineering industry repository as well as portal, dashboard and reporting tools so organi- and security are among the and author of several books on zations can get an aggregated view of their assets . . . Grid solutions new tracks at this year’s Soft- software testing. Sabourin’s provider Tangosol has released Coherence Data Grid Solution Set, a ware Test & Performance sessions include just-in-time CONFERENCE: Nov. 7–9 set of optional client configura- Conference, coming to the testing techniques and testing Hyatt Regency Cambridge, Boston tions for enterprisewide data grid Hyatt Regency Cambridge in for agile development. Black access, access to real-time data feeds with on-client caching, and a Boston, Nov. 7-9. STPCon is will present a full-day tutorial TUTORIALS: compute client for configuring data- or transaction-intensive applica- produced by BZ Media, which on how to assess test team Tuesday, 9:00 am–5:00 pm tion servers. The solution is set to be generally available this month publishes SD Times. effectiveness. His 90-minute with Coherence Data Grid 3.2, an update to the grid server compo- The conference also will sessions include code coverage CLASSES: nent that reportedly will include grouping and composite parallel host tracks featuring Rob metrics and how to use them, Wednesday, 8:30 am–4:15 pm aggregators and conditional data grid processors . . . GemStone Sys- Sabourin, a professor of soft- and a two-part session on Thursday, 8:30 am–5:00 pm tems has updated its GemFire Enterprise data fabric for Java EE, grid, ware engineering at McGill identifying and mitigating SOA and OLTP to version 5. New capabilities include role-based data University; and Rex Black, a risks through testing. EXHIBIT HOURS: distribution for setting priorities of cache members, data portioning Black, president of RBCS, Wednesday, 2:30 pm–7:00 pm that now can be used to define logical namespaces that interoperate a consultancy offering test Thursday, 12:00 pm–4:00 pm with partitioned and nonpartitioned regions, and a gateway/hub mod- automation and quality assur- el for creating distributed systems across a WAN . . . On Sept 15. ance services, also will deliver KEYNOTES: Microsoft released Windows CE 6.0 to manufacturing. Beta 1 of the a keynote address titled “Five Wednesday, 4:30 pm–4:45 pm, embedded operating system, code-named Yamazaki, was released in Trends in Software Engi- Industry Keynote. May with major improvements, including the ability to handle as many neering.” 4:45 pm–5:30 pm, Rex Black as 32,000 processes, each capable of addressing as much as 2GB of The 2006 conference marks Keynote. virtual memory. The previous capacity was 32 processes addressing the end of the tenure of con- 64MB each. ference chairman Lindsey www.stpcon.com Vereen, who is retiring from PEOPLE his role as editor of Software the front line of quality assur- Test & Performance magazine. ance,” said Vereen, who has Lindsey Vereen, editor of BZ Media’s Software Test & Performance “It’s been a pleasure to chaired the event since its magazine, has announced his retirement at the end of October 2006. serve as conference chair and inception. “They have a formi- He will be succeeded by Edward J. Correia, currently executive editor RBCS president Rex Black will speak gratifying to work with the dable responsibility, and I of BZ Media’s SD Times. T on trends in software engineering. dedicated men and women on admire their commitment.” T www.sdtimes.com Software Development Times October 15, 2006 NEWS 17

cern of the W3C’s RIA guidelines is to make the development W3C Works Toward Accessible RIAs of accessible Web applications easier on programmers. Said < continued from page 1 While the trial itself has not ment mandates accessibility for tect themselves from litigation. Brewer: “One thing we want to related documents. been completely resolved, Ryge Web sites—similar to when the But Brewer said that, man- do right now is to make sure “We’re hoping that it would said that some of his clients are ADA forced business owners to dated or not, making Web sites developers can do whatever they provide tools for Web develop- nervous that they, too, will be install wheelchair ramps and accessible to the blind and hand- need to make Web applications ers,” said Brewer. She added open to lawsuits. He said that elevators—corporations may icapped is the right thing to do. and still have the [applications] that current W3C guidelines whether or not the U.S. govern- have to revise their sites to pro- She said that the primary con- be accessible.” T have become popular with gov- ernments around the world as a way to standardize civic Web site design practices. Of previous accessibility standards released by the W3C, Brewer said, “We’ve already seen quite a bit of adoption of our guidelines at the U.S. government level and also in the EU.” Brewer added that many corporations are already implementing previous W3C standards, which suggest adding metadata tags to all images on a site that describe the purpose of that image. Leif Ryge, a freelance Web developer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, said that while the W3C’s best practices for Web design already go a long way to making sites accessible to screen readers, RIAs using AJAX and Flash programs were in need of some new best practices. “If your site is already vali- dated against the W3C’s standards, you should be mostly accessible already,” said Ryge. He added that scripted programs are not easily reconciled with the W3C’s current Web Content Accessibility Guide- lines. Brewer noted that version 2.0 of those guidelines would be surfacing early next year, and would seek to fix those issues.

TARGET ON TRIAL But Ryge said some of his clients are now concerned by a currently pending accessibility lawsuit against Target.com, and as such, are being extra careful about ensuring that the blind can reach their content. The lawsuit in question was brought against mega-retailer Target by the National Federa- tion for the Blind. Initially, Tar- get sought to have the case thrown out, arguing that inter- state commerce could not be governed by federal or state laws. But the federal judge over- seeing the case ruled in Septem- ber that the case can proceed because the Target.com Web site can interact with the physical store locations, bringing the site under the jurisdiction of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). 18 NEWS Software Development Times October 15, 2006 www.sdtimes.com Studio Enterprise Adds AJAX Support BY P.J. CONNOLLY Microsoft’s client- and server- Splitter for ASP.NET, which collapsible, resizable and MaskEdit, WebNumericEdit Last month, ComponentOne based AJAX components, for- works with any content or scrollable panels. and WebPercentEdit. released the latest version of merly code-named Atlas. third-party component to Also in the release are five SuperToolTip for .NET its application development These include what the automatically add AJAX abili- new data input controls, collec- helps developers add Vista-like tool set, Studio Enterprise company claims is the first ties, and which supports flexi- tively referred to as WebInput elements, including labels and 2006 version 3, which adds server-side AJAX control, ble layouts with splits along for ASP.NET: WebCurren- ToolTips to .NET applications. features designed to support WebSplitter and WebUpdate- horizontal or vertical axes, or cyEdit, WebDateEdit, Web- NavBar and TopicBar for .NET are two new components in Menus and Toolbars for .NET that allow the use of paneled, Outlook 2003-like navigation. Three new chart types in Chart for .NET and WebChart for .NET enable the use of cone, cylindrical and pyrami- dal styles in WebForms and WinForms charts. WebChart for ASP.NET now offers AJAX features that eliminate form post-backs and increase the interactivity with end users. The Menus and Toolbars for .NET and Preview for .NET modules now use the company’s SmartDesigners technology for visual development, while the WebBars and Web- Menus for ASP.NET components now offer optimized rendering: The company claims the HTML output from these controls has been reduced by 80 percent or more. T Ivis Refreshes Process Software BY P.J. CONNOLLY Last week, Ivis Technologies released the latest version of xProcess, its Eclipse-based process management software for Linux, Mac OS X and Win- dows. xProcess 2.5 now offers what Chris Page, Ivis’ director of technology services, noted as “full” financial reporting that adds consumables to dollar- and hour-based project accounting calculations, for a more accu- rate reckoning of the project life cycle. Ivis added a workflow engine to xProcess, as well as process modeling for a visual representation of constraints and dependencies. The new version also adds a fully functional Web version of the so-called Participant client, eliminating the additional software footprint on the desktop of what Page esti- mated was 80 percent or 90 percent of the xProcess user base. Ivis has also dipped its toe in the SaaS (software-as-a- service) pond, by offering xProcess On-Demand, for US$59 a month. T

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toll free 866-568-0129 www.sdtimes.com Software Development Times October 15, 2006 NEWS 2121

and quality assurance products, Borland’s Core Dump, LQM Announcement which Borland acquired in Feb- ruary; the company’s Caliber- < continued from page 1 Requirements Definition and being integrated to extend the son. “But very often the target RM requirements management SDP comes less than a year after Management, and Change Man- application life-cycle manage- consumer that we’re going after software; and the test automa- the company announced it agement. The distinction be- ment inside of an organization. in each of those domains is ini- tion tool Borland purchased in would divest itself of its IDE tween those products is necessar- “There is clearly overlap tially different.” March when it acquired Gaunt- business lines and focus on Core ily blurry, said Johnson, because between defining and managing The company announced its let Systems. Also included in SDP. As SD Times went to press, they’re targeted at different cus- requirements and life-cycle LQM solution in early October. LQM is the StarTeam SCM sources indicated the sale of the tomers and each is capable of quality management,” said John- This suite includes Segue’s test repository. T IDE business was imminent, and could well have been announced by the cover date. The four pieces of the company’s new ALM software, said Johnson, are LQM, IT Management and Governance, BORLAND’S LQM SUITE INCLUDES:

SilkCentral: Test management CaliberRM: Requirements management Caliber DefineIT: Requirements definition SilkPerformer: Load and performance testing SilkTest: Automated functional testing Gauntlet: Automation and management of nightly tests Garcia First In Cybersecurity < continued from page 1 secretary for cybersecurity job. The position was created in July 2005 but remained vacant until Garcia’s appointment. “Cyber- security is [apparently] not an issue for DHS,” Kurtz said in a phone interview with SD Times in late July. Of Garcia’s appointment, Kurtz said: “We look forward to working with him on defining priorities and programs to improve our readiness for a massive disruption involving the information infrastructure.” In addition to ensuring the security of information infrastructure, Garcia will oversee the Software Assurance Program, which publishes guidelines, sponsors events and works with the private sector to promote the development of secure software. A spokesman for ITAA said Garcia was not available for comment. ITAA president and CEO Phil Bond applauded Garcia’s appointment to the DHS post. “Greg has been a leading voice for improving the safety and security of America’s information infrastructure. We wish Greg every success,” he said in a statement. T 22 EMBEDDED & WIRELESS NEWS Software Development Times October 15, 2006 www.sdtimes.com A CountDown To Telelogic Rolls Out Universal, Global Rhapsody 7.0 Device Testing Code generation, TestQuest claims platform tests any reuse enhanced BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN mobile device anywhere in the world Enhanced reverse-engineering capabilities and an emphasis on BY EDWARD J. CORREIA forth or shipping the device Source: TestQuest component reuse highlight the While it’s not new to equip a into India, you can set up the Sept. 25 release of Rhapsody specific device for testing over connection over the Internet CountDown uses on-device agents to launch tests and report results. 7.0, the modeling tool for the Internet, TestQuest claims and see what’s happening from embedded systems and software that its new CountDown plat- your office.” General availabili- prietary operating systems and Test scripts are created with acquired by Telelogic in March form can launch applications ty is set for Nov. 30; pricing applications can take anywhere the stand-alone drag-and-drop when it bought iLogix. and run real tests on any device starts at around US$38,000 for from hours to weeks, said John environment written in .NET. Telelogic wanted to make it running any operating system a five-developer deployment. Yuzdepski, the company’s chief The entire platform is extensi- easier for developers going from anywhere in the world. The solution is built around marketing officer. “The ability ble to enable customization and code to the model, according to That claim, said company device-specific agents that run to have remote connectivity to integration with an organiza- George LeBlanc, senior direc- CEO Martin Hahn, applies on and control the target device, a device in Korea to run on a tion’s existing test equipment tor of marketing for Rhapsody. even to proprietary operating launch applications and test Verizon network is a complexi- and processes. A so-called code respect ini- systems and applications. “Let’s scripts and communicate results. ty unique to the mobile indus- Out of the box, the solution is tiative maintains file structures, say you’re testing a Motorola CountDown includes agents try.” Development time for most valuable to development the ordering of elements in a file phone,” Hahn said. “That for devices from LG Electron- custom agents, he said, teams of device makers and car- and naming when code is gener- phone doesn’t have to be physi- ics, Motorola, Nokia and Sam- depends largely on a develop- riers, which can use the reposi- ated from a model, giving that cally connected to the test sung running Linux (and other er’s familiarity with the plat- tory to share and reuse test cas- code the same look as the origi- machine; the developer could open-source operating systems), form, “the testing protocols es, logic and other assets. The nal source code. Also, a new inte- be thousands of miles away.” Symbian OS (S60 and UIQ) and required, and whether you added value to the enterprise, gration with the Eclipse CDT The developer sees a local rep- Windows Mobile. An API allows have access to the kernel Yuzdepski said, is its ability to environment lets developers use resentation of that device on a connection to the Palm OS, but development team.” provide a testing solution for the Eclipse-based IDE of their workstation. “When you press a TestQuest is waiting until the Agents deliver test results homegrown devices such as choice, from where code will be button, you are really pressing Access Linux strategy matures. simultaneously to a Web-based those used by FedEx and UPS, synced with Rhapsody models. the button on the physical Supported networks include test management client and a both of which are customers. Rhapsody 7 also enables mul- phone thousands of miles Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile and SQL Server-based repository, “They still have a require- tilanguage design. “You can use away,” he said. Verizon. Organizations needing which also stores test scripts, test ment for functional testing,” C for firmware, C++ for the gen- The results on the phone’s to support other devices or oper- requirements, information about Yuzdepski said. “Their devices eral application, and Java for the screen are instantly displayed ating systems would build their the devices and dashboards. The are not cell phones—they are GUI piece, and all will be sup- on the developer’s screen in own agents with a stand-alone management client handles test specialized devices from Sym- ported in the model at the same software, he said. “Rather than development kit. assets, delivers them to devices bol and others—but they have time,” said Rick Boldt, senior having to fly people back and Developing agents for pro- and schedules tests. all the issues.” T director of Rhapsody marketing. Rhapsody also now has the ability to do what Boldt described as a base-aware diff Jaluna Rebrands, Refocuses as VirtualLogix merge: When code branches or patches, the base model and the VLX RTOS virtualization aimed at network gear, phones and set-top boxes source trunk need to be brought BY P.J. CONNOLLY fundamental benefits of consoli- ture processors, such as the isolate open-source code from together at the end of the day, Virtualization is something dation…and take that into the Core Duo E6400 and T7400, proprietary software. facilitating parallel development. that’s easy to associate with embedded market.” Having helping the migration from Milligan noted that the In the past, he said, Rhapsody mainframes, servers and even found the most traction for the single-core proprietary designs mobile space offered some could do only two-way merges. desktop machines. But real- company’s products in three to multicore devices. It will be “really interesting opportuni- Boldt also noted Rhapsody now time virtualization pioneer Vir- areas, the company decided to available later this year. ties” for VirtualLogix and its can do automatic merges, under- tualLogix decided that the take its technology, “turn it into VLX for Mobile Handsets technology. The demand to add standing when there is no con- recent Intel Developer Forum vertical market solutions, and 3.0, formerly OSWare for functionality and services cre- flict between branches and the in San Francisco was a good expand the road map.” ARM, attempts to provide ated the smart phone, he said, base. Parameters for accepting opportunity to rebrand the The company, acquired as more flexibility for device which turns out to be bulky and automatic merges can be estab- company, unveil a new product, Chorus Systems by Sun makers and consumers by power-hungry. Using virtualiza- lished by the developers. and announce a new focus on Microsystems in 1997 and spun allowing devices to run a sta- tion “allows us to create a smart A new Java API and com- vertical markets. off in 2002 as Jaluna, now pro- ble and secure real-time oper- phone with what’s known as a mand-line interface calls enable Mark Milligan, VirtualLogix’s vides three virtualization plat- ating system in a partition feature phone architecture.” developers to build up a scripting vice president of marketing and forms aimed at specific vertical alongside of a Linux instance. VLX for Mobile Handsets 3.0 is environment to select assets and business development, observed specialties. All are built on what An independent executive available now. generate code, and pull related that the company’s background was Jaluna’s OSWare, now allows operating-system moni- The third member of Vir- assets based on the variations and gave it the confidence to known as VLX. toring, remote management tualLogix’s team, VLX for Digital dependencies they have defined, attempt RTOS virtualization A new product, VLX for and secure execution; Virtual- Multimedia, is designed for he explained. A rules-based code when many engineers dismissed Network Infrastructure, allows Logix considers this the best low-cost telecom and video generator lets developers modify the very idea: “What we’ve been multiple software platforms to way to maintain device up- equipment using Texas Instru- asset rules and tailor those assets able to do is take some of those be run on Intel Core Architec- time, guarantee service and ments’ digital signal processors. T for different target platforms. T Copyright 1996-2006 Infragistics, Inc. All rights reserved. Infragistics and the Infragistics logo are registered trademarks of Infragistics, Inc. NetAdvantage is a registered trademark of Infragistics, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the respective property of their owners. jsf for JSF ® WINDOWS FORMS ASP.NET WPF JSF WINDOWS FORMS ASP.NET +44 (0) 800 298 9055 - ss Intuitive features for end users; simple tag interface for developers Intuitive features ee ll – aa SS 800 231 8588 Built to support large, data-driven applications Built to support large, ee - Fully customizable look & feel pp – ss oo ee rr ll – uu aa EE SS ss ss cc cc

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Before the Europa release is fit for consumption, several tasty dishes will be golden brown and ready to serve BY EDWARD J. CORREIA

t’s official: The next Eclipse simultaneous release will The project’s team, led by IBM’s Per Kroll, sible,” said Oberhuber. be called Europa, continuing the Jovian moon pattern at press time was finishing work on its two Version 1.0 also will include an establishedI with Callisto. But with Europa’s launch date main components: EPF Composer early version of Service still more than half a year away, several important pro- and OpenUP. The tooling compo- Discovery, which jects are expected to arrive hot from the oven before nent, EPF Composer, lets scans a network for Europa hits the table in mid-2007. developers pick and choose devices and services the process components offered. “We are al- from which to deploy ready providing it with Project: Mylar Project Lead: Mik Kersten and generate project the download, but it’s Host Platforms: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows maps. The tool can labeled as experimental,” Requirements: Eclipse 3.2, JDK 1.5 and import and export XML Oberhuber said, adding that Bugzilla, JIRA or Trac to facilitate exchange of the feature is expected to be con- Implementation: information with other environ- sidered stable by version 1.1. Expected 1.0: Early December Plug-in ments. An API also permits extension to Also left for version 1.1 will be the ability to mong the most far-reaching and broadly appealing the environment. “You’re not forced to use the tool we store user actions for later execution. “If you found your- of those soon-to-be-released Eclipse projects is built; you can use it as an extensible framework to cap- self doing the same things on a remote system like run- Mylar,A a plug-in that can increase developer productiv- ture a process from scratch or import one.” ning a compiler, you can set a user action for that and also ity by managing and filtering tasks based on context. EPF will include OpenUP, the Open Unified share it with others.” A future edition might also include “Developers waste a tremendous amount of time Process, which Kroll described as “a very light process import and export capability, which would extend the scrolling, navigating and parsing information instead of that covers a complete life cycle of a project from start copy/paste method in use now for uploading and down- getting work done,” said project lead Mik Kersten, a to end.” It also gives developers the ability to “capture loading files. “Import will allow you to synchronize the Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia. The requirements, develop and manage code and manage local file system with a remote file system. But these familiar Eclipse Package Explorer can contain tens of all other aspects of a project.” Also extensible, OpenUP plans are not signed off by everybody—it’s still a propos- thousands of elements for even a small enterprise appli- is now at version 0.9. al,” he said. cation, which he said results in information overload. Future editions will include Extreme Processing Although the Target Management project includes Mylar introduces context management and task man- and Scrum. “All kinds of processes can be produced a framework, Oberhuber said the tools would be useful agement facilities to Eclipse, permitting tasks to be using EPF,” he said. “We’re working on an XP process; to many people without modification. “They can use stored in a repository as objects. “When working with a you should see that in the next couple of months.” the tools out of the box on any Unix or Linux comput- fully integrated connector, you can rely purely on Mylar Still, Kroll believes that OpenUP, which is intended for er,” he said. “But in the embedded space, you typically for working with that repository. Everything you can do any organization developing software, can be useful as is. have proprietary protocols, so they would use the in Bugzilla, you can now do in Eclipse,” he said, for exam- “Most will use it as a tool. But it has an API for the frame- framework to [modify accordingly].” ple. Mylar also will support Trac and JIRA issue trackers. work, and after a few projects some will modify it” to suit Target Management 1.0 is set for release on Oct. 20. “Rudimentary support for Google Code, SourceForge their own processes. He added, though, that the unmodi- and gforce” repositories also will be delivered with 1.0, he fied environment is not particularly well suited for large- Project: DSDP, embedded RCP said, including the ability to plan, save, query and edit scale development or for companies adhering to compli- Project Leads: Chris Aniszczyk, Mark Rogalski tasks through the Eclipse embedded browser. ance issues. “We don’t provide specific guidance for that, Host Platform: Windows Adding a form of filtering to the Package Explorer, so a company would have to extend it themselves.” Targets: Windows Mobile 2003, 2005; context management monitors a developer’s interactions Eclipse Process Framework 1.0 was set for release Nokia S80 within Eclipse and automatically identifies information on Sept. 30. Requirements: Eclipse 3.2, RCP Implementation: relevant to the task at hand, according to its documenta- Released 1.0: Sept. 22 Plug-in tion. Using that data—which can include a developer’s access to methods, APIs, documents and other arti- Project: DSDP, Target Management or device-minded UI developers looking for an facts—the tool focuses Eclipse views and editors to show Project Leads: Martin Oberhuber, David Dykstal alternative to MIDP 2.0, the DSDP’s embedded only relevant information. “The more you use Mylar, the Host Platforms: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows RCPF might be worth a look. more productive you become,” Kersten said. Requirements: Eclipse 3.2, CDT On Sept. 22 the team, led by IBM’s Chris Mylar also contains a rich editor capable of drag- Expected 1.0: Oct. 20 Implementation: Aniszczyk and Mark Rogalski, released a runtime Plug-in and-drop attachments and offline editing. Integrated framework for installing and managing Java plug-ins change notifications allow developers to use Mylar’s he Device Software Development Platform project, on devices, allowing them to share services and a task list as an inbox instead of an e-mail client. introduced early last year by embedded giant Wind common JVM. “This is a big improvement over Mylar 1.0 is set to debut in early December. RiverT Systems, has gained tremendous interest and MIDP 2.0,” claimed Rogalski, “in which only applica- momentum. Three of its six subprojects—Target Man- tions in the same ‘suite’ can share common services.” agement (TM), embedded RCP (eRCP) and Mobile With eRCP, Rogalski said the Eclipse and OSGi Project: Eclipse Process Framework Tools for Java (MTJ)—will release 1.0 versions this year. underpinnings provide the features of a plug-in archi- Project Lead: Per Kroll Device Debugging and Native App Builder are on the tecture and a widget-based API. “Developers can now Host Platforms: Linux and Windows Requirements: Eclipse 3.2 Europa timetable; Tools for Mobile Linux was still in the use their existing experience and knowledge of writing Implementation: 1.0 Release Date: Sept. 30 proposal stage at press time. Eclipse plug-ins to write embedded [and] mobile Full The TM project, which is led by Wind River’s Martin applications. “This is the next step up from MIDP 2.0, he Eclipse Process Framework project’s aim is to Oberhuber and IBM’s David Dykstal, gives Eclipse an which he said has had limited widget capabilities. The provide developers with a starting point for the cre- interface for controlling remote devices and accessing its eRCP tools include a stable set of “rich widgets” for ationT of development best practices. Intended for all processes with remote shell. Developers can search for devices running Nokia’s Series 80, Windows and Win- aspects of the job, the tool includes guidance for and edit files, and launch applications and test scripts. “It dows Mobile 2003 and 2005. requirements authoring, maintenance and publication uses whatever services are registered with the frame- Support for Nokia’s S60 and Trolltech’s QT Embed- of methods and processes, and for library management. work [and is] optimized for as little data transfer as pos- ded interfaces is planned for July 2007. T 26 OPINION Software Development Times October 15, 2006 www.sdtimes.com FROM THE EDITORS A Trip to the Moon

Borland Moves Off Core n this 21st anniversary of its incep- scales and, most important, a danger ou had to figure Borland would do away with Core SDP, its software Otion, it would have been nice to that application quality will actually Ydevelopment optimization/application life-cycle management solution. wish “Happy Birthday” to the software reduce! That was developed under and touted by Dale Fuller, the former CEO test automation industry. But why A loss of motivation and confidence who was banished last year after the company underperformed in the should we offer felicitations to this mis- is easily understood if the application is guided runaway monster that should constantly bouncing between the UAT financial department. have derailed a long time go. group and development because too The fact that it was associated with a difficult time in Borland’s histo- No one can take issue with the laud- many bugs exist that should have been ry (not that things are going so well now) probably wasn’t reason enough able objective of improving software identified and corrected during unit to end Core SDP. The new management team has acknowledged the quality, and it is the difficulties Colin Armitage and system testing. Test rep- strategy did not match up with the roles people play in an organization in achieving it that created the etitions, whether manual or to develop software. Core Analyst, Core Architect, Core Developer and opportunity for technology- automated, take time, so the Core Tester apparently didn’t meet the needs of development shops—or based solutions. However, if effect on timescales is we remind ourselves of what inevitable. It is also a fact didn’t articulate buzzwords as clearly as the new package, which offers IT we were trying to achieve, the that UAT happens at the governance, life-cycle quality management, requirements definition and catastrophic flaws in the solu- end of the development life management, and software change management. tions being offered become all cycle when previous phases Of course, Borland is not the only company to put a shiny new wrap- too clear. will have probably overrun per on dog-eared products. IBM did the same thing when it took its Many different approaches and an implementation date Rational tools, combined them with the WebSphere app server, and were taken to testing in 1985, been set. However, my per- launched the brand-new Rational Software Development Platform. That the year that Auto Tester was sonal favorite is the way in was delivered as a preemptive move against Microsoft’s announced Team founded, which I see as the first real which excess repetitions can lead to a attempt at test automation. However, reduction in application quality. It is all System, which would in fact have new (for Microsoft) functionality. it’s long been accepted that it was a down to boredom. Borland’s new packages include a lot of the old—the Caliber tools for good idea to let someone other than the Consider the keen sense of anticipa- requirements, StarTeam for change and configuration management, developers try a new application before tion, even excitement, in SMEs that Together for modeling—and some of the new, including the Segue test- it went live. Typically this was achieved accompanies the chance to see and test ing tools bought in February, the IT governance offering it acquired by taking knowledgeable users—what a new application. This application can from Legadero in late 2005, and process improvement and skills training are now described as Subject Matter potentially solve a number of issues in services acquired with consulting firm Terraquest. Experts (SMEs)—out of the line of the line of business, perhaps increasing And what of the developer tools? Our sources tell us that by the time you business while they performed an the company’s competitiveness and acceptance test. financial success. This initial enthusiasm read this, the spinoff should be a done deal. But we’re told JBuilder, the Let us remember that this was takes a bit of a knock as the tester expe- Java IDE, remains an important part of Borland’s solution moving forward. before Y2K, an event that fundamen- riences a crash on the log-in dialog, and Will Borland be able to retain the control it seeks to advance the product in tally altered users’ expectations of the it is distinctly on the wane as each test a way that is strategic to the advancement of its overall offerings? quality of applications that should be cycle follows another. Borland is entering a crowded market, so it can’t hurt to get ALM into initially delivered by the development Testers are only human, and as the its product names. Analysts with whom we’ve spoken believe Borland teams. Prior to Y2K, the proposition to implementation date approaches, the will get a small piece of the ALM market, getting customers to commit the users was that if you give us your excess repetitions have taken a poten- time to undertake a User Acceptance tially fatal toll. Driven by time pressures to its tools on a project level, but not across the enterprise. Test (UAT) then you will receive a and an ever-increasing level of disen- The confused messaging, another reshuffling of products and aban- new, or much enhanced, application. chantment, they inevitably start to test donment of its IDEs makes it seem unlikely that Borland the ALM com- Y2K changed all this, as typically the only the fixes development has provid- pany will ever inspire the kind of loyal following it had when it was new version offered not one iota of ed. So the depth and effectiveness of known simply as a maker of great tools for developers. new functionality—just a promise that testing actually deteriorates in this final it would continue to work once every- stage, and that is when the dreaded col- one had recovered from the Millenni- lateral damage occurs. This need for Understanding the Past um celebrations. The reaction of many testing to be equally effective and com- user teams was to insist that the IS plete on every repetition is another key e haven’t thought about the challenges of representing Sumerian function took much greater, or even driver for test automation. Won a computer since the last time we read Neal Stephenson’s 1993 total, responsibility, as the business So if the justifications for test thriller “Snow Crash,” but we applaud the Unicode Consortium’s com- functionality remained the same and automation are eminently sensible, mitment to adding ancient scripts to its database. It has occurred to us, the testing did not require their why have so many companies given up, though, that as the technology advances and the surviving cuneiform expertise. not bothered or are incurring such sig- tablets are translated, museums run the risk of finding that their precious This enhanced level of expectation nificant costs in its support? This is a for the quality of application entering riddle that is easily solved simply by collections consist of little more than TPS reports. UAT was accompanied by a Y2K-driven examining what the users actually After all, we’re certain there was a scribe in ancient Babylon who told realization in development teams that wanted in the key areas of usability, his co-workers: “Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles effective testing was tough to achieve, capability and survivability—if you staring at wet clay all day, poking it with sticks and listening to eight dif- repetitive and, if undertaken manually, want to go to the moon, it’s a good idea ferent bosses drone on about mission statements.” extremely laborious. And it is the issue to build a rocket! Joking aside, academic and cultural research will undoubtedly benefit of repetition that is at the heart of the ROCKET SCIENCE from the ability to analyze ancient texts more fully. At a distance of 4,500 drive for test automation. years, it’s a miracle that any records of that time have survived, but Sumer- It is in the interests of everyone The multistage Saturn V rockets that involved in the application life cycle to supported the lunar missions seem the ian tablets have the benefit of being a stable format, contrasted with our see the number of test repetitions kept most appropriate analogy, so let’s start so-called “permanent” records. We suspect that in 6506, archaeologists will to an effective minimum as excess rep- with the first stage, the big one at the know more about us from our non-biodegradable food wrappers and our etitions lead to a loss of motivation, a bottom. For us, the first challenge is toxic waste dumps than from our literature or laws. And those clay tablets loss of confidence in the new applica- usability, because unless the solution will probably still be around, someplace, to be discovered again. T tion, missed implementation time can be utilized by its intended SME www.sdtimes.com Software Development Times October 15, 2006 OPINION 27 audience, it will never leave the launch pad. Even at this most basic level, the flaws in the available technology become apparent. Instead of empow- THE VENTURE CAPITALISTS just backward in time. In a couple of years, ering the SMEs, the programming con- can’t keep that dough in their pockets can attendees look forward to used-to- structs underpinning automated solu- right now. With analysts placing the val- be-big names such as ? and the Myste- Software Development Times tions have taken automation away from ue of Youtube.com at around a billion rians or perhaps The Monkees? Issue No. 160 its target audience and instead created dollars and Yahoo considering a buyout –P.J. Connolly October 15, 2006 a new industry and a lucrative career of Facebook.com for a similar sum, it’s path for people with the appropriate clear that the bubble is back. This time, SD TIMES HAS come a long way since Editorial technical skills. the bubble is riding atop the soapy suds its humble beginnings in February Editor-in-Chief As our second stage, we have the of AJAX. Here in the Silicon Valley, 2000, going from the 28th in our sector David Rubinstein thorny issue of capability. Who said test investment capital is finding its way (dead last), to No. 2 today. And I’m +1-631-421-4158 x105 automation starts with the visual layer? into the hands of new companies that proud to say that I’ve been there from [email protected] Just because I press the submit button seek to follow the new open-source the beginning, alternately donning hats Executive Editor Columnists in my Web application, and I receive model: Give the product away for free; for writing and editing. So it is bitter- Edward J. Correia Andrew Binstock a message stating that my order has sell the support and service contracts. sweet that I say so long, but not good- +1-631-421-4158 x100 Larry O’Brien [email protected] been accepted, is that sufficient confir- But many of these companies are find- bye. After this issue, I begin my new Contributing Writers mation that all is OK? What about ing that writing good software and role as editor of Software Test & Per- Managing Editor Geoff Koch checking the database? What about offering good technical support are two formance magazine, another BZ Media Patricia Sarica Susan Messenheimer checking it every time rather than completely different business goals. publication. I will miss writing for [email protected] Lisa L. Morgan through some partial and infrequent Right now, not many start-ups are able SD Times, but will still have the plea- Senior Editors Carol Weiszmann P.J. Connolly SQL? This merely lifts the lid on a vast to offer the level of service that is sure of sharing the company of its out- Editorial Director area of capabilities that are critical to required to keep their clients satisfied. standing staff. [email protected] Alan Zeichick effective testing, including items such For their part, at least for now, the VCs –Edward J. Correia Jennifer deJong +1-650-359-4763 [email protected] as test data creation, protection and don’t seem to notice—or care. But as [email protected] obfuscation. the open-source market expands, it is THE PASSWORD is…disruption. It’s a Alex Handy You can throw money at the first- service and support failings that will term I’ve heard spoken with pride by [email protected] stage problem, and you can accept the pop many of these bubbles. software sellers. Most recently it came limitations of your second-stage testing, –Alex Handy from VA Software’s Darryll Dewan, Art & Production but it is the third stage that has proved who runs the SourceForge Enterprise Art Director Art/Production decisive and has consigned so much soft- LEARNING THAT BERLIN, Elton business. The company has made avail- Mara Leonardi Assistant ware to the shelf. Change is a fact of John and Joan Jett were going to be on able its SourceForge Enterprise Edi- Erin Broadhurst business and IS life, and unless a test the entertainment list for next week’s tion free for up to 15 users, hoping that automation solution can adapt to new Oracle OpenWorld proves that coming when those people try it, they will come Sales & Marketing versions of software, the benefits disap- up with after-show entertainment can’t back for more licenses, which wouldn’t Publisher Advertising Traffic pear. Creating automated tests will be easy. Finding something new and be free. “Look what Eclipse did to Ted Bahr Phyllis Oakes always take more time than a single different becomes JBuilder. Look what JBoss did to the +1-631-421-4158 x101 +1-631-421-4158 x115 manual test cycle—the benefits of a challenge, and other Java app servers. Is it disruptive? [email protected] [email protected] Southwest U.S./Asia automation are only realized through it’s all too easy to You bet, and we’re right in the middle Marketing Manager Robin Nakamura reuse. Take this away, and the corporate hire a “hot” band of it.” The market is coming around to Marilyn Daly +1-408-445-8154 asset you were hoping to create becomes such as AC/DShe, SourceForge, Dewan said, explaining +1-631-421-4158 x118 [email protected] an expensive liability. which seems to that people want a common platform, [email protected] Northwest U.S./ So go on, take a look out of the win- have made a small integrated with tools, with no heavy- Canada List Services dow. If you are aiming for the moon, career out of playing San Francisco handed process, and a collaborative Paula F. Miller Nyla Moshlak what are you driving? T trade shows. But with last year’s bands development environment. It sounds to +1-925-831-3803 +1-631-421-4158 x124 including Counting Crows and me like the market is coming around, [email protected] [email protected] Colin Armitage is CEO of test software a Sting/Police cover group, it occurs all right…to Eclipse. Southeast U.S./ Reprints company Original Software. that OpenWorld’s organizers are going –David Rubinstein Europe Lisa Abelson Jonathan Sawyer +1-516-379-7097 +1-603-924-4489 [email protected] [email protected] Northeast/ Accounting Central U.S./Canada Viena Isaray David Lyman +1-631-421-4158 x110 +1-978-465-2351 [email protected] [email protected]

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Not especially committed, according to a recent survey conduct- Director of Circulation Customer Service/ ed by the BPM Forum, the not-for-profit consortium focused on Agnes Vanek Subscriptions business process management. +1-631-421-4158 x111 +1-847-763-9692 Published in September, the “Compliance-Enabled Enter- [email protected] [email protected] prise” study found that less than half of respondents consider compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley to be a critical initiative with full management support. The study included responses from nearly 400 CEOs and other top executives. President Ted Bahr

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the promotions use case. To cut to the chase: The version of the Test-First Tactic Trounces Thread Threat open-source presentation framework they used had a race condition. The association ot long ago, I was contacted by a My first step was to write some unit just two concurrent users would cause of an HTTP request with a logical session Ncompany whose very successful tests to automate the retrieval of the the system to fail. If the app server was was not thread-safe: With concurrent domain-specific engine is used by hun- Web pages of the promotions use case. restarted, though, the ability to handle a calls, one thread might receive a null ses- dreds of businesses to make tens of mil- Once I had that in hand, I would move moderate number of users would reset. sion and another might be assigned two lions of dollars’ worth of transactions per on to unit tests to really hammer the Time to revisit my assumptions. (the second clobbering the first). This year. Its Web tier used an open-source business logic and database tiers, where I Confused, I set the logging level to would cause an exception to be raised on presentation framework, and its code was sure the problem lay. My first unit DEBUG and fired up my test suite again. the null-session thread, but the clobbered had a liberal sprinkling of debug traces test retrieved the first page, checked the A strange thing happened: Although the session would cause a long-lasting thread that outputted via another open-source HTTP response code, and Windows & .NET Watch response time degraded signif- corruption in the application server. Every logging solution. The company’s Web, confirmed the number of lines icantly (there were a lot of time the race condition occurred, it took business and data tiers were coordinated in the returned Web page. DEBUG traces), the system out a thread from the application server, by a commercial application server, and I decided to get the writing didn’t “fall off a cliff.” The increasing the system’s vulnerability to in the normal course of business did of the stress test out of the way. DEBUG statements affected further failures. As the race condition marvelously for all involved. But there I wrapped calls to my first unit the failure mode of the system. clobbered more threads, though, the rela- was a problem. test in timing code, generated I learned later this was one of tive amount of time each remaining “When our clients do an e-mail pro- some threads, and sure the reasons the company had thread spent inside the critical section motion, the system slows down tremen- enough, with MAX_USERS asked me to take a look—turn- decreased! Eventually the system would dously. For some people, it might take a set to 2, things went fine. “Let ing on DEBUG tracing had degrade to one or two threads, providing minute for a page to load; others might me just hammer this first page been the first step of their the illusion that the system was “limping never see a page. What’s going on?” The in order to get a sense of the internal trouble-shooters and along.” And making me ass-u-me that the promotions use case involved a slightly scaling curve,” I thought. I didn’t expect it they had thereby lost their quarry before problem had to do with the database. different page-navigation scheme than to break, since the first page just set up they ever entered the woods. Luckily, my bad assumption was normal, but the real problem was scal- the session and presented static compo- The DEBUG traces gave me the trumped by my test-first approach. The ing: At 9:00 am on Monday mornings, nents. So I wrote another test that called information I needed, and I was able to solution was simple enough: Upgrade the the system would experience a higher my timing test, doubling MAX_USERS isolate the problem fairly quickly. Not as presentation framework and, in the number of concurrent users than the every time. Four users went a little slow- quickly as I might have, though: The meantime, wrap the vulnerable section in general use cases, when visitors arrived er, eight a little slower still, 16 fell off a lit- problem occurred at a point in process- three lines of thread-locking code. I randomly. Because the system didn’t tle more, and then…the system fell off a ing before any promotions-specific code would have made a lot more money completely fail, but limped along, I cliff. A few tests finished, but others timed was activated. It occurred, in fact, in rewriting their object-relational interface, strongly suspected a problem involving out and threw exceptions. It was ugly. boilerplate code involved with associat- but per line of code? I did just fine. T the interactions between the business I reran the tests, and this time the ing the HTTP request with a logical and database tiers: too many round trips, system showed the disastrous behavior “Session” object. I had discovered (and Larry O’Brien is a technology consul- clumsy query construction, connections in earlier runs, with only perhaps four or quickly confirmed via a new unit test) tant, analyst and writer. Read his blog at not being freed, and so forth. eight concurrent users. Sometimes even that the vulnerability was not unique to www.knowing.net.

just as easily as you can stuff an integer. This mechanism is used for closures and The Language of Lua for inheritance. Single and multiple inheritance are available by setting up he past several months have seen a lot true portability. It was not until Sun Lua, however, remains a lesser-known the tables so that any missing functions Tof ink spilled on the rise of dynamic worked out the last JVM kinks and alternative that has some very nifty fea- are looked up in parent tables. Elegant, languages. The reason for this resurgent Microsoft’s attempt to extend the plat- tures not commonly found elsewhere. no? Lua leverages hashes in procedural interest in scripting, I believe, is the con- form was finally smashed down that we The first is performance. In most inde- contexts as well. For example, functions fluence of two factors: the speed of today’s all knew Java had turned the corner and pendent benchmarks, it beats and some- can return hashes, enabling them to hardware and the recovery from what one would succeed in its ambitious mission. times routs all other dynamic languages. return multiple values from a single call. pundit labeled the “Java nuclear winter.” That period—the mid-1990s—was a It is also lightweight. The entire distribu- Of course, Lua has the usual dynam- The latter refers to a phenomenon that fertile time for the creation of Integration Watch tion—compiler, runtime and ic features such as duck typing, garbage has been consistently overlooked in the dynamic languages. PHP (re- libraries—fits in 1MB. Both collection (with the capability of tagging suddenly chic castigations of Java. leased in 1995), Ruby (1995), aspects are intentional, as the elements for collection) and wide porta- At the time Java was launched, it rep- Lua (1993) and Python slightly primary application for Lua is bility, as well as an open-source imple- resented a very substantial step forward earlier are all part of the same as an embedded dynamic mentation. In addition, Lua benefits from the state of the art, C++. Java’s generation as Java. And in toto language in C/C++ applica- from a very active community that has promise of universal portability and its they were a statement about tions. Today, C and C++ are created numerous libraries and develop- built-in garbage collection, immutable the need for a high-level alter- used where performance is ment tools. Like Ruby before Rails, Lua strings and lack of a preprocessor or con- native to C/C++ that would be essential, and so an embedded is a gem waiting to be discovered—the ditional compilation were all very differ- less narrow than the “little lan- language has to have similar difference is that it’s much faster than ent ways of looking at the world that res- guages” used in Unix (such as benefits. As a result, Lua is Ruby, has a tiny runtime footprint and is onated deeply with developers. While awk, sed and shell scripts) and very commonly embedded in easier to embed. For ISVs, in particular, these innovations came from other lan- not proprietary like the many 4GLs float- games (World of Warcraft in particular) it represents an important option. guages, Java was the first mainstream lan- ing around at the time. and occasionally in ISV offerings (such as I promise soon to move on from this guage to bring them all together. Now that Java has assumed the legacy Adobe LightRoom). topic of dynamic languages. I have one I hasten to add that this was true role played by C++ in those days, devel- However, it functions just fine as a more to cover this year: Groovy, the innovation and Java was embraced by opers are looking anew at the alternatives. stand-alone language. Among its unique about-to-be-released Java scripting lan- many developers the same way that And with the great advances in hardware capabilities is that its fundamental guage, which like Lua has numerous inno- Ruby is today—as a brilliant alternative diminishing the performance costs, some object is a table (or what many people vative features plus complete Java com- to the bloated de facto language of the of those old languages have a new viabili- call hashes or maps). It uses a hash to patibility. Then, back to the larger travails day. As some veteran readers will surely ty. Among the few that have not already implement object orientation—a capa- we all face. T recall, there was considerable doubt as been widely adopted, Ruby and Lua stand bility made possible by implementing to whether Java would actually succeed out. Ruby, as we have discussed earlier, is functions as first-class objects. That is, Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst in its core mission: less buggy code and in the process of crossing the chasm. you can stuff a function into a hash slot at Pacific Data Works. 30 INDUSTRY Software Development Times October 15, 2006 www.sdtimes.com

ment team. Phase 3 is around the offshoring of very technical skill sets. Mercury and Points Offshore “People with skills that good will work for a cool software company, like STAR West Oct. 16–20 ooking for an independent voice on evaluate products from other compa- Adobe or Microsoft,” she said. “The Anaheim L SOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEERING the HP-Mercury deal, I finally nies, since only a very small portion of enterprise can’t afford to keep those www.sqe.com/starwest caught up with industry analyst Theresa HP’s revenue comes from software. If skills up to date.” Citibank, she said as SoftSummit Oct. 17–18 Lanowitz, who has left Gartner and you’re a test tools customer, Lanowitz an example, doesn’t need to pay some- Santa Clara started up her own firm, Voke (like in said, you’d have to be leery of a com- one $100,000 to write LoadRunner MACROVISION pro-voke). She shares our concerns pany “that gets 51 percent of its rev- scripts. “They need good managers, www.softsummit.com about the future of Mercury in a compa- enue from toner.” who can make the go or no-go decision Development Products Oct. 19–20 ny that has not had success selling soft- Shifting gears, Lanowitz said her on [deploying] applications.” Conference ware in the past. company will be focusing on the appli- Software companies also will have San Jose HP customers might think Industry Watch cation life cycle, with a mis- pressure put on them from enterprises EVANS DATA of the acquisition as giving sion to move the industry to create tools that business analysts can www.evansdata.com/dpc them something more, but beyond the status quo. use in collaboration with development Oracle OpenWorld Oct. 22–26 Mercury customers won’t be “Things are largely the same teams, to ensure that what’s being built San Francisco interested in HP’s network since 1999,” she said. “IT is meets the needs of the business. We’re ORACLE view of the world, or in Open- working on tactical things, already seeing some of that in the www.oracle.com/openworld View, to which everything at and not being strategic. The requirements management space; she OOPSLA Oct. 22–26 HP slants, Lanowitz said. IT model of today is really thinks this will become a big market Portland, Ore. Mercury’s management outmoded, and the applica- opportunity in the coming years. ACM SIGPLAN www.oopsla.org/2006 team, led by Tony Zingale, tion life cycle is one of those Further, the decisions on which was nimble and aggressive, big areas.” tools the company should use will start Trolltech Developer Days Oct. 26–27 San Jose helping the company to a 50 According to Lanowitz, to be made in conjunction with the TROLLTECH percent share of the software testing who worked for a software company outsourcing companies that will be www.trolltech.com/company/newsroom/events market. Its engineers, she said, have before moving to the analysis side, using them. “While the payment is /allevents/devdays2006 great visions for what Mercury’s archi- “Companies will tell an analyst some- coming from a North American com- Colorado Software Oct. 22–27 tecture needs to be for the future. thing they will never tell a vendor. It’s pany, the use is by the offshore guys, Summit Now, it has become part of HP’s staid like a doctor-patient relationship.” She and they’ll help drive the evaluations.” Keystone, Colo. approach, and the target of smaller, noted the disconnect between what the With U.S. business schools over- KOVSKY CONFERENCE PRODUCTIONS more nimble and aggressive companies. software sellers are saying and what the flowing and plenty of good seats still www.softwaresummit.com Empirix, another testing tools provider, development teams are saying. “In the available at computer science schools, Zend/PHP Oct. 30–Nov. 2 is offering a free one-to-one switch from application life-cycle management it will be easier for enterprises to find Conference & Expo Mercury products to its own. Opportu- environment, vendors think every IT this type of manager, and send the cod- San Jose nities also exist for Compuware, IBM organization is humming right along, ing overseas. It might not be as cost- KB CONFERENCES zendcon06.kbconferences.com Rational and others, she said. efficient and effective. But these guys effective as it was when the trend Lanowitz speculated that the are struggling. It’s a hard, hard life.” began, as programmers offshore get ASP.NET Connections Nov. 6–9 US$4.5 billion HP paid for Mercury One area in which she sees a major hip to what they can ask for, but it Las Vegas DEVCONNECTIONS was driven by bidding, mentioning change in how business is done is in might be the only way for these enter- www.devconnections.com such companies as Oracle, SAP and the outsourcing of IT work. She prises to stay competitive in a world in Software Test Nov. 7–9 EMC as potential suitors. “HP isn’t one described outsourcing as being in its which more and more business is mov- & Performance Conference I even would have guessed” to have an third phase, with the first being cost- ing to the Web. T Boston interest in Mercury, Lanowitz said. savings and the second involving figur- BZ MEDIA She believes the traditional Mer- ing out how to make the outsourcing David Rubinstein is editor-in-chief of www.stpcon.com cury customer base will be looking to company an extension of the develop- SD Times. Web 2.0 Conference Nov. 7–9 San Francisco O'REILLY MEDIA www.web2con.com Six Sigma in Software & IT Nov. 7–9 MOBILE 365 GIVES SYBASE GLOBAL, RSA Security shareholders last month voted to San Francisco approve the company’s acquisition by EMC Corp. for WCB YEAR-ROUND UPTIME www.wcbf.com/quality/5068 US$2.1 billion, adding security to EMC’s portfolio. Sybase has announced the acquisition of Mobile 365, in a bid to gain an “Bringing RSA into the fold provides EMC with indus- SuperComputing 2006 Nov. 11–17 instant lead in the realm of content delivery networks. The deal is valued at try-leading identity and access management technolo- Tampa, Fla. IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY between US$400 million and $425 million. Mobile 365, based in Chantilly, Va., gies and best-in-class encryption and key manage- sc06.supercomputing.org generated about $90 million in revenue during its fiscal year ended March 31, ment software to help EMC deliver information 2006. Revenue is mainly from its mobile data, messaging and premium con- lifecycle management securely,” EMC CEO Joe Tucci VSLive Nov. 14–17 Dallas tent operations for operators, content providers, media companies and finan- said in a statement. RSA is expected to remain in its FAWCETTE TECHNICAL PUBLICATIONS cial institutions around the world. “This acquisition extends our Unwired Bedford, Mass., headquarters and to operate as a divi- www.ftponline.com/conferences/vslive/2006/dallas Enterprise vision with the addition of two new enterprise channels—wireless sion of EMC. carriers and content providers—making Sybase the leading mobile software Application Integration Dec. 4–6 and Web Services Summit and services provider in the world,” said Sybase president and CEO John Chen EARNINGS: Oracle posted record earnings and rev- Orlando, Fla. in a statement. Among Mobile 365’s data services are those for interoper- enues in its first fiscal quarter, with GAAP net income GARTNER ability, interactivity and distribution of SMS, MMS, WAP and IM services. The of US$670 million and GAAP revenues of $3.6 billion. www.gartner.com/2_events/conferences/apn17.jsp company claims to process more than 3 billion messages per month over its Those were increases of 29 percent and 40 percent, XML 2006 Dec. 5–7 operator-grade network, which contains connections to mobile operators, respectively. Much of the driver for Oracle’s success Boston including Cingular, China Mobile, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless and was growth in revenues for new packaged applications, IDEALLIANCE Vodafone—nearly 700 connections in all. The transaction is expected to close which reportedly climbed 80 percent. “We exceeded 2006.xmlconference.org by the end of this year, and will create Sybase Mobile 365, a wholly owned our guidance on every metric and delivered strong rev- For a more complete calendar of U.S. software subsidiary. Marty Beard, currently Sybase’s senior vice president of corporate enue growth across all product lines and geographies,” development events, see www.bzmedia.com/calendar. Information is subject to change. Send news about development and marketing, will run the subsidiary as its president. said Oracle president Safra Catz in a statement. T upcoming events to [email protected].

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