Darryl K. Taft

NEW YORK–A growing conflict is emerging within enterprises between the need to enable innovation through mashups and the need to govern the results of these new services. A mashup is a Web application that combines data or services from more than one source into a single integrated application. The rise of Web services and mashup […]

Five years ago this month IBM acquired Rational Software, an application lifecycle developer tools vendor that has become an integral part of the IBM software story. IBM Rational is a prime example of IBM’s successful acquisition strategy to broaden its software base. Five years ago, IBM Software Group Senior Vice President Steve Mills set out […]

Adobe Systems is promoting Kevin Lynch to chief technology officer. Most recently, Lynch served as senior vice president and chief software architect for the design software giant. In his new role, announced Feb. 5, Lynch will oversee Adobe’s “experience design” and core technology across business units, company officials said. Lynch came to Adobe in 2005 […]

Two efforts to deliver an implementation of the Ruby language on the .Net platform have merged into one. Or have they? Rather than continue to chase the same goal, Wayne Kelly, a lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology and the lead on the Ruby.Net project, said he is refocusing his efforts on Microsoft’s IronRuby […]

REDMOND, Wash.-Microsoft, which in October officially announced its intent to support model-driven development in a broad strategy known as ” Oslo,” is beginning work on a new declarative programming language, a supporting editing tool and other components of the initiative, according to sources close to the company. Microsoft announced Oslo as part of an amorphous […]

Sun Microsystems is joining the SOA Consortium as a sponsor. The consortium is a group of users, service providers and technology vendors focused on helping commercial enterprises, major government agencies and mid-market businesses adopt SOA (service-oriented architecture) by 2010. The Needham, Mass.-based SOA Consortium announced Feb. 4 that Sun is joining Cisco Systems, IBM, SAP […]

REDMOND, Wash. — As the Ruby language becomes more popular, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and others are working on ways to make the language run better on various platforms. John Lam, a program manager on the Microsoft DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) team and the creator of the RubyCLR bridge for Ruby developers to write Ruby code […]

The talk around Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo is centered on the online advertising play, but the software giant stands to gain other assets, including developer support, that may end up being the bigger story. When it comes to supporting developers, Microsoft is often viewed as second to none. Yet, should this deal go […]

REDMOND, Wash.-Microsoft is planning to bring the sexy, uh, the scripting back to Visual Basic. In a talk entitled “Bringing Scripting (Back) to Visual Basic” at the Lang.Net conference here Jan. 31, Paul Vick, Microsoft’s principal architect for Visual Basic said now that his team has shipped Visual Basic 2008, “We found ourselves looking back […]

Google has announced a new set of social networking APIs that help people find friends. Google’s new Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful, said Brad Fitzpatrick, a software engineer at Google. The new Google Social Graph API “takes all the existing public relationship […]

REDMOND, Wash. – Consistent with the theme that dynamic languages can be used for general-purpose applications, Resolver Systems is introducing a spreadsheet written in Python. At the Lang.NET conference on the Microsoft campus here Jan. 29, Giles Thomas, chief technology officer at London-based Resolver Systems, demonstrated Resolver One, a spreadsheet written in Python. Thomas said […]

REDMOND, Wash.-First it was Python, then Ruby, and now PHP is being groomed to run on Microsoft’s .Net platform. At the Lang.Net conference Microsoft is hosting at its campus here to discuss the future of programming languages, experts in the PHP language talked of their hope to see the popular Web development technology work better […]