Darryl K. Taft

What is a Java developer to do? Sun Microsystems began letting people go as of Jan. 22 in the first wave of layoffs that are likely to affect up to 5,000 to 6,000 employees. Many of those released, according to employee reports, were coders. My colleague, Chris Preimesberger, reported that layoff notifications were sent to […]

The open-source Cloud Tools project, hosted on Google Code, is a prime example of the emerging trend of open-source developers targeting the cloud and looking at services such as Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine to host their applications. An Evans Data survey recently emphasized this trend, showing that 40 percent of surveyed developers […]

Google has introduced a new way for developers to kick the tires on its JavaScript APIs: the Google AJAX API Playground. In a Jan. 21 blog post about the Google AJAX API Playground, Google Developer Programs Engineer Ben Lisbakken said, “I have been working on this in my 20% time and today I am proud […]

While it appears that mum’s the word for IBM management, IBM rank and file employees are talking loud and saying something about recent layoffs. Word of layoffs comes with a bit of irony, as IBM just announced strong quarterly results on Jan. 20 to the tune of $4.4 billion in profits-up 12 percent over the […]

Microsoft has delivered Version 1.0 of its Web Platform Installer, a free download manager that enables developers to install the Microsoft Web Platform or at least part of it. Following up on the delivery of a release candidate version in November, Microsoft made Web PI 1.0 available on Jan. 20. The Web PI is a […]

The Eclipse Foundation, a consortium of developers supporting the open-source Eclipse development platform, has announced a major upgrade to the Eclipse PHP Development Tools project, PDT 2.0. As a leading contributor to the PDT effort, PHP specialist Zend Technologies is pushing PHP as a key element of the Eclipse platform and as a language used […]

Technology sector bellwether IBM announced its fourth-quarter 2008 earnings, including a 12 percent increase in net income to $4.4 billion, up from $4 billion in the same period a year ago. “A strong fourth quarter capped an outstanding year,” Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM chairman, president and CEO, said in a statement. “In 2008, IBM performed […]

A recent survey from Evans Data shows that 40 percent of surveyed developers working on open-source projects plan to deliver their applications as Web services offerings using cloud providers. According to the Evans Data Open Source/Linux Development survey, among those who plan to use the cloud, the majority, at 28 percent, said they plan to […]

T3 Technologies has announced its filing of a lawsuit against IBM with the European Commission for allegedly illegally tying mainframe software and hardware. T3 initially announced that it was preparing to file suit in August, but has now moved forward with its complaint. On Jan. 20, T2 filed a formal complaint against IBM with the […]

Microsoft announced Jan. 16 that the Presidential Inaugural Committee has selected the company’s Silverlight technology to enable live and on-demand video streaming of the official inauguration swearing-in ceremony on the PIC Web site. As part of its effort to hold the most open and accessible inauguration in history, on Saturday, Jan. 17, the PIC will […]

Microsoft has released an updated software development kit for its Windows Azure cloud offering and has delivered some advice on how to run the Windows Azure SDK on the Windows 7 beta. In a blog post on Jan. 14, Microsoft’s Windows Azure team said: “Today, in less than three months since its announcement, Microsoft’s Windows […]

I always wondered how vendors go about making decisions when they’re working on a product and the core standards defining the technology behind that product are in flux. Typically, if the standard is important enough to the vendor, it is involved in any standards effort governing the evolution of the standard in question. And it […]