Peter Coffee

Technology editor Peter Coffee recently spoke with members of the eWEEK Corporate Partner Advisory Board about their experiences as they work toward attaining and maintaining compliance with the various regulations affecting their industries. The burdens of achieving enterprise compliance with expanding regulatory and legislative mandates are obvious; the means of meeting them, and even the […]

If you want to enjoy willing suspension of disbelief when watching most science-fiction movies, dont learn any thermodynamics. Once you start to look at things in terms of energy flows, too much of what you see on the big screen will stop making sense. Lately, though, my problem is that the energy picture of real-life […]

Presumably, Erich Gamma and John Wiegand enjoy their day jobs as Distinguished Engineers at IBM Rational Software. If they ever feel a need for a change, though, they could do a lot worse than to take their act on the road. Their joint general session on the lessons of 2006 JavaOne conference in San Francisco, […]

When eWeek labs reviewed the first release of Oracles JDeveloper 10g in July 2004, the only downside we found in that capable Java tool set was its lack of support for Apple Computers Mac OS X. That was a noteworthy flaw, given Apples offering of a solid Java development platform whose market share among Web […]

Programming guru Brian Kernighan has famously said that debugging code is twice as difficult as writing it—and, he said, it follows that, “If you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” Id generalize this to two principles that should be followed by anyone who buys, […]

It sounds more dignified to say “bee-pell” than “bipple,” but both are accepted pronunciations of BPEL, or Business Process Execution Language. The latter pronunciation is the one that Im hearing most when I talk with development toolmakers. And Im hearing it a lot. Version 2.0 of the BPEL for Web Services specification is nearing public […]

Developers are like any other type of user, in that theyre far more likely to do what their tools suggest and make easy—or better yet, make automatic—in preference to being expected to follow guidelines and write reports without intuitive tool support. Thats the proposition behind the spring 2006 release of Parasofts SOAtest 4.5, which helps […]

Its more than slightly perverse that most development teams know more about the interactions in their code than among their coders. Redressing that imbalance is the goal of CQ2, from the Enerjy Software division of Teamstudio. Version 1.1 of CQ2, formerly trademarked CQ2, will launch on the opening day of JavaOne. During tests of a […]

Management guru Tom Peters is almost three times as well-known for his 1982 book (with Robert Waterman), In Search of Excellence, as he is for his 1987 work Thriving on Chaos. (I make that statement based on the number of Google hits for the combination of the authors name with each of those book titles.) […]

You have no idea how much youre paying for the inconsistent performance, unproductive complexity and inadequate management facilities that afflict your enterprise information systems. Id normally couch a statement like that with a “probably,” but I think I can state that as a fact. When IT systems are available to their users, functioning as designed, […]

The proverbial “Zero-One-Infinity Rule,” one of the tenets of hacker lore, says that any element of an IT architecture should “Allow none of foo, one of foo, or any number of foo.” Any other restriction or limitation smacks of favoring the convenience of an implementer over the needs or expectations of the user. This rule […]

The label of “computer literacy” isnt useful for much besides inducing taxpayers to spend too much on irrelevant classroom technology. It can be used to describe a working knowledge of the generic menu-driven interface of file and edit menus, as well as associated concepts such as files and directories. It can equally be applied, though, […]