Peter Coffee

More than just tools that roll new code from scratch, the open-source arsenal also offers enterprise developers a wide range of prebuilt components and application skeletons that can be used to jump-start an in-house application or a vertical-market solution. Sophisticated CRM (customer relationship management) suites are among the highlights of what we might call the […]

The road to platform success is paved with strategic development technologies. IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. are responding to that reality with Java environments that are not merely competitive but actually set a fast pace for the Visual Studio update that Microsoft Corp. wont ship until late this summer. IBMs Rational Web Developer 6.0 speeds […]

If I wanted to spoil my wifes attempt to surprise me on my birthday, Amazon.com would have made it easy for me to do that—but only because she tried to use Amazons services to make my gift keep on giving. Developers who plan to deploy a “personalized” Web service should consider the implications, and make […]

In the controversy over IBMs sale of its PC business to a company in China, we find an important message about the changing nature of enterprise information security. We used to get along with simple hierarchies of trust, providing a straightforward increase in privilege—from 0 to 100 percent—as we moved from the outside in. Whats […]

Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow once warned of the hazards of oversimplification, saying that one could call it the occupational hazard of being an economist—except that it was actually the occupation. In the same way, one could say that its the occupation of the Web services developer to make a companys intellectual property available to […]

My snake-oil detector was screaming at me, “This cant be right.” That happens when someone tells me that everything I think I know is wrong, especially in an area like getting information into and out of a radio signal—something that Ive thought I understood since I got my first ham radio license 35 years ago. […]

Today marks the entry deadline—really, we mean it—for eWEEKs Fifth Annual Excellence Awards. Full information is available at www.excellenceawardsonline.com. As we prepare for the annual flood of last-minute entries, I find that eWEEK newshound Darryl Taft has pretty much written the rest of this column for me with his coverage of last weeks announcements of […]

Online retail enjoys the mixed blessing of extremely tight coupling between the means of advertising a product and the means of buying it. A mechanism that calls a product to possible buyers attention, such as Amazons reader rankings, is just a few clicks away from the mechanism by which a buyer can act on that […]

Sitting there on my desk, apparently doing nothing useful but getting awfully hot in the process, my Windows 2000 laptops CPU was running at 90 percent. Spyware? A virus? None could be found. With its icon bouncing away in the dock of my Mac OS X desktop, a file decompression utility seemed unable to start. […]

I began this year with high expectations for broader application of grid computing. At the same time, though, I shared some concerns about vendors who might seek to warm themselves in the glow of grids fire while actually promoting their own proprietary approaches. A welcome reinforcement of standards-based grid technology comes with this mornings announcement […]

The next time you check into a business-class hotel, imagine how youd react if told that use of the room TV would cost you $8 a night. Or that hot water would be surcharged by the gallon. If this seems ridiculous, what do you think about charging for high-speed Internet access? How much is that […]

The last few months of 2004 saw notable progress toward the challenging goal of all-optical data switching. By eliminating costly and time-consuming conversion between electronic and photonic signaling, all-optical hardware promises data-handling rates of 100 terabits per second before the end of this decade. Current optical switches include Lucent Technologies WaveStar LambdaRouter, a microelectromechanical system […]