PC World Business

Concentrating on rich Internet applications, Zend Technologies is backing Adobe's Action Message Format (AMF) in Zend Framework 1.7.

The New York Times used Ruby on Rails to pull together, analyze and display election results in near real time on one of its busiest Web traffic days ever. How did nytimes.com scale up Rails -- a framework known for quick development turnaround but less than lightning fast performance?

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published the specification for a Microsoft-created file format that caused bitter debate during its path to become an international standard.

Marking the two-year anniversary of their controversial interoperability agreement, Microsoft and Novell this week are announcing upcoming availability of both the beta version of Moonlight, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application technology on Linux, and the general release of Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

Backed by Huawei Technologies and operators including Telefónica and Vodafone, the GSM Association (GSMA) has launched the Embedded Mobile initiative, aiming to bring down prices of 3G modules that can be embedded in cars, cameras, health monitoring devices and other machines by developing common standards and platforms.

A few years ago, self-proclaimed non-developer Kevin Smith worked for a software company that tried to build a project tracking tool using Microsoft .Net. Some 15 developers spent a year with little success. "After burning though a million dollars and still without a product, the company called it quits," says Smith, now managing partner of NextWave Performance, a consultancy in Denver, Colo.

When Terry Weaver wants to create .Net applications, he fires up Visual Studio and types away like any other .Net programmer. The setup gets a bit weird when he wants to test how the .Net application might appear to a Mac user visiting the Web site. Instead of starting up another machine, asking a colleague with a Mac, or simply ignoring those crazy followers of Steve Jobs, Weaver just pops over to the browser in another window. That's easy because Visual Studio is running on Windows inside a Parallels virtual machine, which, in turn, runs on his Mac. He has a PC, a Mac, and a Unix development box all in one.

Winning entries from the annual Ruby on Rails coding contest.

Last week, Microsoft announced its cloud-computing effort, called Azure. Fitting between Google's and Amazon.com's current offerings, it represents a very big step toward moving applications off the desktop and out of a corporation's own datacenters. Whether or not it will have any traction with corporate IT developers remains to be seen.

With the advent of multicore processors such as the Intel Core Duo, which is now commonplace in PCs, software developers must deal with a new wrinkle -- getting software to be processed across multiple cores -- in order to ensure the maximum performance from their software. But this is much easier said than done, with developers having to tackle issues with concurrency and potential performance bottlenecks. Already, 71 percent of organizations are developing multithreaded applications for multicore hardware, according to a recent IDC survey sponsored by tool vendor Coverity.

PHP security guru Stefan Esser recently posted on some of the changes and important security issues that are likely to have significant effects for the everyday PHP coder (and user) with the release of the upcoming PHP 5.3.

If Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the State Board of Education have their way, soon every California student will have to pass an algebra test to graduate from the eighth grade.

You don't have to be a programmer to be a mobile innovator. All you need to do is open your eyes to the fact that a smart phone or QWERTY handset is a personal computer, sans legacy baggage. In the future, user-facing computers will have more in common with the high-end mobile devices of today than with the eight-core desktops and quad-core notebooks of 2009.

InfoWorld has been all over this week's official launch of Android, the new smartphone platform from Google. With its slick interface and open application platform, Android shows every sign of giving Apple's iPhone a run for its money when the first phones begin shipping in late October.

Last week I said I would look at Google Chrome "from a developer's perspective." I should have specified what kind. I meant I was considering it from a Web developer's perspective: What does it mean for Web application builders to have yet another browser enter the already-crowded field?

Google, which celebrates 10 years of its incorporation this month, remains strongly committed to its Enterprise unit and to the customers it serves, including IT and business managers and CIOs, although most of the company's revenue comes from online advertising.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, and Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash. We have also spoken to Charles H. Moore about Forth. In this interview, we chat to Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame about the design and development of C++, garbage collection and the role of facial hair in successful programming languages.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash, and S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions. In this article we chat to Microsoft about its web application framework ASP.NET, used to build dynamic Web sites, applications and Web services

Yahoo last week announced it is working on BrowserPlus, a development platform for creating Web applications that contain desktop capabilities.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we spoke to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, and in this article we chat to Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash.

Flash animation gives websites pizzazz. It's used for video and other moving graphics, as well as non-static adverts. Flash is an excellent way of adding a little something extra to your site and making it stand out from the crowd.

Put your business on the map

They are four applications designed to serve different purposes: A web browser, a music player and organizer, another that does the same for video, and a word processor for screenwriters. Yet they share one thing in common: All were built with a Mozilla-based toolkit, either the Gecko Runtime Environment or its successor, XULRunner. Both toolkits use the same codebase which runs Firefox.

I like trying out lots of new software. But when I uninstall a stinker, I know it is probably leaving behind chunks of code that will bog down my system over time. So lately I've been trying out new programs on a virtual machine.

Running a business and want to promote yourself online? You need a domain name.

This buying guide provides a thorough overview of server hardware with a focus on CPU-based, entry-level devices from Intel and AMD.

Before you install a database, you need to grapple with concepts like database servers, relational and object databases, and the thorny question of why apparently similar products range in price from free to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Read this guide to understand how e-mail works and how it folds into the broader capabilities of today's messaging and collaboration platforms.