InfoWorld.com articles from February 2009

InfoWorld.com archives from February 2009

You don't know tech: The InfoWorld news quiz; Match your weekly tech news wits against our snarky quiz master.
February 2, 2009... Byline: Dan Tynan Despite bearish earnings and big layoffs, any week where there're rumors of a new iPhone can't all be bad. Apple rumors, rogue road signs, new and/or improved browsers, and the ever expanding world of Google made it a...

Six ways to save your IT project from the scrap heap; Tight times require new strategies for keeping your IT projects on line and your career moving forward.
February 2, 2009... Byline: Dan Tynan To weather the current economic maelstrom, enterprises not only are reducing head count but also are cutting back on ambitious or long-term projects in IT. Knowing how best to keep your IT project in the pipeline could...

Gizmox offering RIA tool for Silverlight, AJAX; The commercial suite, based on Gizmox's open-source Visual WebGui platform, features integration with Visual Studio, scalability, and redundancy with server extensions.
February 2, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Gizmox on Monday is unveiling a commercial version of its Visual WebGui product for building enterprise-class rich Internet applications. Previously available as an open-source technology, Visual WebGui is designed...

McAfee builds SaaS arm; Security vendor establishes a business unit to house hosted offerings.
February 2, 2009... Byline: Tom Sullivan McAfee on Monday announced that it has rolled its SaaS security offerings into a new business unit. The new unit will include all McAfee products delivered over the Internet, including security scanning, Web and...

Microsoft prepares for Windows 7, Windows Server upgrade; The Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Ecosystem Readiness Program offers partners tools and other resources to ensure compatibility.
February 2, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Looking to make partners ready for upcoming Windows client and server releases, Microsoft began on Monday its Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Ecosystem Readiness Program, featuring tools and resources to test...

The Open Group upgrades enterprise architecture; TOGAF 9 enterprise architecture framework and method features modularity as well as greater detail and clarity over previous versions.
February 2, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill The Open Group, a technology consortium focused on interoperability and "boundary-less information flow," on Monday is launching version 9 of TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework), which provides a framework and...

Sun to take to the cloud; The company, which believes there will be many clouds in the future, wants to be a major player in the field and plans to enter the trendy computing space on March 18.
February 3, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Sun Microsystems plans to detail on March 18 its grand entrance into the cloud computing space, Sun officials said Tuesday morning. Speaking during SugarCRM's SugarCon 2009 conference in San Francisco, Sun...

VMware touts open source desktop virtualization; New tools enables customers to host desktop environments in the datacenter.
February 3, 2009... Byline: Tom Sullivan VMware on Tuesday announced VMware View Open Client and claimed that it advances its vClient Initiative toward universal clients. The new software, available under the GNU Lesser GPL 2.1, enables IT to host and...

Zend names its co-founder as new CEO; Andi Gutmans takes the reins at Zend Technologies as Harold Goldberg departs the PHP tools company.
February 3, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Zend Technologies, maker of tools for PHP application development, has named company co-founder Andi Gutmans as its new chief executive officer, the company is announcing on Tuesday. The company also named Mark...

Browser secrets of secure connections; Ranking Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari on cipher support.
February 3, 2009... Byline: Roger A. Grimes Although most users don't know it, their Web browser plays a key part in determining the strength of the ciphers used between their client and an HTTPS-protected Web site. Encryption ciphers used in the SSL/TLS...

Browsing behind Windows Vista; Vista's Mandatory Integrity Controls help defend your system safe from a malicious Web, but only if your browser supports them.
February 3, 2009... Byline: Roger A. Grimes Windows Vista has a new security construct called Mandatory Integrity Controls (MIC), which is similar to integrity functionality long available in the Linux and Unix worlds. In Vista, all security principals...

Surprise! Tech is a safe career choice today; Despite the real issues IT pros have with their jobs, they're better off than with most other professions.
February 4, 2009... Byline: Tom Kaneshige The once rock-steady tech job has been battered by ferocious waves lately: a dot-com bust, offshoring, outsourcing, H-1B replacements, cost-cutting, and now layoffs resulting from the global economic crisis. Weary...

IBM links Web 2.0, CRM; WebSphere sMash platform for situational apps can work with open source Sugar platform.
February 4, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill IBM revealed on Tuesday afternoon that its WebSphere sMash 1.1 platform for situational applications can function with the SugarCRM Sugar 5.2 CRM system, offering capabilities such as workflow. Announced last year,...

Opera working on faster JavaScript engine; Carakan, intended to be world's fastest JavaScript engine, will be released in as-yet-undetermined version of the Opera browser.
February 5, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Opera is working on a JavaScript engine, called Carakan, which is intended to be the fastest JavaScript engine on the planet, according to Opera. Carakan (pronounced Tsharakan) is now 2.5 times faster than Futhark,...

Oracle buys mValent; mValent's app configuration management technology will boost Oracle's Enterprise Manager platform.
February 5, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Oracle is acquiring application configuration management vendor mValent, with the goal of enhancing the Oracle Enterprise Manager platform, Oracle said this week. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. [ Oracle...

Test Center review: Amazon eases cloud control; With its intuitive interface, the highly capable AWS Management Console is an ideal for users new to cloud computing.
February 5, 2009... Byline: Rick Grehan When Amazon's Elastic Cloud was in its infancy, the only management tools available were a set of Java-based command-line applications. The set was comprehensive: You had complete control over and access to Amazon...

You don't know tech: The InfoWorld news quiz; Match your weekly tech news wits against our snarky quiz master.
February 6, 2009... Byline: Dan Tynan Call this week The Good, The Bad, and The Google. The search mavens were all over the news -- declaring the entire Internet a malware infestation, plumbing the world's oceans, fighting privacy lawsuits, creating next-gen...

BlackBerry still targeting businesses; On the smartphone's 10th anniversary, RIM officials discussed its signature handheld's enterprise strengths over competitors like the iPhone and the Google Android platform.
February 6, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill While competitors like the Apple iPhone and the budding Google Android platform have garnered a lot of attention lately, Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the ubiquitous BlackBerry smartphone, sees itself as the right...

WSO2 offers open source, componentized SOA; Carbon framework lets developers deploy only needed components and eliminate complexities of middleware integration.
February 6, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Open source SOA vendor WSO2 on Monday will debut a componentized framework for SOA based on OSGi, with the intent of letting user sites assemble just what they need for their own deployments without having to carry...

You don't know tech: The InfoWorld news quiz; Match your weekly tech news wits against our snarky quiz master.
February 9, 2009... Byline: Dan Tynan Call this week The Good, The Bad, and The Google. The search mavens were all over the news -- declaring the entire Internet a malware infestation, plumbing the world's oceans, fighting privacy lawsuits, creating next-gen...

The incredible shrinking operating system; Windows, Mac OS, and Linux are all getting smaller. What does that mean for you?
February 9, 2009... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz From the software concept called JeOS (pronounced "juice"), the Just Enough OS, to hardware concepts like Celio RedFly, an 8-inch screen and keyboard device running applications off a smartphone via a USB or a...

Should Microsoft simplify XP-to-Win-7 upgrades? XP users must do a clean install to get Windows 7, which could be a hurdle for adoption.
February 9, 2009... Byline: Galen Gruman When Windows 7 is released later this year or in early 2010, many PC users who upgrade will be coming from Windows XP. Unlike Vista users, they can't do an "in-place upgrade," in which the new OS overwrites the old...

Google syncing Gmail, Calendar with iPhone; Google Sync licenses Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync protocol technology.(Calendar)
February 9, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Google said on Monday it was releasing a beta version of Google Sync for the iPhone and Windows Mobile phones, providing the ability to synchronize Gmail contact information and Google Calendar events with handheld...

IBM extends service management beyond IT; Big Blue's new products and services aim to help customers create more efficient and intelligent infrastructures that ultimately enable cloud-based services.
February 9, 2009... Byline: Tom Sullivan IBM on Monday announced a host of products and services that it claims will arm customers with the technology to build new dynamic infrastructures that meld physical and digital realms. "We call these building...

Test Center review: Java fights Flash; Sun's JavaFX is a crisp, simple way to leverage existing Java code, Java 2D, and Java Web Start technology for more Web-savvy interfaces.
February 9, 2009... Byline: Peter Wayner A long time ago, in an ancient world when the Internet was young, the Java language was so hot that Fortune put Scott McNealy on the cover with a superhero costume and the name "Java Man." The cross-architecture power...

The cloud-SOA connection; IT groups that understand SOA may be able to take better advantage of the cloud.
February 10, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Cloud computing may have overtaken SOA as the trendy technology term du jour, but the two concepts can be paired to bolster service deployments, industry experts say. With cloud computing, enterprises can access services...

Microsoft gets its 10,000th U.S. patent; A surface computing technology patent hit the milestone for the company, which is continuing to rethink how best to utilize its patents.
February 10, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Microsoft is marking on Tuesday the recent awarding of its 10,000th U.S. patent, granted for its surface computing technology. U.S. Patent No. 7,479,950 outlines how users can place objects, ranging from cell phones...

Tech layoffs: The real numbers aren't so bad; A series of announcements suggest 35,000 or more tech-vendor workers lost their jobs this winter; the real figures are far, far less.
February 11, 2009... Byline: Tom Sullivan From the constant drip of tech industry layoff announcements, you'd think huge numbers of IT workers would be out on the street. And certainly Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Oracle, SAP, Sun, and others have...

Moonlight 1.0 puts Silverlight on Linux; The open source project unveiled on Wednesday that brings Microsoft's RIA platform to Linux and Unix was used to stream the Presidential inauguration.
February 11, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Moonlight 1.0, an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich media application platform, was announced Wednesday for Unix and Linux systems, said Miguel de Icaza, the Novell developer who has been in...

Snakebite network readied for open source projects; The network will allow developers to test their software on multiple platforms.
February 11, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Developers soon will have a network to go to for developing principally open source projects and testing their software on multiple platforms. The planned Snakebite network is intended to "provide developers of open...

Test Center: Five products compete to protect clients from malware, viruses, and other threats; InfoWorld testing reveals key differences in platform support, security features, and reporting functions among Check Point, McAfee, Sophos, Symantec, and Trend Micro apps.
February 11, 2009... Byline: Keith Schultz Every computer that connects to the Internet must have some form of anti-virus protection installed. The number and type of virus threats increase every year, with new ones appearing at an alarming rate. However,...

iPhone management tools: Are they enough? Apple has no enterprise-class tool, and analysts doubt that point products from other vendors fill the gap.
February 12, 2009... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz The simple facts are these: Unlike its main smartphone competitors, Apple does not offer large organizations a set of centralized application software controls to push applications and policies to the iPhone or to...

Amazon, IBM, and Savvis bridge datacenters to cloud; Companies unwrap cloud-based offerings, plans, and partnerships to bring more flexibility to customers.
February 12, 2009... Byline: Tom Sullivan IBM has had a busy week, cloud computing-wise, but it's not the only company making such waves. Savvis is embarking on Thursday on an ambitious plan to offer enterprise customers a complete virtualized datacenter....

Joy ponders software, decline of print media; Sun co-founder Bill Joy also touts green energy initiatives.
February 12, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and author of Berkeley Unix, predicted the decline of the print newspaper, lamented the state of software development, and pondered the futures for green energy and the...

Test Center: A cure for Vista's compatibility blues; Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization taps an anemic virtualization engine to bridge the gap with legacy Windows XP and Windows 2000 applications.
February 12, 2009... Byline: Randall C. Kennedy Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization, or MED-V, is the productized version of technology the company obtained through its acquisition of Kidaro in 2007. Slated to ship in the second quarter as part of the...

Bespin Web-based code editor effort launched; The Bespin project is intended to boost productivity and speed and provide the richness of a desktop editor in a Web-based environment.
February 13, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Mozilla Labs this week launched a preview of Bespin, a Web-based code editor intended to boost developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences and promote "open" standards. Launched as a project within...

You don't know tech: The InfoWorld news quiz; Match your weekly tech news wits against our snarky quiz master.
February 16, 2009... The week of Friday the 13th proved an unlucky one for small Web startups and a Michigan congressman who's just a bit too enamored of Twitter. On the other hand, Amazon trotted out a new Kindle, Google unveiled yet more free services, Yahoo came...

Cloud options for IT that IT will love; Bring cloud computing to your datacenter to extend your IT infrastructure while saving big bucks.
February 16, 2009... Byline: Mel Beckman Back in 1991, before the Internet was a big deal, Ohio State University technologist Jerry Martin signalled the nascent Internet's value with an official standards document entitled "There's gold in them thar networks!"...

Test Center: DiVitas' mobile desk phone; DiVitas Mobile Unified Communications taps Wi-Fi and VoIP to marry the mobile smartphone with the company PBX.
February 16, 2009... Byline: Brian Chee When we tested the DiVitas Mobile Convergence Appliance in May 2007 (see the review), the value proposition was straightforward. By leveraging VoIP, wireless LAN connections, and dual-mode Windows Mobile phones, the...

Outsourcer Aragon buys Krugle; Aragon will use Krugle's code-searching technology to enhance its Next.0 Delivery Platform.
February 17, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Software outsourcing company Aragon Consulting Group has acquired Krugle, which has specialized in code search and analysis. Aragon announced the acquisition on Tuesday. With the Krugle technology, Aragon plans to...

Test Center: BlackBerry Curve 8900 hits the hotspot with VoIP; RIM's pocket-sized, dual-mode QWERTY handset taps Wi-Fi and IP telephony for clear, unlimited T-Mobile HotSpot calling.
February 17, 2009... Byline: Tom Yager RIM has developed a knack for pulling customers into new BlackBerry devices. That's no mean feat. BlackBerry is the most mature, most imitated, and most-targeted brand in the mobile industry. RIM keeps new handsets...

Netbooks in the business: Do they make sense? For field forces, the answer is clearly yes. For other users, the fit is less clear.
February 18, 2009... Byline: Ephraim Schwartz With the some of the most recognized names in the high-tech industry -- Intel, Arm, Microsoft, Linux, Acer, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, and many more -- hyping netbooks as the next big thing, InfoWorld decided to...

Google seeks apps demo videos; Developers invited to make submissions of apps they have made based on Google's technology.
February 18, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Google is asking developers to send videos of applications based on the company's technologies, which could be featured on the code.google.com site or Google developer blogs. The company, said Christine Tsai, product...

Soasta cloud platform tests Web apps globally; Conditions and Web traffic are simulated at different levels of scale to help developers fine-tune code, firewalls, or load balancers.
February 18, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Soasta is offering developers a cloud service for testing Web applications under simulated conditions, with hits coming from globally distributed locations. Available on Wednesday, the company's CloudTest Global...

Test Center: Sun's stellar NAS in a can; The Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System's combination of 48 drives, SSD log storage, broad protocol support, ZFS, and amazing GUI make for one great filer.
February 19, 2009... Byline: Paul Venezia Not so long ago, I tested the Sun Fire X4500 Storage Server, aka Thumper, which went on to win InfoWorld's 2008 Technology of the Year award for Best Storage Server. Thumper was a dual-CPU, dual-core Opteron-based...

You don't know tech: The InfoWorld news quiz; Match your weekly tech news wits against our snarky quiz master.
February 20, 2009... Byline: Dan Tynan After a week in Barcelona attending the Mobile World Congress, you might forgive us if we have cell phones on the brain, or at least what's left of it. More than half the questions in this week's quiz deal with handsets...

Microsoft Visual Studio to boost SharePoint; Templates and an extensibility API eyed for upgrade to development environment.
February 20, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Developers building solutions based on Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration and business process platform will gain expanded support in the planned Visual Studio 2010 development environment, which will feature templates...

iWay Software enters EIM fray; New enterprise information management suite springs out of company's ETL, integration past.
February 20, 2009... Byline: Tom Sullivan Building on its ETL and integration history, iWay Software brought forth this week a new enterprise information management suite and two add-on products that expand the EIM capabilities. The company designed the...

You don't know tech: The InfoWorld news quiz; Match your weekly tech news wits against our snarky quiz master.
February 23, 2009... Byline: Dan Tynan After a week in Barcelona attending the Mobile World Congress, you might forgive us if we have cell phones on the brain, or at least what's left of it. More than half the questions in this week's quiz deal with handsets...

Test your Web IQ; Think you know all there is to know about the World Wide Web? Take our quiz to find out.
February 23, 2009... Byline: Neil McAllister The World Wide Web has had the greatest impact on our lives of any technology since the personal computer itself. But Web 2.0 didn't happen overnight -- the history of this radical medium spans 17 years of servers,...

Borland offers release readiness for software; TeamInspector is part of company's software delivery platform and helps development managers know when software is ready for customer use.
February 23, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Borland Software is unveiling on Monday TeamInspector, a "release readiness" system that reveals metrics to give development managers evidence that software is ready for customer use. Metrics like code analysis, test...

Microsoft cites cloud as transformational; The company promoted cloud computing in general and its Windows Azure technology in particular at the MSDN Developer Conference.(Conference news)
February 23, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Promoting its Windows Azure cloud OS, Microsoft described on Monday the cloud as a transformational shift for the industry. The move to the cloud follows transformations from the mainframe to the PC, from the PC to...

Seagate sees datacenter power, SSDs as future priorities; The drive maker's CEO dismisses cloud-based storage and expects storage use to recover earlier than other technologies.
February 23, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Disk drive maker Seagate is working on solving the issue of power consumption in the datacenter, the company's CEO said in an interview with InfoWorld. While short on specific details, CEO Stephen Luczo said the company...

Vertica tailors its analytic database for VMware; IT shops can deploy the virtualized appliance to private clouds.
February 23, 2009... Byline: Tom Sullivan Vertica packaged its Vertica Virtualized Analytic Database as a software appliance and unwrapped the bundle on Monday. "This is almost a no-brainer for us," explains Dave Menninger, vice president of product...

Test Center review: Thumbs-up to FileMaker upgrade; FileMaker Pro 10 is significantly improved with a smoother GUI and winning new features, but faces stiff competition on Windows.
February 23, 2009... Byline: Martin Heller A wonderfully easy-to-use desktop database product that runs on Windows and the Mac, FileMaker Pro is ideal for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as departments of large and enterprise-sized businesses....

Enterprise architecture groups merge; Affiliate of The Open Group joins with GEAO; the merged organization will focus on advancing enterprise architecture.
February 24, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Two industry organizations focused on enterprise architecture have merged. The Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects (AOGEA), an affiliate of The Open Group, has merged with the Global Enterprise...

Google sets billing rates for App Engine; Developers using the hosting service who want to go beyond App Engine's free quota limits will be able to pay for more resource usage.
February 24, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Google on Tuesday will institute new billing services for developers using its App Engine hosting service for Web applications, but developers will be able to go beyond the capacity quotas that had been in place, a...

Microsoft offers language-agnostic coding technology; Code Contracts enables "design by contract" programming for .Net.
February 24, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Bolstering developers, Microsoft Research has developed Code Contracts, offering a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .Net. The technology was released on the Microsoft DevLabs site this week....

Update: Microsoft shows off new Visual Studio UI; The look and feel for Visual Studio 2010 will be based on Windows Presentation Foundation and .Net Framework 4.0.
February 24, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Microsoft showed on Tuesday morning the "modernized" look and feel for the planned Visual Studio 2010 software development environment. The company detailed the UI effort at the VSLive conference in San Francisco....

More specialty Linuxes to the rescue; Whether your focus is security, storage, music, or religion, there's a flavor of Linux that fits the bill.
February 24, 2009... Byline: Rick Grehan The day of the mold-your-own OS has come, and Linux is the clay. Linux provides free and open access to the source for the OS itself. Developers are free to tailor a custom Linux -- even down to the level of the...

HP adds to apps performance management pack; The HP Performance Center 9.5 suite of performance- and load-testing software has been upgraded along with HP's ALM services.
February 26, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill HP boosted its software for managing application performance this week with upgrades to its performance testing suite and load-testing software. With the HP Performance Center 9.5 suite, customers can validate...

ManageEngine moves network management tools to the cloud; The company has posted a free beta of its OpManager On-Demand service and plans to offer more wares as hosted services over the course of the year.
February 26, 2009... Byline: Tom Sullivan ManageEngine is beginning a transformation this week to offer network management tools SaaS-style. The company took its first step down the software-as-service path with a free beta of OpManager On-Demand, a...

Microsoft sues Linux-based vendor over patents; The legal action against TomTom could signal a more aggressive stance regarding open source by the software giant.
February 26, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Microsoft's lawsuit against a Linux-based technology vendor TomTom over alleged patent violations could signal a more aggressive stance by the software giant over IP issues or could be just an isolated case involving a...

Test Center review: King of the dynamic IDEs; Multilingual ActiveState Komodo 5.0 conquers Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby projects with strong debug facilities, excellent code control, and an unbeatable set of utilities.
February 26, 2009... Byline: James R. Borck Komodo IDE 5 from ActiveState is the most comprehensive code editor and debugger available for enterprise teams that develop applications using a range of dynamic languages. Komodo's strong debugging skills are...

Test Center: Safari 4 preview; Apple's new beta of Safari for Mac OS X and Windows is fast, beautiful, tuned to the latest Web standards, and finally even with the remarkable WebKit project.
February 26, 2009... Byline: Tom Yager You already know Safari. It's the only browser that ships with OS X, in the same manner that Internet Explorer is the de facto browser for Windows. Safari rose to greater recognition as the iPhone's touchy-feely Web 2.0...

You don't know tech: The InfoWorld news quiz; Match your weekly tech news wits against our snarky quiz master.
February 27, 2009... Byline: Dan Tynan It's the Land of the Lost this week here at quiz central. Among other things, a major U.S. corporation lost track of its severance payments, Congress suffered a Twitter-induced loss of attention during this week's...

FathomDB launches cloud database; The company's beta program is the only standard relational database in the cloud and features data safety and analytics.
February 27, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill FathomDB unveiled on Friday its database as a service platform for the cloud. Speaking at a TechCrunch's "Whose Cloud is it Anyway?" roundtable event in Mountain View, Calif., on Friday afternoon, Justin Santa...

Microsoft converging programming languages; Upgrades to Visual Basic and C# will co-evolve the platforms together and bring interoperability with dynamic languages.
February 27, 2009... Byline: Paul Krill Microsoft will converge features of Visual Basic and C# languages with planned upgrades to the two platforms, a Microsoft official said this week. Visual Basic 10 and C# 4 are both due concurrently with the Visual...