Peter Coffee

Its good news when distributed computing platforms let you allocate resources as easily as a teenager manages the playlist on an iPod. Its great news when that distributed solution gets important improvements to scalability, manageability and compatibility with heterogeneous development environments. Thats what were seeing on April 10 from Gigaspaces with its release of its […]

Its a sign of competent public relations when a companys actions are covered as news. Its brilliant PR, though, when those stories focus on the topic that a company would rather have covered, instead of paying uncomfortable attention to what a company hopes well ignore. This brings us to the subject of the latest delay […]

The transformation thats taken place in the market for development environments is also gaining momentum in operating environments. In much the same way that Borland elected earlier this year to move its distinctive life-cycle strengths to the playing field defined by Eclipse, virtualization technology provider Virtual Iron announces this week its Version 3 platform with […]

If this issue of eWEEK were dated April 1, you might think that Im just making up this news hook. Even in this less frivolous time frame, you might think that the flowers that bloom in the spring have been replaced in my garden by exotic varieties of hallucinogenic mushroom. I give you leave, therefore, […]

My blog post from late last week says most of what I believe can be said, and should be said, about last weeks disclosure of further delays in the broad consumer release of Windows Vista. Ill have further comments, for April 3rd, on the dramatic lowering of ambitions for the product itself thats taken place—compared […]

Id pay to listen to any conversation including Lawrence Lessig (a Stanford Law School professor and widely published scholar of copyright issues) and Greg Papadopoulos (Sun Microsystems CTO). Receiving a free transcript of their chat about digital content, courtesy of Suns midmonth Boardroom Minutes letter, is proof that e-mail is sometimes worth the nuisance. That […]

Does this sound to you like an accurate statement? “Developers gravitated to Java because they could focus on writing business logic. The run time handled everything else. A lot of people want to return to that level of simplicity, even for multinode, enterprise applications. Thats the goal.” Im quoting a comment made today by Ari […]

As I noted in a summary blog from last weeks OReilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, the competition there to launch new Web services APIs seemed like a software-centered version of the new-hardware blitz that used to characterize the Las Vegas Comdex show each fall. Adobe, for example, broke significant news at ETech on […]

The preannouncement hype surrounding Microsofts “Origami” reminded me of the TV ads that preceded the launch of the Infiniti brand. Those ads never showed the cars, but instead showed pictures of surf and mountains while talking about the experience to come. Microsofts coy video clips at www.origamiproject.com were like those Infiniti messages, albeit with two […]

In any scene from any “Star Trek” episode or movie, the most futuristic things we see are the wireless communication devices. Who needs a starship when you can just give the order, “On screen!”—and watch, by unexplained means, what would otherwise take several light-years flight to observe? Consider those little badges on every Starfleet crew […]

Introduced to enterprise developers more than 10 years before Java, the Smalltalk language established key ideas of object-oriented language design and implementation. It also committed the rarely forgiven sin of being ahead of its time, demanding memory budgets and processor speeds more often found on a high-end workstation than on a commodity PC before the […]

Formerly the priestly language of Webmasters incantations, Perl is being adopted across a broadening spectrum of tasks. Perl 6, a major re-engineering of the Perl technology, promises to preserve Perls legendary productivity in simple tasks while being built on a formal specification. The result, its hoped, will prove more suitable for construction of complex and […]