Short Takes: Lack-of-oil-driven software development
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Preflight builds spread wings for smoother projects
Developers are increasingly turning to preflight builds, allowing them to experiment with ...
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Coverity creates program to enforce code adherence
The Architecture Analyzer uses mapping technology from the company's Software DNA static a...
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QCon 2008 features domain-driven development
This year's QCon invites speakers like Eric Evans and Dan North to talk about domain-drive...
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.NET similarities prove golden for Silverlight
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SOA Watch: New economic realities
In the current economic downturn, agile programming and SOA are attractive options that bu...
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Integration Watch: A new twist on threads
The key to raising the efficiency of multiprocessors is to shrink the overall workload by ...
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Integration Watch: The Return of NetRexx?
Java scripting languages are seeing a surge in popularity, with NetRexx looking particular...
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Windows & .NET Watch: Transaction crowd gets a boost
With multicore chips becoming the standard for processors, the need for a flexible, usable...
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From the Editors: Election should shake up JCP
Rod Johnson has the right ideas for opening up the Java Community Process, and he may be a...
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Letters to the Editor: Sun gives REST, SOAP choice
A reader takes issue with a headline on our story about Sun working with REST along with S...
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Guest View: Be smart and lazy
The optimal solution for problems is the simplest one, so always aim to streamline your ap...
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Zeichick's Take: From EXEC to EXEC 2 to REXX to NetRexx
Andrew Binstock's column last week, "The Return of NetRexx," brought back some fond memori...
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Advanced Corda CenterView™ Data Visualization for the BusinessObjects™ Intelligence Platform
Corda Technologies presents a white paper on pervasive BI. The BusinessObjects business in...
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From Mobile to SOA: A Guide for Optimized Application Deployment
Customer need has driven the emergence of multiple computing tiers. Today’s application d...
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e-Kit: Web Application Security
Is your network secure? What about your web applications.
If IT security is your top p...
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Practical tips for saving money on code maintenance
If software design is expensive, well, code maintenance is even more so. When you look...
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By SD Times News Team
July 1, 2008 —
Packets, not petroleum
What will you do when gasoline hits US$17 per gallon? That's what drivers in the United Kingdom have been facing.
According to a story in the Daily Mail, the combination of high oil prices, high taxes and a mid-June strike by fuel-lorry drivers caused some petrol stations to raise the liter price as high as £1.99, which is in the neighborhood of $17 for a gallon. Even at that price, some stations had run out by the strike’s third day, June 16.
Ouch.
Think about that when you complain about filling your tank for $4.39 per gallon, which is what our neighborhood gas station is charging this week. Imagine if 15 gallons of mid-grade set you back $255 instead of $66. I’m so glad that I drive a little Mazda instead of a massive sport utility vehicle!
So, what do you do? People are already starting to travel less. Drivers are increasingly adopting public transport, according to news reports. They’re also turning to collaborative technologies.
Telephone conference calls are pretty inexpensive. Face-to-face video conferencing, whether it’s over iChat AV or Skype, is free. Whiteboarding systems, wikis and SharePoint can bring your team closer together. Groupware features within your favorite IDE or application life-cycle management suite are more important than ever. Make sure that your software development tools have them—and use them.
Alan Zeichick
A severe case of founder’s pride
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has neglected his fiduciary duties, leaving Yahoo shareholders with nothing but stock and promises. Yang’s acute case of founder’s pride has blinded him to the reality that there’s almost nothing he could do to generate as much shareholders' equity as Microsoft’s best offer would have. The company must reinvent itself, and some difficult decisions lie ahead. The Yahoo we know today will not exist in the near future; it is likely to consolidate its product offerings and reduce its staff. I wonder what Carl Icahn has to say about that?
David Worthington
Project Green Drive wins SAP contest
SAP put a different twist on the software development competitions that many companies host, by including customers and partners along with SAP’s own coders.
Thirty SAP developers plus 14 developers from partner firms such as Accenture, and customers such as Colgate-Palmolive, broke into seven teams and, according to one participant, lived mostly on brownies and Red Bull while coding around the clock over one weekend.
“We know that innovation can come from different places,” said Rami Branitzky, managing director of SAP Labs North America and the Ryan Seacrest-like host of the Demo Jam held June 9, where each application was demonstrated before a panel of judges “American Idol”-style.
The software had to incorporate any or all of three concepts: green technology, mobility and social networking.
The winner was Project Green Drive for a coordinated carpooling application. Users on a mobile device or a PC browser can form a carpool or ask to join someone else’s. The application links with Facebook, allowing users to choose from among their friends to join a carpool, then mapping out the route the driver takes to pick up each passenger.
“[Someone] said this is something we should quit our jobs over and go to market. You never know,” quipped Brian Bischoff, lead developer on Project Green Drive.
Actually, SAP retains ownership of the applications developed during the competition, observed spokeswoman Lindsey Held.
Robert Mullins
Apple’s got the (migration) cat in the bag
The hot news out of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in early June might have been about the iPhone, but the references to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the operating system’s 10.6 release, surprised some in the press section.
What’s interesting is that with about a year to go before release, nobody at Apple wants to say much officially about Snow Leopard, except that it’s going to focus on stability. I’m OK with that; I’m even OK with Snow Leopard dropping support for PowerPC-based Macs, even though that orphans the machine where I do most of my thinking, writing and recreating. (Honestly, I’ve had more problems with the current version’s networking than with its application support.)
I suspect this move will be a can of corn, since the Mac platform’s on its third processor architecture; this transition has become old hat. Even though I haven’t seen anything come out this century that works radically better for me than stuff I was using 10 or 12 years ago, I’m still looking for an excuse to make some changes. After all, applications are not Scotch; when they’re 10 years old, they lose much of their allure.
P.J. Connolly
Related Search Term(s): Green computing, mobile development, software development, Apple, SAP, Yahoo
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