Peter Coffee

Federal agencies and contractors have until Oct. 27 to define a new standard of personal identification. Thats the deadline for compliance with the first phase of Homeland Security Presidential Directive HSPD-12, which called in August of last year for the creation of a federal standard that was issued this past February as FIPS 201. That […]

When 216 Java development managers were asked this summer about their biggest frustrations in deploying high-quality code, 40 percent of them admitted that they dont even measure code quality in more than half of their projects; in the projects where code quality is being measured, the same group estimated that almost a third of those […]

Although next spring marks the 10th anniversary of Java integrated development environments, toolmakers still find innovative ways to make developers more productive in that language and on its associated platforms. Even familiar tasks such as source code editing are fertile ground for continuing tool improvements. Click here to read the full review of IntelliJ Idea […]

Making data more directly accessible to developers, with greater freedom to use it in ways not anticipated when it was compiled, is the hottest fashion statement in development technology. With rapid refinement of tools for working with XML on datas supply side and with data manipulation becoming better integrated with mainstream code on the demand […]

Enterprise applications access data and enable business processes. That may seem thoroughly obvious, but a recently arrived extraterrestrial looking at developers tools might easily get a different impression. The languages and tools that are used to build most applications put much of their expressive power and productivity enhancement into other areas. Transparent access to data, […]

Theres not much point in writing efficient code that robustly supports an ineffective or irrelevant business process. The most crucial opportunity for improvement in developer tools, paradoxically, may therefore be in areas that most directly serve the nondeveloper participants in project teams whose members will increasingly come from many specialties. Not surprisingly, proprietary and standard […]

My view of the services business was first shaped by John Walker, founder of Autodesk. Its a view of unexciting margins, inconsistent quality and overall lack of appeal to the technology entrepreneur—but, today, its the business that IT providers must master. Walkers book about the origin and growth of Autodesk, “The Autodesk File,” is now […]

I cant define “suspicious traffic,” but I know it when I see it. Unfortunately, this human test—with apologies to the late Justice Potter Stewart, who famously applied it to pornography—does not scale cost-effectively to enterprise volumes of potentially sensitive information that requires controls on access or exchange. The future of corporate and personal reputations (not […]

Last year, the best brains in robotics couldnt build a vehicle that traveled more than seven miles without human input. This year, five vehicles finished a 137-mile test course in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agencys second Grand Challenge competition, and they could probably have kept on going much farther. Does anyone really think that […]

Like the phrase “Personal Computer” after IBM trademarked “IBM PC” in 1981, the generic label of “managed code” has apparently acquired a vendor-specific aura—as I learned from readers comments on my letter of last week. Many readers, it appears, interpreted that endorsement of managed code technology as a declaration of victory for Microsofts .Net over […]

Its hard to admit that youve been doing things wrong, especially when youve gotten really good at it. When a company—or even an entire industry—gets built on the foundation of a fatally flawed idea, something really big and obvious may need to happen before people are willing to move together toward a different approach. I […]

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, eWEEK Labs spoke with members of eWEEKs Corporate Partner Advisory Board to determine if the event had changed the scope of their organizations disaster recovery planning. Participating in the roundtable were Kevin Baradet, chief technology officer at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y.; […]