Peter Coffee

Nonprogrammers underestimate the challenge of writing programs that actually work, all the time, with never a strange behavior or erroneous result. It might be useful, if perhaps insanely difficult, to attempt to convey that challenge by writing a laymans interpretive guide to a book such as “Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases,” published last […]

Service-oriented architecture development can be successful to a fault if service developers are empowered to create and publish services more quickly than service consumers can identify and compose them into applications. Developments announced today by Systinet hold out the promise that SOA governance is coming into balance with service creation. I spoke in advance of […]

Activitys rising rapidly at blog.eWEEK.com, where youll find timely discussions led by eWEEK News and Labs. I have to hold myself back, though, from posting there everything that comes to mind—once a week, I need to reserve a posting to share with you here. For example, I was struck by the many reports from the […]

Like many others whod long awaited Microsofts Visual Studio 2005, I felt more than a little let down when that development suite shipped without the full-spectrum collaboration tools that wed been told to expect among its most distinctive improvements. Microsoft now assures us that the Team Foundation Server (TFS) is forthcoming: Sources tell eWEEKs Darryl […]

Developers preparing for battle on any new platform are likely to have a predictable choice of weapons. Any technology thats had time to become at all established will typically offer a mix of low-level tools, platform-tailored environments, component libraries and full-blown abstractions that package the details for greater convenience. In the year (almost) since the […]

Its almost time to send first-birthday-party invitations for AJAX, a catchy label (though not a novel idea) that has quickly become the banner buzzword of standards-based interactive applications for the Web. The benefits of AJAX are far more obvious than its burdens on developers, and eWEEK Labs therefore offers this perspective on the choices that […]

What would you say is the single most civilizing technology ever devised? You might think that as an active backpacker, Id unhesitatingly cast my vote for indoor plumbing—but when I get to the end of a seven-day trek and see the car that we parked at our exit point still sitting there, Im even more […]

If you had the chance to redesign your IT environment from scratch, with no history of custom application or skill development costs to justify and with no installed-base hardware or middleware constraints, how would it differ most from what you have today? The answer, I suggest, defines your most important goals for the year thats […]

Theres a poster in the gallery of the infamous Despair Inc. whose caption reads, “Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.” Much of the mail that Ive gotten from IT pros in the last few years has reported that gloomy motto being borne out in the real world: They […]

Expected in bookstores this month, Lynn Fosters “Nanotechnology: Science, Innovation, and Opportunity” includes a chapter I contributed on the subject of fads and hype. (Im using the verb “contributed” in both senses of the word—the only compensation Im getting is what I learned by writing the chapter content, plus three copies of the book.) At […]

As 2005 began, questions of application development and software platform choice were moving from the enterprise backroom onto a much larger stage. Rapidly developing economies had already led to the coinage in 2003 of “BRIC” (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as shorthand for the places where capital is looking for resources. Its no coincidence that […]

Asian developers are looking at North American efforts and seeing a rapid increase in 64-bit development, along with a reversal in a three-year decline of work on thin-client applications. Its interesting that U.S. reports, based in part on the same survey data, focus instead on a putative decline in U.S. use of Java — in […]