Borland ALM survey finds heterogeneity
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Borland, newly focused on application lifecycle management, asked customers about development platforms and tools.
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The results of the latest poll from the International PHP Magazine are in. The question this time asked which, of the options given, were your favorites in the Smyfony project's feature set. There was a clear winner above all of the others - the scaffolding that it makes so simple.   Some of the other options that were included but didn't get nearly as many votes were:  Simple templating and helpers Multilingualism and I18N support Object model and MVC separation Ajax support  Following at a distant second was the "Object model and MVC separation" choice (and to others, "Enterprise ready" and "Ajax support" nipping close at its heels).   Be sure to cast your vote in this week's poll that asks your opinion on some of the rules that the PHP Throwdown has set in place. Vote for the one that you think fits best with the spirit of the competition.
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Delivering the capabilities of traditional EAI products within a light-footprint, standards-based infrastructure supporting incremental integration
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Second place has been revealed in Nick Halstead's programming competition - and the 2nd place mark goes to Evan Chiu.   So second place, more drum rolls.. goes to Evan Chiu. Evan's solution revolved around a well implemented breadth first search which was wrapped up in a neat class. It was also quite well presented and the HTML was all w3c compliant.   In Evan's solution, he opted for a single "solve" method to handle the heart of the transition - an implementation of the "Breadth First Search method. If you'd like to see the full code, you can check it out here.
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Never mind the width After months of promises, and with backing from the Eclipse Foundation, Borland has released an overhauled edition of JBuilder that promises to overtake Eclipse on quality.â¦
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Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
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At the BorCon conference this week, Borland Software will reveal its Software Delivery Optimization strategy, which leverages the companyâs ALM (application lifecycle management) and developer products to ease software development and maintenance.
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SAN JOSE, CALIF. -- Borland with its Software Delivery Optimization (SDO) plan is looking to enable users to manage software projects like a business, Borlandâs Boz Elloy, senior vice president of software products, told attendees at the BorCon conference here on Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - Borland Software this week is rolling out an upgrade to its Together enterprise modeling tool for the Eclipse platform, featuring SOA capabilities. Borland Together 2006 for Eclipse Release 2 boosts its usefulness for SOA by enabling a UML-based (Unified Modeling Language) view of dependencies in an entire system. This lets developers understand where services are being invoked and helps them gauge the impact of changes, said Dave Hauck, director of marketing for Together technologies at Borland. Also featured is support for the Eclipse 3.2 platform and C++ projects and integration with the company's requirements definition package. Together 2006 for Eclipse Release 2 plugs into the Eclipse shell. Eclipse 3.2 supports the Java 5 specification, which features generics, Hauck said. With C++ backing, models and code in C++ applications are synchronized automatically when developers make changes to diagrams or code. This synchronization is based on Borland's LiveSource technology. "Software architects and developers benefit from our LiveSource technology because we automate this source code level to UML abstraction automatically," Hauck said in an e-mail. Design patterns and source code metrics in the new Together product help a C++ developer create better code. Integration with the Borland RDM (Requirements & Definition Management) solution, comprising Borland CalibreRM and CalibreDefineIT, allows developers, architects, and analysts to build systems based on requirements gathered during an analysis phase, Hauck said. Borland sees itself competing with IBM Rational and Telelogic. But those vendors do not have UML modeling, data modeling, and business-process modeling integrated into a single tool, Hauck said. BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) capabilities have been improved in the new product, enabling the import of BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services). Also further compliance with the BPMN specification and diagram improvements are included. Model-Driven Architecture capabilities have been bolstered, as well, with the product offering enhanced transformation authoring, XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) transformation types and examples for getting started. Model and code quality assurance functions have been improved, too. Borland Together 2006 for Eclipse Release 2 is $3,500 per user. It ships Sept. 8. Below are the fields to populate the Chart.
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Chip power has increased dramatically in the last few years, thanks to new multicore processors from Intel, AMD and other chip makers. The problem is, software developers who understand how to utilize the new hardware are in short supply.
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Will broad, long beta tests mean fast adoption? Others are doubtful.
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(InfoWorld) - With virtualization growing in popularity, Borland Software and VMWare are partnering to accommodate the unique application testing needs presented by this paradigm. Both companies are introducing product upgrades that can function with each other. Borland is announcing its SilkCentral Test Manager 2007 software testing package while VMware is offering VMware Lab Manager 2.5, which is an image library management and provisioning system for virtual machine images. SilkCentral Test Manager 2007 features UI-level integration with Lab Manager 2.5. With the integration of the two products, applications can be tested across multiple configurations, Borland said. Users can assign individual tests to run on many different configurations or platforms without having to maintain multiple hardware configurations that otherwise would be needed for testing. "We've integrated with Lab Manager so that when a quality engineer using SilkCentral Test Manager as their test management interface wants to deploy a test on multiple configurations, they can do so with their virtualized environment by leveraging Lab Manager integration," said Brad Johnson, Borland director of product marketing for lifecycle quality management products. "They don't have to leave the SilkCentral Test Manager interface. "What Lab Manager does is it sets up the environment for the test automatically and SilkCentral can perform the tests," said James Phillips, senior director of software lifecycle automation at VMware. Johnson pointed out the necessity of testing applications based on each platform. "When QA organizations test applications, they have to test multiple configurations," Johnson said. It is expensive to maintain separate hardware stacks for configuration testing, he said. With the Borland-VMware combination, tests can be provisioned in minutes rather than days, according to Borland. "You can run tests on different virtualized configurations just as if they were physical configurations," Johnson said. The value of virtualization, he said, is users can have different environments deployed on one virtualized server. "We're embracing the fact that virtualization is quite ubiquitous in IT shops today," Johnson said. Virtual test lab management presents an "incredible opportunity for developers and testers alike," said Carey Schwaber, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "Testers understand that they have a problem, and they often spend upwards of a third of their time trying to manage test environments," Schwaber said. "Dabbling with virtual machines here and there doesn't get you nearly the savings that you can accrue with a virtual test lab management solution. The opportunity for developers is different. Most of them don't even know that they could be building in a production-like environment." Also new in SilkCentral Test Manager 2007 is enhanced requirements testing tied to business requirements. New features in Lab Manager 2.5 include support for iSCSI and NFS storage as well as administration capabilities for cleaning up a storage library. VMware also is offering an ROI calculator to calculate return on investment from using the product. Silk Central Test Manager 2007 pricing starts at $1,700 per seat license for named users. Availability is anticipated in the third quarter of 2007. Lab Manager 2.5, which ships on Monday, starts in price at $15,000. Pricing for a bundle of Lab Manager 2.5 and VMware Infrastructure 3 starts at $35,000. Infrastructure 3 is VMware's core technology for slicing up a server into virtual machines.
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During the construction of my 64-bit box I collected enough spare parts to build another machine, one destined for a 32-bit Linux system. Last week I finally got that machine built and running with a sparkling new version of the Jacklab Audio Distribution (JAD). I've been using JAD in its alpha releases, but the new box is running the first beta version. Various improvements have been made in JAD since my earlier review, including the adoption of a 2.6.19 kernel optimized for superb realtime performance. Since I've profiled the system in an earlier blog entry I decided to briefly review some of the more unusual software included with the distribution or built with the help of its development packages. JAD contains more than 70 applications for audio and video composition and production, most of which are at their most recent release versions, so come join me in a look at some less typical sound &amp; music software running on one of the best of the new breed of multimedia-optimized Linux distributions.
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Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c50275)  has announced the addition of Datamonitor's new report: Computer  Hardware in Belgium to their offering.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Alexey Zakhlestin gave a talk for the PHPThinktank IRC channel recently on the topic of YAML, PHP, and some of the work that he's done combining the two.   It happened a bit of spontaneously, so noone was invited. It was my first try, to make introduction to yaml for php prgrammers, and if there is more interest I will give another talk which will cover more details, this time with proper scheduling :)   You can check out the log of the discussion for his entire talk (covering topics like what YAML is, where to get more information on it, some of its features, and a mention of the Syck library for parsing it).
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While taking a back seat to software and security efforts, hardware is still a big time concern according to our survey. Organizations are taking the opportunity to consolidate their environments as they replace