Development

Java development will become markedly easier if upcoming technologies from Eclipse Foundation and Sun Microsystems Inc. live up to their promise.

Most enterprise development tools vendors have remarkably little interaction with developers. That grows from two principles that guide the tools market: Developers don't make buying decisions, and it's impossible to make any two developers happy. For PR's sake it's a good idea to create a forum or a newsgroup for developers to complain to one another, but for sanity's sake, don't let anyone from the company participate in it.

Sleepycat Software Inc. recently began shipping Berkeley DB Java Edition, a Java version of its embedded database.

Seven software vendors announced on Wednesday plans to team up with IBM Corp. in an effort to prepare their applications for grid computing.

The backlash against offshoring will deepen over the next few months, but will be consigned to the wastebasket of history by the end of 2005, according to Craig Baty, group vice-president, Global Tech Industries Group, Gartner Inc.

IBM Corp. next week for the first time will add support for Microsoft Corp.'s .Net development tools to its access management software, letting corporations build support for IBM's identity management platform directly into Windows-based applications.

IBM Corp. rolled out a new version of its enterprise software that integrates information from numerous sources by using automated features and search technology.

Talisma Corp. has upgraded its namesake software for the increasingly competitive CRM (customer relationship management) market, adding "co-browsing" capabilities, user-defined interface customization features and the ability to handle a greater number of concurrent users, according to company officials in New York last week at CeBIT America