Timothy Dyck

Macromedia Inc.s first release of what was Allaire Corp.s ColdFusion Web application server, which will ship early next month, provides some innovative but incremental changes that current ColdFusion developers will welcome. eWeek Labs tested a near-release-candidate build of Macromedia ColdFusion 5. Virtually all the changes we found are administrative updates (such as reporting and monitoring […]

There is a stealthy upswing in VOIP phones going on this year, raising the likelihood that, in the next few years, youll be able to wire offices with nothing but Ethernet— or, in some cases, no wires at all. Its the combination of voice-over-IP and wireless technology that provides the most incentive to switch. Symbol […]

Earlier this month at Networld+Interop, many of the worlds key soap developers spent a week together finding and fixing interoperability problems among their implementations of Simple Object Access Protocol. When I talked to developers at the SOAP Developer Community Interoperability Connectathon midway through the week, about 80 percent of combinations between servers and clients were […]

Clippy (officially clippit), along with his merry band of Office Assistant friends, has bitten the digital dust and will not be included in the upcoming Microsoft Office XP product line. Touted as a major usability advance in Microsoft Office 97 and still present in Microsoft Office 2000, Clippy has succeeded in leaving users of two […]

Taking a fresh approach to mobile application development, iConverse Inc.s iConverse Mobile Studio lets users visually design these applications without having to worry about the rats nest of devices and markup languages that currently plague mobile developers. eWeek Labs tested a late beta release of iConverse Mobile Studio 2.0, which should ship at the end […]

Just a few months after releasing code for its internal research efforts to build a more secure Linux, the National Security Agency has taken the next step to make sure the project gets completed. Last month, the NSA announced that it will fund a $1.2 million, two-year development effort for its SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) project. […]

In a move that gives the Windows server market a good shaking, the Samba development team has released Samba 2.2, a free Windows-compatible file and print server that offers enough functionality to be a Windows NT Server replacement for many organizations, especially in smaller stand-alone offices. For basic file sharing and print sharing in a […]

Administrators managing servers running Red Hat Linux or MandrakeSofts Linux-Mandrake can look forward to an updated version of the Bastille Linux security-hardening program to be released very soon. I praised Bastille Linux 1.1 last year for its comprehensiveness and ease of use. The 1.2 release, which was in Release Candidate 3 stage as of mid-April, […]

A worthwhile new distributed computing project backed by the University of Oxford, in England; the National Foundation for Cancer Research, in Maryland; Intel; and United Devices, along with other supporting organizations, was launched earlier this month. The United Devices agent can run in the background or as a screen saver and looks for topological matches […]

The next release of the Java language, Version 1.4, is taking shape as a significant upgrade for server-side Java programmers. Improved performance is a big goal, as well as new database and XML functionality. It should ship later this year. Java 1.4 (“Merlin”) will be 64-bit enabled for Sun SPARC and Intel Itanium chips. A […]

Crystal Decisions Inc.s Crystal Enterprise 8 Professional Edition data report server provides a fast, highly programmable tool for creating and distributing reports to users. However, this release—which replaces Crystal Info 7.5 and started shipping last month—is something of a two-steps-forward, two-steps-back effort, with some important new performance and programmability features appearing, but other important analysis […]

Finally kicking the door open to widespread corporate Windows deployment and dramatically boosting Unix scalability via threads, The Apache Software Foundation has released the first beta of Apache HTTP Server 2.0. Four years in development, this more-or-less-stable build boasts an entirely new server design based on an operating-system-independent layer called Apache Portable Runtime, along with […]