PC World Business

Microsoft has integrated its Dynamics CRM (customer relationship management) software with Twitter, in just the latest move by an enterprise software company to latch onto the wildly popular micro-blogging service.

File this under: Don't believe everything you see.

PayPal will soon open up its platform to third-party developers, allowing them to build applications with a range of money transfer options.

Microsoft's Silverlight technology for rich Internet applications is gathering steam among developers in Asia, an Evans Data survey unveiled on Tuesday reveals.

Google's idea of an operating system sounds pretty cool: Lightweight. Speedy. Secure. Web-centric. But while I'm sure Chrome OS will pick up some fans, I have a hard time seeing this as the way of the future for computing.

Internet search engines and software applications can catalog huge volumes of information, but they aren't smart enough to trace personal relationships between people, according to the executive chairman of World-Check, a company that maintains a database of individuals that banks and other companies might want to think twice about doing business with.

HTML 5, a groundbreaking upgrade to the prominent Web presentation specification, could become a game-changer in Web application development, one that might even make obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.

If only it were as easy to build a Web application as it is to design one in Illustrator and Photoshop. Maybe it will be someday, and maybe that someday is closer than we might think. Adobe has certainly succeeded in shrinking the distance between design and development with its latest batch of RIA tools: Adobe Flex 4 SDK, Adobe Flash Builder 4 (the Flex Builder IDE renamed), and Adobe Flash Catalyst, all recently made available in public beta.

Is Microsoft a friend or foe of open source? Going by the company's actions, Microsoft can't seem to decide whether to make love or war. But if it's war, Microsoft appears to lack the legal weaponry to defeat or even disturb its adversaries.

Mozilla has given US$100,000 to improve and develop Ogg Theora, an open source video codec being developed by the Xiph.org Foundation. Wikimedia will disburs funds over a six-month period. Although not the best-known video format, Ogg already has some major support from web developers. Theora will be built into Firefox 3.1, which is currently in Beta 2, as well as into Norway's homegrown browser Opera. Theora is also the video format of choice for all Wikimedia Foundation projects.

I'm a big fan of Google's Chrome Web browser. Lightweight and fast, Chrome epitomizes the kind of "less is more" philosophy that has always appealed to my inner geek. However, I, like many Chrome enthusiasts, lament the lack of an established framework for implementing the myriad plug-ins and extensions that made IE bearable and Firefox one of the hottest Web development platforms going.

Put three geeks in a room and it won't take long to start an argument. Well, analyst Dennis Byron, veteran open source exec Stuart Cohen, and ex-Microsoft developer Keith Curtis weren't exactly in the same room, but all three have provocative opinions about the future of software in general and of open source in particular.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. This time we chat with Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language and regarded as the father of modern scripting languages.

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

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.

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.