Darryl K. Taft

The KDE Community has announced the availability of KDE 3.5.10, a maintenance release of KDE, the free desktop for GNU Linux and other Unix flavors. The KDE desktop is the system of choice for a broad array of Linux users. And although the KDE community released KDE 4.1 at the end of July, KDE e.V., […]

Aptana is bringing its brand of AJAX-style development to the Python community by acquiring the Pydev suite of Python development tools. Aptana’s acquisition of the Eclipse-based IDE (integrated development environment) for Python also is a boon for developers integrating Web development with cloud computing, as on the Google App Engine, because not only is Aptana […]

The folks at Mozilla have souped up JavaScript with a new just-in-time compilation scheme in a project known as TraceMonkey, which boosts JavaScript performance as much as 22.5 times depending on which benchmarks and tests you use. Brendan Eich, chief technology officer at Mozilla, called the technology a game changer and said TraceMonkey moves the […]

Microsoft and Novell have announced an incremental investment in their partnership to promote interoperability between the SUSE Linux platform and Windows, with Microsoft pledging to purchase up to $100 million in certificates that customers can redeem for support. The goal of the Microsoft/Novell partnership, initiated in November of 2006, is to build a bridge between […]

Canonical, maintainer of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has joined the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux. By joining, Canonical can both contribute to and benefit from the foundation that features many of the Linux community’s leading companies as members, Canonical and Linux Foundation officials said. “Joining the Linux Foundation […]

Embarcadero Technologies plans to release the next generation of its CodeGear-formerly Borland-rapid application development tools for Windows, Delphi 2009 and C++Builder 2009, on Aug. 25. For packaged software developers and enterprise developers building client/server applications, the new CodeGear releases will make application creation more efficient and productive, Embarcadero officials said. The new releases “are going […]

The specification that was to lead to a revised JavaScript language has been taken off the table in lieu of a more harmonious approach to reaching standardization for the next version of the language that will take the Web forward. The Ecma International standards body, which oversees the ECMAScript language, has decided to scrap the […]

Michael Phelps is not the only one breaking records and winning gold at the Olympics in Beijing. If Microsoft’s Silverlight continues to have the success it has had in streaming video coverage of the Olympic Games around the world, it could mean gold for Microsoft as the software giant continues its competition with Adobe and […]

Oracle is rolling out a new release of the WebLogic application server the company acquired when it bought BEA Systems in January. The new release features enhancements for Web 2.0 development and enhanced support for the Spring Framework and other improvements. It’s also the first release to unify Oracle and BEA technology. The release also […]

Microsoft is releasing to manufacturing the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 (Service Pack 1) and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Aug. 11, and developers have weighed in saying the new offering enhances their capabilities for building and delivering applications. Although Microsoft is delivering new functionality in these service pack releases, the offerings provide a host of advancements […]

This year’s Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference) will be chock full of content for developers focused on the Microsoft platform. If nothing else, the preconference sessions that will run Oct. 26, the day before the PDC actually begins, indicate a richness and variety of what Microsoft plans to offer its developer base. The preconference sessions […]

The Microsoft community development site, CodePlex, celebrated its second anniversary in early August. On Aug. 6, S. “Soma” Somasegar, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Developer Division, blogged that CodePlex had reached its second year of operation as a Microsoft-run hosting site. The community site houses open-source software that can be used by developers to build […]