Timothy Dyck

Okena Inc.s StormWatch 3.0 ups the ante in the security-hardening tool space with its ease of use and large set of pre-built security lock-down rules. Administrators who want to go beyond the usual patches-plus-firewalls combination will find StormWatch a big step forward. This release adds Solaris support to StormWatchs existing Windows NT and Windows 2000 […]

Given the widespread adoption of simple object access protocol as a remote procedure call mechanism elsewhere in the industry, its not surprising that Sun Microsystems Inc. would bake SOAP into its upcoming Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.4 specification. However, the move might also be a quiet gift even to those working in all-Java environments because […]

The Java application server market is about to go through another cycle of change with the imminent release of the J2EE 1.4 specification. J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) compatibility is the sine qua non for any Java application server with enterprise ambitions. Version 1.4 was released as a proposed final draft Aug. 22 and updates […]

Nimble Technologys heterogeneous data gateway, Nimble Integration Suite 2.0, adds an ODBC driver to allow Windows applications to query its data gateway as if it were a normal database. The server continues to provide XML-formatted, heterogeneous query results accessible through its Microsoft COM, ASP, Java and JSP APIs. NIS 2.0, which started shipping in August, […]

Security always comes down to securing applications. The whole point of firewalls is to hide internally deployed network applications—assumed to have exploitable vulnerabilities somewhere—from the outside world. The main weakness of firewalls is that they are based on a one-application/one-IP-port model, something that worked in the pre-Web days but is completely inadequate now. These days, […]

Integrating a far-flung organizations technology products and strategies is one of the toughest, messiest and most failure-prone jobs in IT. Making sure that integration projects result in success takes business knowledge, clearly defined goals, realistic expectations and the right technology. In this Special Report, well outline the major challenges and directions in the integration space, […]

Questioned under a slowly swinging light, Web services wouldnt confess to being anything special or even anything we havent seen before. Bruce Nelson and Andrew Birrell, two researchers at Xerox Corp. subsidiary Palo Alto Research Center Inc., formalized the idea of the remote procedure call in a series of publications in the early 1980s. Sun […]

The next version of Linux suffered a major setback in mid-August with the sudden announcement that the head IDE developer, Marcin Dalecki, was leaving the development effort and that all his IDE code was being thrown out. Theres still mystery around the reasons for this, although Dalecki had been under steady criticism by some other […]

Databases are the place where many different client data access technologies need to intersect, making the repositories natural candidates for Web services. Database vendors have seen this convergence coming, and a number of them have already released first-generation Web services features for their databases. Microsoft Corp.s SQL Server 2000 has the simplest and easiest-to-deploy Web […]

Last month, the W3C published the first public working draft of the next generation of HTML, XHTML 2.0. (Never mind that XHTML 1.0 hasnt caught on yet.) XHTML 2.0 uses the same modular structure defined in XHTML Modularization 1.0, so small devices can support just a subset of XHTML, but it introduces big changes in […]