OCTOBER 15, 2006 • ISSUE NO. 160 Borland ...dighamm/publicity/SDTimes160.pdf · that BEA’s SOA...

BY ALEX HANDY

Borland Software is abandoningCore SDP, formerly the center-piece of its application life-cyclemanagement approach to soft-ware development, according toofficials at the company.

The role-based Core SDP,which had been released to muchfanfare in March 2005, has beenpushed aside by a new four-waysolution, led by Borland’s newLifecycle Quality Management(LQM) suite.

Brad Johnson, Borland’sdirector of product marketing,said that Core SDP would soonbe phased out in favor of the fourdifferent life-cycle managementsolutions based on the company’s

newest products. These piecescan be combined into a singleALM solution, and Johnsonpointed out that the productsthat made up Core SDP arebeing portioned out into theappropriate new package.

Marc Brown, senior directorof product marketing, said thatCore SDP’s roles-based toolingdid not reflect the roles that exist-ed within clients’ companies.“Everyone defines those roles dif-ferently,” said Brown. When askedif the Core SDP would bechopped up and rebranded underthe four new ALM solution lines,Brown said, “Yes.”

The decision to dump Core

BY JENNIFER DEJONG

Filling a post that has beenvacant for more than a year, theU.S. Department of HomelandSecurity has named GregoryGarcia to be the nation’s firstassistant secretary for cybersecu-rity and telecommunications.

DHS Secretary MichaelChertoff last month pluckedGarcia from the InformationTechnology Association of Amer-ica, a trade group where he hasserved as vice president for infor-mation security policy and pro-grams since 2003. “Greg bringsthe right mix of experience ingovernment and the private sec-tor to continue to strengthen ourrobust partnerships that areessential to this field,” Chertoffsaid in a statement.

Paul Kurtz, executive directorfor the advocacy group CyberSecurity Industry Alliance and acritic of the way DHS has han-dled cybersecurity issues, praisedthe appointment. “Greg is anexcellent choice for the position,bringing both his solid knowl-edge of information securityissues and strong relationships inthe private sector to [DHS],” hesaid in a statement.

Earlier this year, Kurtz,among others, criticized DHSfor its failure to fill the assistant

Borland’s LQM suite encompasses the testing and requirements tools neededto integrate testing and development teams under one communication andplanning framework.

Borland Dumps Core SDPFour-way product offerings replace single ALM platform

U.S. NamesFirst Czar OfCybersecurityIT trade associationexecutive Garcia fillslong-vacant position

OCTOBER 15, 2006 • ISSUE NO. 160 www.sdtimes.com • $7.95

A BZ Media Publication

BEA Comes Full Circle With SOA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

A Global View of Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

Analyst Says Red Hat Stack Comes Up Short . . . . . . . . . .8

Microsoft Refreshes Office Beta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

Toad Hops Onto Mainframes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15

CountDown to Universal Device Testing . . . . . . . . . . . . .22

O’BRIEN: Test-First Tactic Trounces Thread Threat . . . .29

BINSTOCK: The Language of Lua . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29

RUBINSTEIN: Mercury and Points Offshore . . . . . . . . . .30

IN THIS ISSUESTPCon Makes Tracks On Testing page 16

continued on page 21 >


BY ALEX HANDY

The blind may soon be able tobetter access AJAX widgets inWeb sites. The World Wide WebConsortium has published thebeginnings of new acces-sibility standards aimed atrich Internet applica-tions. The guidelines area first step toward theestablishment of best practicesfor making RIAs accessible toscreen readers and alternateforms of computer interface navigation.

Judy Brewer, director of theWeb accessibility initiative for

the W3C, said that the newguidelines and road map, whichwere released in late September,will expand significantly overtime. “We’re calling them the

start of the WAI-ARIASuite. That includes onedocument that’s essen-tially a road map, andtwo documents that

include work in specific areas,”said Brewer. The latter of thesetwo documents seeks to lay outhow roles, states and propertiesshould be defined in accessiblerich Internet applications.

WAI-ARIA stands for the Web

Accessibility Initiative’s Accessi-ble Rich Internet Applicationsuite. That suite, said Brewer, willcomprise best practices docu-ments that will give developersguidelines for making their RIAsamenable to use by the blind andphysically handicapped.

Brewer said that the initialset of three documents—theroad map, states and properties,and roles documents—are nowopen for review and comment.Later, the Web Accessibility Ini-tiative will expand and refinethese and other accessible RIA-


page 5

BEHIND THECODING:THE MAKINGOF A‘ROCK STAR’APPLICATION

SPECIAL REPORT:ECLIPSE PROJECTSBefore the next release train is ready for consumption, a fewtasty morsels will beready to serve

W3C Giving Sites to the BlindWorking on accessibility standards for rich Internet apps

page 25

A HUB OFAJAX

ACTIVITY PAGE 6

Source: Borland Software

Software Development Times October 15, 2006 NEWS 3www.sdtimes.com

BY ALEX HANDY

BEA Systems used its annualconference to announce thecircling of its product lines.The mid-September eventwas highlighted by theannouncement of SOA 360(as in 360 degrees), the company’s new name for its integrated SOA platform.Comprising WebLogic,AquaLogic and Tuxedo, SOA360 will offer a single man-agement and developmentenvironment for service-ori-ented architectures.

Alfred Chuang, chair-man and CEO of BEA, tookthe keynote stage of BEAWorldto discuss the potential of SOAin the enterprise. During hisspeech, he said that BEA nowearns 20 percent of its revenuefrom AquaLogic sales, despitethe product being just over ayear old. “SOA puts businessback in charge of business,”said Chuang. He went on to

state that SOA allows difficultbusiness processes to be bettermanaged and executed upon.

The newly titled platformwill materialize in 2007 with thefirst release of WorkSpace 360,an Eclipse-based collaborativedevelopment environment.SOA 360 will also include theexisting BEA SOA products,

and incorporate some newbits of code that tie every-thing together under thisEclipse control panel.

Bill Roth, vice presidentof BEA’s Workshop Group,said the WebLogic Work-shop development environ-ment will become a part of the WorkSpace 360 platform. Additional tool-ing will arrive in 2007, and will include a relationshiplayout tool, PHP develop-ment facilities and possibleexpanded support forREST. Roth demonstratedone of these tools, Web-

Space Architect, which dia-grams the XML associated withcode held in the repository for-merly known as Flashline.

Noel Yuhanna, senior ana-lyst at Forrester Research, saidthat BEA’s SOA 360 offers abroader perspective of SOA. “Ithink they are taking the rightsteps toward…getting this into

a real-world scenario.” But Mike Wienick, consul-

tant and analyst for Europeanfirm Pierre Audion, said thathe was still waiting to see justhow much of SOA 360 is mar-keting hype, and how much isactual innovation. “Obviouslythe idea’s very interesting, butto me it’s not very different thanwhat they’ve talked aboutbefore. It makes sense for cus-tomers who are using all three,but how much is it going tocost to upgrade?” wonderedWienick. He went on to say thatBEA has been saying all alongits products would be integrat-ed and cohesive.

MORE WORLD NEWS

Also announced during BEA-World was the release of theAquaLogic Data Services Plat-form 2.5. The software isdesigned to access and presentany form of data available with-in an enterprise.

In addition, the companyannounced the formation of apartnership with Web servicesreseller StrikeIron. The part-nership will bring new dataintegration services for harvest-ing information from Excelspreadsheets and making itavailable to an AquaLogicdeployment through the dataservices platform.

BEA also used the confer-ence to introduce its Guardiansupport service. This new tooloffers real-time suggestions toadministrators working withWebLogic or AquaLogic instal-lations. Guardian, said Chuang,will keep users up to date withcurrent patches and informthem when they are moving intoareas that could cause problemsdown the line. The system candownload and install updatesspecific to situations encoun-tered during daily administra-tion. No date for the delivery ofGuardian was given. z

3www.sdtimes.com

SOA 360 brings together the SOA, transactionand development solutions of BEA.

BEA Pulls a 360 With Consolidated SOA Offering

Source: BEA

BY P.J. CONNOLLY

Fifteen years after its first publication,the Unicode standard has reached amilestone with Unicode 5.0.0, the latestversion of the character encodingscheme. The new version includes1,369 new character assignments, withthree new contemporary script familiesand two ancient: Balinese, N’Ko andPhags-Pa; Phoenician and Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform, respectively.

The cuneiform characters representthe effort of a multidisciplinary teambased out of Johns Hopkins University,known as the Digital Hammurabi pro-ject. Much of the project’s efforts andits National Science Foundation grantwere devoted to hardware solutionsthat addressed the problems of scan-ning three-dimensional clay tablets,and displaying them in a format thatallows users to magnify, pan, rotate andtilt the images, and generate three-dimensional models as well as two-dimensional drawings that representthe precious originals.

But software concerns also played apart: The first cuneiform e-mail wassent in 2001, and in 2004, both theUnicode Consortium and the ISO10646 WG2 working group approved

an encoding standard, which incorpo-rated characters from Akkadian,Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian andSumerian.

Unicode is important in the interna-tionalization and localization of applica-tions; ideally, translatable strings suchas dialog boxes and menu items are sep-arated off into resource files, while vari-able formatting and searching, sortingand other processing are designed to belanguage-independent. This interna-tionalized application is then packagedwith appropriate resource files, becom-ing localized versions that cost less toproduce than those built by translatingthe entire application into other lan-guages, one at a time.

Mark Davis, president of the Uni-code Consortium, explained, “Compa-nies tended to toss their products acrossthe wall to some subsidiary in Japan orFrance or someplace, and that groupwould have to make sense of what allthis code was.” He observed that “you’dend up with something that was diffi-cult to maintain because you had multi-ple versions of code floating around,”with expensive barriers to doing busi-ness in foreign markets. Although themarket for software in Phoenician or

Sumerian is virtuallynil, the Unicode stan-dard includes archaicscripts in support ofacademic and anti-quarian research.

The bulk of thenew characters arefrom the addedscripts; the cuneiform entriesalone account for 982 addi-tions. A number of minor addi-tions to Western and Asiancharacter and symbol sets makeup the rest of the changes to thecharacter database.

The files that constitute the UnicodeCharacter Database are already avail-able online at the Unicode Consor-tium’s Web site (www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0). A hard copyedition, titled “The Unicode Standard,Version 5.0” (ISBN 0-321-48091-0), willbe published by Addison-Wesley in thefourth quarter of this year; the text will beavailable online in the early part of 2007.

Changes in the book’s physical for-mat and paper stock will result in alighter, easier-to-use publication. Nev-ertheless, there’s actually more contentthan ever: The book will provide the

full text of the Unicodestandard, including the

complete Unicode Standard Annexes,for the first time.

Unicode 5.0 tightens the confor-mance requirements for bidirectionalimplementations, used in Semitic lan-guages such as Arabic and Hebrew. Anumber of behavioral specificationsand property values for character,word, line and sentence separationwere tweaked for accuracy; case-fold-ing stability is considered improvedover Unicode 4.1, and support for pat-tern syntax characters and stable iden-tifiers is now included. z

Sumero-AkkadianRecognized HereUnicode 5.0 adds scripts from ancient languages

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BY ALEX HANDY

Adam Leventhal, Mike Shapiro andBryan Cantrill are rock stars at SunMicrosystems. The three have spentalmost the entire new millennium work-ing on DTrace, the ground-breakingdynamic tracing framework in Solaris 10that has won a dedicated following andmuch praise in the industry and press.

DTrace gives developers a view fromthe top of an application to the bottom.Using either prewritten probes or thosewritten in the tool’s D language, DTracefollows a process or thread from its initia-tion to its termination. That gives develop-ers a view into what resources are beingused, where slowdowns occur, and whereserious errors enter the data stream.

We sat down with staff engineer Lev-enthal, distinguished engineer Shapiro,and senior staff engineer Cantrill to dis-cuss the genesis of the DTrace project,and to talk about how software haschanged over the past 10 years. Whatfollows is an excerpt of that discussion.

Adam Leventhal: DTrace…was designedto be able to answer arbitrary questionswith concision. There are two aspects tothe power of DTrace. One is the dynamicnature of it: being able to ask arbitraryquestions from any place in the system,from the lowest levels like the I/O subsys-tems and scheduling, through the kerneland system calls, all the way up to areas ofJava and userland and things like that—aspects of any piece of the system. Theother is that you can gather arbitrary datathat is not just a predetermined payload,but rather anything you can think of. Itwas designed for production systems,meaning that it needs to always be safe.There can never be some way you couldinstrument the system in a way that couldcrash it or cause data corruption. Which isvery different than any other tracingframework that’s been designed in thepast, or any sort of analysis tool that wasdesigned in the past.

Bryan Cantrill: The key observation thatwe had is the nature of software haschanged. It used to be that you wouldgenerate a binary and ship it, and if therewas a problem with the binary, you couldjust go back to development and fix it.

Mike Shapiro: Also that binary was yourwhole application. One binary, one

processor, one thread, and most likelywritten in one language. And probablyonly using the base system, so it mightaccess three libraries.

Cantrill: It was entirely static. So it wasin C, or C++ or Pascal or Fortran.

Leventhal: And the libraries were allfrom one vendor.

Cantrill: Life was simple. And the toolsfor understanding software reflectedthat simplicity. Then in the ’90s, thepromise of componentization that hadbeen fringe became mainstream. Andthat happened, arguably first with Java,but really it was the advent of the Web,where you could suddenly start reallyrealizing distributed computing goals.You had multiple applications now, ormultiple processes that form a singleapplication. So an application becamenot just a binary. But then you had aWeb server and an app server and adatabase server, and now you don’t haveone language—you’ve got three or fouror five. You’ve got these different envi-ronments, different protected domains,and the problem is that the problems insoftware didn’t really show up in devel-opment. They started showing upincreasingly in production…. And theexisting tools were kind of barely keep-ing up in the simple world.

Shapiro: I think the other consequenceof what Bryan is talking about that’simportant to also see is that it’s not justthe same people with different tools, butthat the people roles and what the rolesare have totally changed as well. A lot ofthe people you talk to probably...run thegamut from someone who might bewriting one of those components tosomeone who might be more like anintegrator. And so the componentizationdrives productivity because you can sortof have people who focus on assemblyactivities, or the business logic or theglue. And that changes roles as well,because it means that there’s no notionof, “Well, if I have a problem, only theguy who wrote this had this great tool tofigure out what was going on,” becausethere’s not just one guy anymore.There’s this huge stack of stuff that wasassembled, and you don’t even have thesource code for all of it, right? Even ifyou had the world’s greatest source leveldebugger, it doesn’t really apply to a lotof these new roles. And that’s why thetools not only have to be different, but

also have to look more at who is actuallyusing these things.

Leventhal: We are taking a very differ-ent tack than previous tool makers. Pre-vious tool makers have been focusing ondevelopers in development, which putsvery different constraints on the prob-lem, and they’ve been focusing on oneparticular aspect of the system, likedebugging Java, or debugging C or evenanalyzing kernel statistics. We were try-ing to make a tool that had a systemicscope, that would let you gather informa-

tion from all of these different sources.

Shapiro: The reason why the old toolswere very much focused...around a lan-guage, is because they were written bythe same people that wrote the compiler.

Cantrill: With a compiler, it’s like, “Thisinput needs to produce that output.”And if it doesn’t, it’s busted, and if itdoes, it works...the development toolswere aimed at understanding applica-tions that were that simple. And theworld is just a lot more complicated. z

5www.sdtimes.com

FOR THE COMPLETE

DISCUSSION, GO TO

www.sdtimes.com

DTrace: AnatomyofA ‘RockStar’ApplicationThe makers of the mega-hit dynamic tracing framework discuss changes in development

The Fab Three: Adam Leventhal, Mike Shapiro and Bryan Cantrill came together over DTrace.

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Software Development Times October 15, 2006NEWS6 www.sdtimes.com

BY ALEX HANDY

The OpenAJAX Alliance is hop-ing a new hub will bring harmo-ny to AJAX tooling. The Open-

AJAX Hub is a project aimed atremoving some of the conflictsthat exist between various AJAXtools. Some alliance members

spent the summer writing thishub, while others worked onwhite papers and a newlyunveiled Web site for the group.

The alliance also took timein early October to elect a sev-en-member steering commit-tee. This governing body will

control the direction of thealliance, and head up efforts torefine the OpenAJAX Hub.

Better steering is a goodthing, said Gary Horen, programmanager of BEA Systems’ com-piler team. He is BEA’s currentrepresentative to the alliance,which counted more than 50members as of mid-September.The organization began work inFebruary, and after a secondburst of participation in May,some members went to workchasing short-term goals.

Those goals, said Jon Fer-raiolo, IBM employee and act-ing director of the alliance,were to establish standards,build a central site for informa-tion, and create paths to under-standing for CIOs.

That last bit was accom-plished through the publicationof a 20-odd-page white paper atthe organization’s openajax.orgWeb site. That first goal ofestablishing standards, howev-er, is taking more time andwork than the others. Current-ly, the first stab at standardiza-tion comes in the form of a ref-erence implementation knownas the OpenAJAX Hub.

“The OpenAJAX Hub is thiseffort that’s under way to allowmultiple AJAX toolkits to worktogether on the same Webpage,” said Ferraiolo. The first-generation AJAX productsassume full control of the brows-er runtime. Our goal with thistechnical work is to allow you touse multiple toolkits. That took asummer’s worth of work.”

COLLISION PREVENTION

Using multiple JavaScript toolsat once requires a hierarchicalframework in which they don’tcollide with one another.

Said Ferraiolo: “To minimizeJavaScript collision, the hub hasa registration facility such thateach toolkit can register theadditions it makes to the brows-er’s standard runtime. The hub,when running in debug mode,will flag that.”

The hub seeks to put intocode some of the best practicesthat are being advocated byalliance members. In October,every member of the alliance,prior to the group’s first elec-tions, signed a contract to worktoward and to support thesebest practices. z

Alliance Is a Hub of AJAX ActivityOrganization puts effort into making tools work together smoothly


BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN

Don’t call it an outsourcer,because the company creates atight partnership with theclient. And certainly don’t call itan offshoring company. It hasdevelopment offices in theUnited States as well as in East-ern Europe and India.

Besides, according to PeterHarrison, CEO of the newlynamed GlobalLogic, “those areemotionally charged terms thatmean different things to differ-ent people. We’re global.”

GlobalLogic is the companythat resulted from the mergerlate last month of internationalsoftware development companyInduslogic and Bonus Technol-ogy, a 300-person outsourcingcompany based in New Jerseywith a large operation in theUkraine. Now headquarteredin Tysons Corner, Va., Global-Logic, which is privately heldand backed by venture capital,employs 1,300 people world-wide, with development officesin the U.S., Kiev, New Delhiand Nagpur, India, according toHarrison. The company’s corecompetency is in telecommuni-cations, which also is the area ofgreatest expertise for Bonus.

“We make software thatruns on SIM cards, cell towers,the operations behind the celltowers, billing centers, VoIPstacks [and] fraud detection,”Harrison said. “Millions of peo-ple use the software we write,but our name isn’t on it.”

Harrison said the company’sgoal is to become “the Flex-tronics of the software indus-try.” Flextronics is a roughlyUS$15 billion electronics man-ufacturing services companybehind much of the hardwarein use in aerospace, automo-tive, medical and industrialoperations. It recently sold itssoftware development businessto an affiliate of KohlbergKravis Roberts & Co., a privateequity firm. Sequoia Capital,which holds a small stake in thesoftware business, also is a keyinvestor in GlobalLogic.

Harrison said that unlike true outsourcing engagements,GlobalLogic thinks of its pro-jects as joint ventures. “We forgepartnerships and structure themas virtual subsidiaries,” heexplained. For instance, unlikeother outsourcing contracts,GlobalLogic will not take a per-

son off a team once that personhas been assigned to a project.Also, everything about the pro-ject is placed into a knowledgebase, so “people aren’t waiting

with pregnant pauses due to thetime differences.”

With the merger and renam-ing, GlobalLogic also is rollingout a new platform, Velocity,

that supports the company’sdistributed agile product engi-neering method. Velocity, Har-rison said, is “an amalgamationof open-source products for

such things as knowledge man-agement, source code manage-ment, testing and deployment.”It also has a dashboard for col-laborative management of soft-ware assets and of the develop-ment process, he added.

“The reality is that peopleare getting more product tomarket faster,” Harrison said. z

A Global View of Software DevelopmentMerger creates company focused on agile development of third-party products

7www.sdtimes.com

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Software Development Times October 15, 2006NEWS8

Analyst: Support LaggingFor Red Hat App StackBY ALEX HANDY

Red Hat now stands on top of JBoss, andis reaching further up into the stack. Inmid-September, the company releasedthe first version of its new integratedapplication stack, which includes theJBoss application server, JBoss Hiber-nate, Red Hat Linux and other pieces ofthe LAMP puzzle, including Apache,PHP and a choice of SQL databases.The stack includes support and servicecontracts that will give subscribersaccess to updates and technical support.

Yet the company still has to overcomeissues around the quality of that technicalsupport and others involving the mergerof the QA and test teams resulting fromRed Hat’s April acquisition of JBoss.

Forrester Research analyst MichaelGoulde said that Red Hat’s technicalsupport is usually good, but the companyhas yet to prove itself on the JBoss side.He added that not all of the customershe had spoken with were pleased withthe quality of their technical support.

Goulde said that the move makessense for Red Hat. “There’s no one elsewho will [move up the stack] in a credi-ble fashion,” he said, noting that Novell’soffering is not tied to an application

server. Currently, Novell offers strictlyLAMP stacks with no application-specif-ic tools, like Hibernate or JBoss. WhileNovell does offer its own applicationserver, Extend, the company has notmarketed a cohesive stack based aroundthe Extend environment.

Todd Barr, director of enterprisemarketing at Red Hat, said Red Hat stillis integrating with various JBoss depart-ments for better effect.

“One of the areas of integration froma Red Hat perspective—and we’re onlyabout 100 plus days into this—is thecombination and standardization of ourQA and test teams,” said Barr. He wenton to state that the JBoss support team isbeing remolded in the image of RedHat’s enterprise Linux support team.“We’re applying those same principles tothe JBoss product line. Ultimately, overtime, this should raise the quality of allof our components.”

The company has created rhstack.108.redhat.com, a news and informationsite designed for developers.

The stack costs US$1,999 per serverper year for up to two CPUs, and $5,499for four CPUs. Round-the-clock supportand service costs $8,499 per server. z

COMPANIES A new Web site has appeared inviting

developers and software enthusiasts to

post their beta code for others to see and

use. Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Site On Spot

on Sept. 11 launched BetaMarker.com, a

free community Web site at which users

can judge which beta applications to down-

load based on ratings of other users.

According to the company, visitors to the

site will know which software is best

because poor software “will get voted

against and buried.”

NEW PRODUCTSCanoo has released the free and open-

source ULC XML, an add-in to its Ultra-

LightClient user interface software that

gives Swing developers a rich Internet

application option. ULC XML is similar to

the open-source

SwiXML project,

in that Java classes are mapped to ele-

ment names and property names become

attribute names. The hierarchies of the

XML and the UI components mirror each

other, allowing developers to quickly create

user interfaces. It costs US$1,499 per

developer . . . At the Embedded Systems

Conference in Boston in late September,

RTOS developer Enea introduced Optima,

an Eclipse-based development environ-

ment for its OSE real-time operating sys-

tem. Working with Eclipse (3.1.2) and C/C++

Development Tools (CDT 3.1.1), the environ-

ment performs system-level browsing,

debugging, profiling and analysis of large

distributed systems across multiple

processors and operating systems. Enea

also is offering plug-ins for run-mode

debugging, an OSE-specific object browser,

and a pool profiler for system memory

analysis . . . Also at ESC, Enea said it would

begin shipping Element 2.0 later this year,

an update to its middleware for high-avail-

ability distributed systems. Version 2.0 will

be compatible with systems running Monta

Vista Carrier Grade Linux, Red Hat Enter-

prise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora Core, and

CentOS (Community Enterprise Operating

System), a free redistribution of Linux

based on RHEL 2.1.

UPDATESTroux has released version 6 of its Metis

enterprise architecture solution with the

ability to create data marts from which

information can be extracted and reported

for use in establishing strategic business

plans. Metis Server, one of the core pieces,

includes the enterprise asset metadata



BY EDWARD J. CORREIA

The ability to connect with and consumenative XML data streams and to process,publish and repurpose that data as richcontent are among the new features inCoral8 Engine 4.4, released on Sept 18.

According to John Morrell, Coral8’sproduct marketing director, its namesakecomplex event processing solution offersbenefits over competitive XML proces-sors that flatten XML structure. “If yourXML stream is highly hierarchical, you’dhave to rip [the stream] apart to processit, and that can drive latency up andreduce throughput,” he said, adding thatonly then can processing begin. “To docomplex event processing on top of [thatflattened] XML would require a lot ofextra code and time to process.”

Since data sources such as those inSOAs and ESBs are streamed usingXML, Morrell said, it made sense tomodify the engine. “You can now just

take XML in your engine and process itnatively, without having to shred or andtransform it into another format. Thatsaves you a lot of coding,” he said, addingthat, in most cases, the application windsup being a lot faster. The engine, avail-able now, works with standards-basedSOAs and ESBs.

A full-featured predeployment versionis available for free at the company’s Website. Licensing starts at US$20,000 for theprofessional edition and $60,000 for theenterprise edition, which adds clustering,high availability, service guarantees andstate persistence for disaster recovery.

Also new in Coral8 4.4 is the additionof variables to its SQL-like language.Morrell said that developers can nowbuild an application that watches the 50-day moving average of a stock, he said,and when the figure reaches a certainpoint, “set a variable as the current stockprice and pass it to another module. z

Coral8 Engine 4.4 Speaks Native XML

BY JENNIFER DEJONG

What if developers could write applica-tions smart enough to diagnose them-selves, and prescribe fixes accordingly?

That’s what IBM researchers have inmind with The Build to Manage Toolkitfor Problem Determination, expected todebut later this year on the company’semerging technology Web site, develop-erWorks.

The toolkit teaches a Java applicationto recognize common errors, encodinginformation on how to fix the problem,said IBM vice president of autonomiccomputing Ric Telford. It’s a matter oftelling the application: “If you see this,then do that.” For instance, an errorrecorded in a DB2 log file could be asymptom that not enough JDBC con-

nections are open to the Web server, hesaid, offering an example. “The applica-tion can fix itself by changing the config-uration settings in DB2.”

The application essentially creates itsown catalog of symptoms, and associatedfixes, and carries that catalog with itfrom coding to testing and deployment,said Telford. The ability to do that easessupport burdens for developers of com-mercial software. “They capture prob-lems and fixes and ship that informationwith the product,” he said.

The toolkit also can record bugsfound during the testing phase, retain-ing that knowledge throughout thedevelopment cycle, said Telford. “Oth-erwise, the deployment team has toreinvent the wheel.” z

Coral8’s event processing server helps create business intelligence.

Source: Coral8

Writing Apps That Fix Their Own Flaws

©2006 Software FX. All rights reserved. Chart FX is a registered trademark of Software FX, Inc. All other brands are owned by their respective owners.

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BY P.J. CONNOLLY

Sometimes, code names arebetter, or at least simpler. TakeCypress for example, which is a lot easier to type than the actual product name: Visu-al Studio 2005 Tools for

Office Second Edition. VSTO2005 SE was released in betalast month and is expected tobe ready around year’s end and available at the same timeas the 2007 Microsoft OfficeSystem.

A so-called “technical re-fresh” of Office Beta 2 alsobecame available for downloadlast month. Mostly consisting ofbug fixes, the refresh alsoadded some last-minute UI “fit-and-finish” changes, including a

Quick Customize Menu, and isoptimized for testing with Win-dows Vista RC1, which wasreleased at the beginning of lastmonth.

The new add-in tools forVisual Studio add support for

PowerPoint and Visio, joiningExcel, InfoPath, Outlook andWord. The feature Microsoft istouting the most is applica-tion-level add-in support,allowing the management, safeloading and unloading of man-aged add-ins.

According to product man-ager Mike Hernandez, VSTO2005 SE “really supports thewhole notion of Office as adevelopment platform.” Hepointed to features built intoVSTO 2005 SE Beta, includinga programming model andruntime support for newOffice features such as customtask panes, Outlook formregions and the Ribbon UI.Developers can now use VSTO2005 SE’s design-time featuresto build InfoPath 2007 formsfrom within Visual Studio.

GATEWAY TO VISUAL STUDIO

“We wanted to provide a tool setthat was literally a gatewaybetween Office developers andVisual Studio developers, so thatOffice developers would have ameans of getting into a profes-sional environment like VisualStudio,” Hernandez observed.

For smaller projects, notedHernandez, “VBA’s a great tool.When you get into more enter-prise line-of-business applica-tions [with requirements forcentralized support, centralizeddeployment, collaboration capa-bilities and security], “then youdefinitely want to go withVSTO.”

At the time VSTO 2005 SEwas announced in June, KDHallman, Microsoft’s generalmanager for the developer sideof the project, admitted in ablog post that it wasn’t going toprovide exactly the same fea-ture set as the VSTO 2005tools for Office 2003. CertainExcel and Word project fea-tures are being hived off intothe VSTO release planned toship around Visual StudioOrcas. That VSTO release willalso incorporate visual design-ers for custom task panes andthe Ribbon UI.

Applications written with theoriginal VSTO 2005 and Office2003 in mind will run under thenew versions of VSTO andOffice. The VSTO beta is avail-able for free to all users of Visu-al Studio Tools for Office 2005,or Visual Studio 2005 Profes-sional Edition, and can bedownloaded from Microsoft. z


Office Beta Refreshed, With New VS Tools


BY P.J. CONNOLLY

Last month, Altova releasedDatabaseSpy 2007, a new data-base design, management andquery tool that the companyclaims can handle any ADO orODBC database. DatabaseSpyplugs into a variety of databaseplatforms; the first releaseworks with the current crop ofIBM DB2, Microsoft, MySQL,Oracle and Sybase products,and runs on the Windows NTfamily of operating systems.

Altova’s previous productssuch as the MapForce Webservices creation tool hadtouched databases, so this isn’tnew ground for the company.Tim Hale, Altova’s marketingdirector, observed: “We alreadyhad some expertise in workingwith databases [from the exist-ing tools], and we decided toleverage that to introduce thisnew tool.”

DatabaseSpy 2007 includesa built-in SQL editor that pro-vides auto-completion, colorcoding, drag-and-drop editingand syntax checking to assistusers in getting SQL statementsright the first time. Users candefine collapsible sections ofcode for faster browsing andediting, according to Hale. TheQuickConnect wizard allowsusers to select specific rows in adatabase table for inspection, orretrieve all rows; users can alsosimultaneously access multipledatabases of different typeswith QuickConnect.

In addition, DatabaseSpyoffers a visual database designerthat lets users create databasesfrom scratch or modify them asneeded without hand-codingthe SQL syntax. The designpane offers drag-and-drop con-struction from existing tables,and a preview function letsusers see the effect of changesthat the generated SQL state-ments would have, before com-mitting them to the database.

A project manager in Data-baseSpy lets users organize fre-quently accessed connections,design files and SQL scripts intoproject files for faster reloadingand reuse, Hale said. Anotherfeature in DatabaseSpy allowsusers to access the many stand-alone databases that businesssoftware applications create anduse without any thought given tomanagement or access by otherapplications; this allows themaintenance and reuse of data

that would otherwise be diffi-cult, if not impossible to recycle.

Applications that requiredata in XML format are oftenhindered by the inability ofdatabases to present their con-

tents in the appropriatescheme. DatabaseSpy’s contentmigration tools allow users toexport databases to structuredor flat XML files for stand-alone use, or directly into Alto-

va’s XMLSpy product. CSVexport and import are also pos-sible, as is data export toHTML or Microsoft Excel files.

Altova’s MapForce and theStyleVision report generator also

complement the feature set ofDatabaseSpy. MapForce allowson-the-fly conversions fromdatabase, EDI, text and XMLfiles, and provides for offlineconversions as well, while Style-Vision’s drag-and-drop interfacesimplifies the task of designingoutput from XML documentsand databases. z

Spying on Your Own Data With Altova13www.sdtimes.com

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BY P.J. CONNOLLY

Quest Software announced therelease of Toad 2.0 for DB2,which now allows users to workwith the same feature setsagainst DB2 for z/OS as they doagainst DB2 for Linux, Unix andWindows implementations—afirst, the company claims.

The software now offers astreamlined installation withembedded DB2 client softwareand DB2 Personal Connect forconnections to DB2 mainframeand AS/400 installations.

When Toad for DB2 firstshipped last year, according toproduct manager Amit Argarwal,the company had to turn awaymany people because the origi-nal product didn’t work withthe mainframe DB2. Users cannow “connect to the z/OS sys-tem, and do all the same typesof things that they’re used todoing” with other Toad releas-es, he said.

“Mainframe has traditionallybeen a very closed environ-ment,” Argarwal continued,“where a lot of the develop-ment that goes on is donethrough green-screen-type,esoteric interfaces.” He wenton to observe that Toad for

DB2 allowed people with skillson other database platforms tomore easily apply their knowl-edge in an otherwise unfamiliarenvironment.

Toad for DB2 2.0 adds a so-called “Analyst Edition” that

gives users a master detailbrowser, pivot table analysisand report generation options,and which runs in a read-onlymode. The Professional andExpert Editions continue fromthe first version; the latter adds

performance tuning to the Pro-fessional Edition’s code com-pletion, debugging, import andsource control features. Allthree of these editions workwith DB2 for z/OS.

For users interested in

advanced development andmodeling, the Toad for DB2Suite adds developer editions ofBenchmark Factory for Data-bases, DataFactory and theToad Data Modeler, but doesnot support DB2 for z/OS z

Quest’s Toad Now Can Take on Mainframes15www.sdtimes.com


Oracle in late September releasedBerkeley DB 4.5, which it claimsis a faster, easier-to-use version ofthe popular application-specificdatabase. It’s the first Oracle-branded release of the softwareonce known as Sleepycat.

Oracle has added a snapshotfeature to version 4.5, which itsays provides concurrency con-trol for databases used in highlyconcurrent, mixed read/writesystems. Also new is the abilityto perform upgrades of replicat-ed databases without stoppingthe system. Aiding this featureis a replication framework,including a set of predevelopedand supported functions forbuilding high-availability orfault-tolerant systems.

As when owned by Sleepy-cat, Berkeley DB 4.5 is availableunder a dual license. The soft-ware and its source code may beused free of charge as long asthe application build around italso is available as open source.Pricing for commercial licens-ing was not disclosed. z

Oracle Gives‘Sleepycat’ a Jolt



Management, performanceand security are among thenew tracks at this year’s Soft-ware Test & PerformanceConference, coming to theHyatt Regency Cambridge inBoston, Nov. 7-9. STPCon isproduced by BZ Media, whichpublishes SD Times.

The conference also willhost tracks featuring RobSabourin, a professor of soft-ware engineering at McGillUniversity; and Rex Black, a

veteran of the software andsystems engineering industryand author of several books onsoftware testing. Sabourin’ssessions include just-in-timetesting techniques and testingfor agile development. Blackwill present a full-day tutorialon how to assess test teameffectiveness. His 90-minutesessions include code coveragemetrics and how to use them,and a two-part session onidentifying and mitigatingrisks through testing.

Black, president of RBCS,a consultancy offering testautomation and quality assur-ance services, also will delivera keynote address titled “FiveTrends in Software Engi-neering.”

The 2006 conference marksthe end of the tenure of con-ference chairman LindseyVereen, who is retiring fromhis role as editor of SoftwareTest & Performance magazine.

“It’s been a pleasure toserve as conference chair andgratifying to work with thededicated men and women on

the front line of quality assur-ance,” said Vereen, who haschaired the event since itsinception. “They have a formi-dable responsibility, and Iadmire their commitment.” z

STPCon Makes Tracks on Testing

CONFERENCE: Nov. 7–9Hyatt Regency Cambridge, Boston

TUTORIALS:Tuesday, 9:00 am–5:00 pm

CLASSES:Wednesday, 8:30 am–4:15 pmThursday, 8:30 am–5:00 pm

EXHIBIT HOURS:Wednesday, 2:30 pm–7:00 pmThursday, 12:00 pm–4:00 pm

KEYNOTES:Wednesday, 4:30 pm–4:45 pm, Industry Keynote.4:45 pm–5:30 pm, Rex BlackKeynote.

www.stpcon.com

MORE UPDATES

RBCS president Rex Black will speakon trends in software engineering.

< continued from page 8

repository as well as portal, dashboard and reporting tools so organi-

zations can get an aggregated view of their assets . . . Grid solutions

provider Tangosol has released Coherence Data Grid Solution Set, a

set of optional client configura-

tions for enterprisewide data grid

access, access to real-time data feeds with on-client caching, and a

compute client for configuring data- or transaction-intensive applica-

tion servers. The solution is set to be generally available this month

with Coherence Data Grid 3.2, an update to the grid server compo-

nent that reportedly will include grouping and composite parallel

aggregators and conditional data grid processors . . . GemStone Sys-

tems has updated its GemFire Enterprise data fabric for Java EE, grid,

SOA and OLTP to version 5. New capabilities include role-based data

distribution for setting priorities of cache members, data portioning

that now can be used to define logical namespaces that interoperate

with partitioned and nonpartitioned regions, and a gateway/hub mod-

el for creating distributed systems across a WAN . . . On Sept 15.

Microsoft released Windows CE 6.0 to manufacturing. Beta 1 of the

embedded operating system, code-named Yamazaki, was released in

May with major improvements, including the ability to handle as many

as 32,000 processes, each capable of addressing as much as 2GB of

virtual memory. The previous capacity was 32 processes addressing

64MB each.

PEOPLELindsey Vereen, editor of BZ Media’s Software Test & Performance

magazine, has announced his retirement at the end of October 2006.

He will be succeeded by Edward J. Correia, currently executive editor

of BZ Media’s SD Times. z


related documents.“We’re hoping that it would

provide tools for Web develop-ers,” said Brewer. She addedthat current W3C guidelineshave become popular with gov-ernments around the world as away to standardize civic Website design practices. Of previ-ous accessibility standardsreleased by the W3C, Brewersaid, “We’ve already seen quitea bit of adoption of our guide-lines at the U.S. governmentlevel and also in the EU.”

Brewer added that manycorporations are already imple-menting previous W3C stan-dards, which suggest addingmetadata tags to all images on asite that describe the purposeof that image.

Leif Ryge, a freelance Webdeveloper based in the SanFrancisco Bay Area, said thatwhile the W3C’s best practicesfor Web design already go a longway to making sites accessible toscreen readers, RIAs using AJAXand Flash programs were inneed of some new best practices.

“If your site is already vali-dated against the W3C’s stan-dards, you should be mostlyaccessible already,” said Ryge.He added that scripted pro-grams are not easily reconciledwith the W3C’s current WebContent Accessibility Guide-lines. Brewer noted that version2.0 of those guidelines wouldbe surfacing early next year, andwould seek to fix those issues.

TARGET ON TRIAL

But Ryge said some of hisclients are now concerned by acurrently pending accessibilitylawsuit against Target.com, andas such, are being extra carefulabout ensuring that the blindcan reach their content.

The lawsuit in question wasbrought against mega-retailerTarget by the National Federa-tion for the Blind. Initially, Tar-get sought to have the casethrown out, arguing that inter-state commerce could not begoverned by federal or statelaws. But the federal judge over-seeing the case ruled in Septem-ber that the case can proceedbecause the Target.com Website can interact with the physi-cal store locations, bringing thesite under the jurisdiction of theAmericans with Disabilities Act(ADA).

While the trial itself has notbeen completely resolved, Rygesaid that some of his clients arenervous that they, too, will beopen to lawsuits. He said thatwhether or not the U.S. govern-

ment mandates accessibility forWeb sites—similar to when theADA forced business owners toinstall wheelchair ramps andelevators—corporations mayhave to revise their sites to pro-

tect themselves from litigation.But Brewer said that, man-

dated or not, making Web sitesaccessible to the blind and hand-icapped is the right thing to do.She said that the primary con-

cern of the W3C’s RIA guide-lines is to make the developmentof accessible Web applicationseasier on programmers. SaidBrewer: “One thing we want todo right now is to make suredevelopers can do whatever theyneed to make Web applicationsand still have the [applications]be accessible.” z

W3C Works Toward Accessible RIAs< continued from page 1


BY P.J. CONNOLLY

Last month, ComponentOnereleased the latest version ofits application developmenttool set, Studio Enterprise2006 version 3, which addsfeatures designed to support

Microsoft’s client- and server-based AJAX components, for-merly code-named Atlas.

These include what thecompany claims is the firstserver-side AJAX control,WebSplitter and WebUpdate-

Splitter for ASP.NET, whichworks with any content orthird-party component toautomatically add AJAX abili-ties, and which supports flexi-ble layouts with splits alonghorizontal or vertical axes, or

collapsible, resizable andscrollable panels.

Also in the release are fivenew data input controls, collec-tively referred to as WebInputfor ASP.NET: WebCurren-cyEdit, WebDateEdit, Web-

MaskEdit, WebNumericEditand WebPercentEdit.

SuperToolTip for .NEThelps developers add Vista-likeelements, including labels andToolTips to .NET applications.NavBar and TopicBar for .NETare two new components inMenus and Toolbars for .NETthat allow the use of paneled,Outlook 2003-like navigation.

Three new chart types inChart for .NET and WebChartfor .NET enable the use ofcone, cylindrical and pyrami-dal styles in WebForms andWinForms charts. WebChartfor ASP.NET now offers AJAXfeatures that eliminate formpost-backs and increase theinteractivity with end users.

The Menus and Toolbars for.NET and Preview for .NETmodules now use the compa-ny’s SmartDesigners technolo-gy for visual development,while the WebBars and Web-Menus for ASP.NET compo-nents now offer optimized ren-dering: The company claimsthe HTML output from thesecontrols has been reduced by80 percent or more. z

Studio Enterprise Adds AJAX Support

BY P.J. CONNOLLY

Last week, Ivis Technologiesreleased the latest version ofxProcess, its Eclipse-basedprocess management softwarefor Linux, Mac OS X and Win-dows. xProcess 2.5 now offerswhat Chris Page, Ivis’ directorof technology services, noted as“full” financial reporting thatadds consumables to dollar- andhour-based project accountingcalculations, for a more accu-rate reckoning of the projectlife cycle.

Ivis added a workflowengine to xProcess, as well asprocess modeling for a visualrepresentation of constraintsand dependencies.

The new version also adds afully functional Web version ofthe so-called Participantclient, eliminating the addi-tional software footprint onthe desktop of what Page esti-mated was 80 percent or 90percent of the xProcess userbase. Ivis has also dipped itstoe in the SaaS (software-as-a-service) pond, by offeringxProcess On-Demand, forUS$59 a month. z

Ivis RefreshesProcess Software

Document Imaging Takes to the Air.Using Atalasoft Imaging Toolkits your business can create applications that save time and money. Our .NET imaging components are designed exclusively for the Microsoft .NET Framework, offering developers Photographic and Document imaging for web and windows based applications featuring AJAX-enabled web imaging, PDF support, data capture, scanning/OCR, barcode reading systems, image management, and archiving just to name a few.

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SDP comes less than a year afterthe company announced itwould divest itself of its IDEbusiness lines and focus on CoreSDP. As SD Times went to press,sources indicated the sale of theIDE business was imminent,and could well have beenannounced by the cover date.

The four pieces of the company’s new ALM software,said Johnson, are LQM, ITManagement and Governance,

Requirements Definition and Management, and Change Man-agement. The distinction be-tween those products is necessar-ily blurry, said Johnson, becausethey’re targeted at different cus-tomers and each is capable of

being integrated to extend theapplication life-cycle manage-ment inside of an organization.

“There is clearly overlapbetween defining and managingrequirements and life-cyclequality management,” said John-

son. “But very often the targetconsumer that we’re going afterin each of those domains is ini-tially different.”

The company announced itsLQM solution in early October.This suite includes Segue’s test

and quality assurance products,which Borland acquired in Feb-ruary; the company’s Caliber-RM requirements managementsoftware; and the test automa-tion tool Borland purchased inMarch when it acquired Gaunt-let Systems. Also included inLQM is the StarTeam SCMrepository. z

21www.sdtimes.com


SilkCentral:Test management

CaliberRM:Requirements management

Caliber DefineIT: Requirements definition

SilkPerformer: Load and performance testing

SilkTest: Automated functional testing

Gauntlet: Automation andmanagement of nightly tests

BORLAND’S LQM SUITE INCLUDES:

Borland’s Core Dump, LQM Announcement

secretary for cybersecurity job.The position was created in July2005 but remained vacant untilGarcia’s appointment. “Cyber-security is [apparently] not anissue for DHS,” Kurtz said in aphone interview with SD Timesin late July.

Of Garcia’s appointment,Kurtz said: “We look forward toworking with him on definingpriorities and programs toimprove our readiness for amassive disruption involvingthe information infrastructure.”

In addition to ensuring thesecurity of information infra-structure, Garcia will oversee theSoftware Assurance Program,which publishes guidelines,sponsors events and works withthe private sector to promote thedevelopment of secure software.

A spokesman for ITAA saidGarcia was not available forcomment. ITAA president andCEO Phil Bond applaudedGarcia’s appointment to theDHS post. “Greg has been aleading voice for improving thesafety and security of America’sinformation infrastructure. Wewish Greg every success,” hesaid in a statement. z


Garcia First InCybersecurity


While it’s not new to equip aspecific device for testing overthe Internet, TestQuest claimsthat its new CountDown plat-form can launch applicationsand run real tests on any devicerunning any operating systemanywhere in the world.

That claim, said companyCEO Martin Hahn, applieseven to proprietary operatingsystems and applications. “Let’ssay you’re testing a Motorolaphone,” Hahn said. “Thatphone doesn’t have to be physi-cally connected to the testmachine; the developer couldbe thousands of miles away.”The developer sees a local rep-resentation of that device on aworkstation. “When you press abutton, you are really pressingthe button on the physicalphone thousands of milesaway,” he said.

The results on the phone’sscreen are instantly displayedon the developer’s screen insoftware, he said. “Rather thanhaving to fly people back and

forth or shipping the deviceinto India, you can set up theconnection over the Internetand see what’s happening fromyour office.” General availabili-ty is set for Nov. 30; pricingstarts at around US$38,000 fora five-developer deployment.

The solution is built arounddevice-specific agents that runon and control the target device,launch applications and testscripts and communicate results.

CountDown includes agentsfor devices from LG Electron-ics, Motorola, Nokia and Sam-sung running Linux (and otheropen-source operating systems),Symbian OS (S60 and UIQ) andWindows Mobile. An API allowsconnection to the Palm OS, butTestQuest is waiting until theAccess Linux strategy matures.Supported networks includeCingular, Sprint, T-Mobile andVerizon. Organizations needingto support other devices or oper-ating systems would build theirown agents with a stand-alonedevelopment kit.

Developing agents for pro-

prietary operating systems andapplications can take anywherefrom hours to weeks, said JohnYuzdepski, the company’s chiefmarketing officer. “The abilityto have remote connectivity toa device in Korea to run on aVerizon network is a complexi-ty unique to the mobile indus-try.” Development time forcustom agents, he said,depends largely on a develop-er’s familiarity with the plat-form, “the testing protocolsrequired, and whether youhave access to the kerneldevelopment team.”

Agents deliver test resultssimultaneously to a Web-basedtest management client and aSQL Server-based repository,which also stores test scripts, testrequirements, information aboutthe devices and dashboards. Themanagement client handles testassets, delivers them to devicesand schedules tests.

Test scripts are created withthe stand-alone drag-and-dropenvironment written in .NET.The entire platform is extensi-ble to enable customization andintegration with an organiza-tion’s existing test equipmentand processes.

Out of the box, the solution ismost valuable to developmentteams of device makers and car-riers, which can use the reposi-tory to share and reuse test cas-es, logic and other assets. Theadded value to the enterprise,Yuzdepski said, is its ability toprovide a testing solution forhomegrown devices such asthose used by FedEx and UPS,both of which are customers.

“They still have a require-ment for functional testing,”Yuzdepski said. “Their devicesare not cell phones—they arespecialized devices from Sym-bol and others—but they haveall the issues.” z

Software Development Times October 15, 2006EMBEDDED & WIRELESS NEWS22 www.sdtimes.com

BY P.J. CONNOLLY

Virtualization is somethingthat’s easy to associate withmainframes, servers and evendesktop machines. But real-time virtualization pioneer Vir-tualLogix decided that therecent Intel Developer Forumin San Francisco was a goodopportunity to rebrand thecompany, unveil a new product,and announce a new focus onvertical markets.

Mark Milligan, VirtualLogix’svice president of marketing andbusiness development, observedthat the company’s backgroundgave it the confidence toattempt RTOS virtualizationwhen many engineers dismissedthe very idea: “What we’ve beenable to do is take some of those

fundamental benefits of consoli-dation…and take that into theembedded market.” Havingfound the most traction for thecompany’s products in threeareas, the company decided totake its technology, “turn it intovertical market solutions, andexpand the road map.”

The company, acquired asChorus Systems by SunMicrosystems in 1997 and spunoff in 2002 as Jaluna, now pro-vides three virtualization plat-forms aimed at specific verticalspecialties. All are built on whatwas Jaluna’s OSWare, nowknown as VLX.

A new product, VLX forNetwork Infrastructure, allowsmultiple software platforms tobe run on Intel Core Architec-

ture processors, such as theCore Duo E6400 and T7400,helping the migration fromsingle-core proprietary designsto multicore devices. It will beavailable later this year.

VLX for Mobile Handsets3.0, formerly OSWare forARM, attempts to providemore flexibility for devicemakers and consumers byallowing devices to run a sta-ble and secure real-time oper-ating system in a partitionalongside of a Linux instance.An independent executiveallows operating-system moni-toring, remote managementand secure execution; Virtual-Logix considers this the bestway to maintain device up-time, guarantee service and

isolate open-source code fromproprietary software.

Milligan noted that themobile space offered some“really interesting opportuni-ties” for VirtualLogix and itstechnology. The demand to addfunctionality and services cre-ated the smart phone, he said,which turns out to be bulky andpower-hungry. Using virtualiza-tion “allows us to create a smartphone with what’s known as afeature phone architecture.”VLX for Mobile Handsets 3.0 isavailable now.

The third member of Vir-tualLogix’s team, VLX for DigitalMultimedia, is designed for low-cost telecom and videoequipment using Texas Instru-ments’ digital signal processors. z

A CountDown ToUniversal, GlobalDevice TestingTestQuest claims platform tests anymobile device anywhere in the world

Jaluna Rebrands, Refocuses as VirtualLogixVLX RTOS virtualization aimed at network gear, phones and set-top boxes

CountDown uses on-device agents to launch tests and report results.

Source: TestQuest

BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN

Enhanced reverse-engineeringcapabilities and an emphasis oncomponent reuse highlight theSept. 25 release of Rhapsody7.0, the modeling tool forembedded systems and softwareacquired by Telelogic in Marchwhen it bought iLogix.

Telelogic wanted to make iteasier for developers going fromcode to the model, according toGeorge LeBlanc, senior direc-tor of marketing for Rhapsody.

A so-called code respect ini-tiative maintains file structures,the ordering of elements in a fileand naming when code is gener-ated from a model, giving thatcode the same look as the origi-nal source code. Also, a new inte-gration with the Eclipse CDTenvironment lets developers usethe Eclipse-based IDE of theirchoice, from where code will besynced with Rhapsody models.

Rhapsody 7 also enables mul-tilanguage design. “You can useC for firmware, C++ for the gen-eral application, and Java for theGUI piece, and all will be sup-ported in the model at the sametime,” said Rick Boldt, seniordirector of Rhapsody marketing.

Rhapsody also now has theability to do what Boldtdescribed as a base-aware diffmerge: When code branches orpatches, the base model and thesource trunk need to be broughttogether at the end of the day,facilitating parallel development.In the past, he said, Rhapsodycould do only two-way merges.Boldt also noted Rhapsody nowcan do automatic merges, under-standing when there is no con-flict between branches and thebase. Parameters for acceptingautomatic merges can be estab-lished by the developers.

A new Java API and com-mand-line interface calls enabledevelopers to build up a scriptingenvironment to select assets andgenerate code, and pull relatedassets based on the variations anddependencies they have defined,he explained. A rules-based codegenerator lets developers modifyasset rules and tailor those assetsfor different target platforms. z

TelelogicRolls OutRhapsody 7.0Code generation,reuse enhanced

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Software Development Times October 15, 2006 SPECIAL REPORT 25www.sdtimes.com

It’s official: The next Eclipse simultaneous release willbe called Europa, continuing the Jovian moon pattern

established with Callisto. But with Europa’s launch datestill more than half a year away, several important pro-jects are expected to arrive hot from the oven beforeEuropa hits the table in mid-2007.

Among the most far-reaching and broadly appealingof those soon-to-be-released Eclipse projects is

Mylar, a plug-in that can increase developer productiv-ity by managing and filtering tasks based on context.

“Developers waste a tremendous amount of timescrolling, navigating and parsing information instead ofgetting work done,” said project lead Mik Kersten, aPh.D. student at the University of British Columbia. Thefamiliar Eclipse Package Explorer can contain tens ofthousands of elements for even a small enterprise appli-cation, which he said results in information overload.

Mylar introduces context management and task man-agement facilities to Eclipse, permitting tasks to bestored in a repository as objects. “When working with afully integrated connector, you can rely purely on Mylarfor working with that repository. Everything you can doin Bugzilla, you can now do in Eclipse,” he said, for exam-ple. Mylar also will support Trac and JIRA issue trackers.“Rudimentary support for Google Code, SourceForgeand gforce” repositories also will be delivered with 1.0, hesaid, including the ability to plan, save, query and edittasks through the Eclipse embedded browser.

Adding a form of filtering to the Package Explorer,context management monitors a developer’s interactionswithin Eclipse and automatically identifies informationrelevant to the task at hand, according to its documenta-tion. Using that data—which can include a developer’saccess to methods, APIs, documents and other arti-facts—the tool focuses Eclipse views and editors to showonly relevant information. “The more you use Mylar, themore productive you become,” Kersten said.

Mylar also contains a rich editor capable of drag-and-drop attachments and offline editing. Integratedchange notifications allow developers to use Mylar’stask list as an inbox instead of an e-mail client.

Mylar 1.0 is set to debut in early December.

The Eclipse Process Framework project’s aim is toprovide developers with a starting point for the cre-

ation of development best practices. Intended for allaspects of the job, the tool includes guidance forrequirements authoring, maintenance and publicationof methods and processes, and for library management.

The project’s team, led by IBM’s Per Kroll,at press time was finishing work on its twomain components: EPF Composerand OpenUP. The tooling compo-nent, EPF Composer, letsdevelopers pick and choosethe process componentsfrom which to deployand generate projectmaps. The tool canimport and export XMLto facilitate exchange ofinformation with other environ-ments. An API also permits extension tothe environment. “You’re not forced to use the tool webuilt; you can use it as an extensible framework to cap-ture a process from scratch or import one.”

EPF will include OpenUP, the Open UnifiedProcess, which Kroll described as “a very light processthat covers a complete life cycle of a project from startto end.” It also gives developers the ability to “capturerequirements, develop and manage code and manageall other aspects of a project.” Also extensible, OpenUPis now at version 0.9.

Future editions will include Extreme Processingand Scrum. “All kinds of processes can be producedusing EPF,” he said. “We’re working on an XP process;you should see that in the next couple of months.”

Still, Kroll believes that OpenUP, which is intended forany organization developing software, can be useful as is.“Most will use it as a tool. But it has an API for the frame-work, and after a few projects some will modify it” to suittheir own processes. He added, though, that the unmodi-fied environment is not particularly well suited for large-scale development or for companies adhering to compli-ance issues. “We don’t provide specific guidance for that,so a company would have to extend it themselves.”

Eclipse Process Framework 1.0 was set for releaseon Sept. 30.

The Device Software Development Platform project,introduced early last year by embedded giant Wind

River Systems, has gained tremendous interest andmomentum. Three of its six subprojects—Target Man-agement (TM), embedded RCP (eRCP) and MobileTools for Java (MTJ)—will release 1.0 versions this year.Device Debugging and Native App Builder are on theEuropa timetable; Tools for Mobile Linux was still in theproposal stage at press time.

The TM project, which is led by Wind River’s MartinOberhuber and IBM’s David Dykstal, gives Eclipse aninterface for controlling remote devices and accessing itsprocesses with remote shell. Developers can search forand edit files, and launch applications and test scripts. “Ituses whatever services are registered with the frame-work [and is] optimized for as little data transfer as pos-

sible,” said Oberhuber. Version 1.0 also will include an

early version of ServiceDiscovery, which

scans a network fordevices and services

offered. “We are al-ready providing it with

the download, but it’slabeled as experimental,”

Oberhuber said, adding thatthe feature is expected to be con-

sidered stable by version 1.1.Also left for version 1.1 will be the ability to

store user actions for later execution. “If you found your-self doing the same things on a remote system like run-ning a compiler, you can set a user action for that and alsoshare it with others.” A future edition might also includeimport and export capability, which would extend thecopy/paste method in use now for uploading and down-loading files. “Import will allow you to synchronize thelocal file system with a remote file system. But theseplans are not signed off by everybody—it’s still a propos-al,” he said.

Although the Target Management project includesa framework, Oberhuber said the tools would be usefulto many people without modification. “They can usethe tools out of the box on any Unix or Linux comput-er,” he said. “But in the embedded space, you typicallyhave proprietary protocols, so they would use theframework to [modify accordingly].”

Target Management 1.0 is set for release on Oct. 20.

For device-minded UI developers looking for analternative to MIDP 2.0, the DSDP’s embedded

RCP might be worth a look. On Sept. 22 the team, led by IBM’s Chris

Aniszczyk and Mark Rogalski, released a runtimeframework for installing and managing Java plug-inson devices, allowing them to share services and acommon JVM. “This is a big improvement overMIDP 2.0,” claimed Rogalski, “in which only applica-tions in the same ‘suite’ can share common services.”

With eRCP, Rogalski said the Eclipse and OSGiunderpinnings provide the features of a plug-in archi-tecture and a widget-based API. “Developers can nowuse their existing experience and knowledge of writingEclipse plug-ins to write embedded [and] mobileapplications. “This is the next step up from MIDP 2.0,which he said has had limited widget capabilities. TheeRCP tools include a stable set of “rich widgets” fordevices running Nokia’s Series 80, Windows and Win-dows Mobile 2003 and 2005.

Support for Nokia’s S60 and Trolltech’s QT Embed-ded interfaces is planned for July 2007. z

Project: Eclipse Process Framework Project Lead: Per KrollHost Platforms: Linux and WindowsRequirements: Eclipse 3.21.0 Release Date: Sept. 30

Implementation:Full

Project: MylarProject Lead: Mik KerstenHost Platforms: Linux, Mac OS X, WindowsRequirements: Eclipse 3.2, JDK 1.5 and

Bugzilla, JIRA or TracExpected 1.0: Early December

Implementation:Plug-in

Project: DSDP, Target ManagementProject Leads: Martin Oberhuber, David DykstalHost Platforms: Linux, Mac OS X, WindowsRequirements: Eclipse 3.2, CDTExpected 1.0: Oct. 20 Implementation:

Plug-in

Project: DSDP, embedded RCPProject Leads: Chris Aniszczyk, Mark Rogalski Host Platform: WindowsTargets: Windows Mobile 2003, 2005;

Nokia S80Requirements: Eclipse 3.2, RCPReleased 1.0: Sept. 22

Implementation:Plug-in

Before the Europa release is fit for consumption, several tasty dishes will be golden brown and ready to serve


26 www.sdtimes.com

On this 21st anniversary of its incep-tion, it would have been nice to

wish “Happy Birthday” to the softwaretest automation industry. But whyshould we offer felicitations to this mis-guided runaway monster that shouldhave derailed a long time go.

No one can take issue with the laud-able objective of improving softwarequality, and it is the difficultiesin achieving it that created theopportunity for technology-based solutions. However, ifwe remind ourselves of whatwe were trying to achieve, thecatastrophic flaws in the solu-tions being offered become alltoo clear.

Many different approacheswere taken to testing in 1985,the year that Auto Tester wasfounded, which I see as the first realattempt at test automation. However,it’s long been accepted that it was agood idea to let someone other than thedevelopers try a new application beforeit went live. Typically this was achievedby taking knowledgeable users—whatare now described as Subject MatterExperts (SMEs)—out of the line ofbusiness while they performed anacceptance test.

Let us remember that this wasbefore Y2K, an event that fundamen-tally altered users’ expectations of thequality of applications that should beinitially delivered by the developmentteams. Prior to Y2K, the proposition tothe users was that if you give us yourtime to undertake a User AcceptanceTest (UAT) then you will receive a new, or much enhanced, application.Y2K changed all this, as typically thenew version offered not one iota ofnew functionality—just a promise thatit would continue to work once every-one had recovered from the Millenni-um celebrations. The reaction of manyuser teams was to insist that the ISfunction took much greater, or eventotal, responsibility, as the businessfunctionality remained the same andthe testing did not require their expertise.

This enhanced level of expectationfor the quality of application enteringUAT was accompanied by a Y2K-drivenrealization in development teams thateffective testing was tough to achieve,repetitive and, if undertaken manually,extremely laborious. And it is the issueof repetition that is at the heart of thedrive for test automation.

It is in the interests of everyoneinvolved in the application life cycle tosee the number of test repetitions keptto an effective minimum as excess rep-etitions lead to a loss of motivation, aloss of confidence in the new applica-tion, missed implementation time

scales and, most important, a dangerthat application quality will actuallyreduce!

A loss of motivation and confidenceis easily understood if the application isconstantly bouncing between the UATgroup and development because toomany bugs exist that should have beenidentified and corrected during unit

and system testing. Test rep-etitions, whether manual orautomated, take time, so theeffect on timescales isinevitable. It is also a factthat UAT happens at theend of the development lifecycle when previous phaseswill have probably overrunand an implementation datebeen set. However, my per-sonal favorite is the way in

which excess repetitions can lead to areduction in application quality. It is alldown to boredom.

Consider the keen sense of anticipa-tion, even excitement, in SMEs thataccompanies the chance to see and testa new application. This application canpotentially solve a number of issues inthe line of business, perhaps increasingthe company’s competitiveness andfinancial success. This initial enthusiasmtakes a bit of a knock as the tester expe-riences a crash on the log-in dialog, andit is distinctly on the wane as each testcycle follows another.

Testers are only human, and as theimplementation date approaches, theexcess repetitions have taken a poten-tially fatal toll. Driven by time pressuresand an ever-increasing level of disen-chantment, they inevitably start to testonly the fixes development has provid-ed. So the depth and effectiveness oftesting actually deteriorates in this finalstage, and that is when the dreaded col-lateral damage occurs. This need fortesting to be equally effective and com-plete on every repetition is another keydriver for test automation.

So if the justifications for testautomation are eminently sensible,why have so many companies given up,not bothered or are incurring such sig-nificant costs in its support? This is ariddle that is easily solved simply byexamining what the users actuallywanted in the key areas of usability,capability and survivability—if youwant to go to the moon, it’s a good ideato build a rocket!

ROCKET SCIENCE

The multistage Saturn V rockets thatsupported the lunar missions seem themost appropriate analogy, so let’s startwith the first stage, the big one at thebottom. For us, the first challenge isusability, because unless the solutioncan be utilized by its intended SME

Colin Armitage

A Trip to the Moon

Software Development Times October 15, 2006OPINION

FROM THE EDITORS

Borland Moves Off CoreYou had to figure Borland would do away with Core SDP, its software

development optimization/application life-cycle management solution.That was developed under and touted by Dale Fuller, the former CEOwho was banished last year after the company underperformed in thefinancial department.

The fact that it was associated with a difficult time in Borland’s histo-ry (not that things are going so well now) probably wasn’t reason enoughto end Core SDP. The new management team has acknowledged thestrategy did not match up with the roles people play in an organizationto develop software. Core Analyst, Core Architect, Core Developer andCore Tester apparently didn’t meet the needs of development shops—ordidn’t articulate buzzwords as clearly as the new package, which offers ITgovernance, life-cycle quality management, requirements definition andmanagement, and software change management.

Of course, Borland is not the only company to put a shiny new wrap-per on dog-eared products. IBM did the same thing when it took itsRational tools, combined them with the WebSphere app server, andlaunched the brand-new Rational Software Development Platform. Thatwas delivered as a preemptive move against Microsoft’s announced TeamSystem, which would in fact have new (for Microsoft) functionality.

Borland’s new packages include a lot of the old—the Caliber tools forrequirements, StarTeam for change and configuration management,Together for modeling—and some of the new, including the Segue test-ing tools bought in February, the IT governance offering it acquiredfrom Legadero in late 2005, and process improvement and skills trainingservices acquired with consulting firm Terraquest.

And what of the developer tools? Our sources tell us that by the time youread this, the spinoff should be a done deal. But we’re told JBuilder, theJava IDE, remains an important part of Borland’s solution moving forward.Will Borland be able to retain the control it seeks to advance the product ina way that is strategic to the advancement of its overall offerings?

Borland is entering a crowded market, so it can’t hurt to get ALM intoits product names. Analysts with whom we’ve spoken believe Borlandwill get a small piece of the ALM market, getting customers to committo its tools on a project level, but not across the enterprise.

The confused messaging, another reshuffling of products and aban-donment of its IDEs makes it seem unlikely that Borland the ALM com-pany will ever inspire the kind of loyal following it had when it wasknown simply as a maker of great tools for developers.

Understanding the Past We haven’t thought about the challenges of representing Sumerian

on a computer since the last time we read Neal Stephenson’s 1993thriller “Snow Crash,” but we applaud the Unicode Consortium’s com-mitment to adding ancient scripts to its database. It has occurred to us,though, that as the technology advances and the surviving cuneiformtablets are translated, museums run the risk of finding that their preciouscollections consist of little more than TPS reports.

After all, we’re certain there was a scribe in ancient Babylon who toldhis co-workers: “Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubiclesstaring at wet clay all day, poking it with sticks and listening to eight dif-ferent bosses drone on about mission statements.”

Joking aside, academic and cultural research will undoubtedly benefitfrom the ability to analyze ancient texts more fully. At a distance of 4,500years, it’s a miracle that any records of that time have survived, but Sumer-ian tablets have the benefit of being a stable format, contrasted with ourso-called “permanent” records. We suspect that in 6506, archaeologists willknow more about us from our non-biodegradable food wrappers and ourtoxic waste dumps than from our literature or laws. And those clay tabletswill probably still be around, someplace, to be discovered again. z

audience, it will never leave the launchpad. Even at this most basic level, theflaws in the available technologybecome apparent. Instead of empow-ering the SMEs, the programming con-structs underpinning automated solu-tions have taken automation away fromits target audience and instead createda new industry and a lucrative careerpath for people with the appropriatetechnical skills.

As our second stage, we have thethorny issue of capability. Who said testautomation starts with the visual layer?Just because I press the submit buttonin my Web application, and I receive a message stating that my order hasbeen accepted, is that sufficient confir-mation that all is OK? What aboutchecking the database? What aboutchecking it every time rather thanthrough some partial and infrequentSQL? This merely lifts the lid on a vastarea of capabilities that are critical toeffective testing, including items suchas test data creation, protection andobfuscation.

You can throw money at the first-stage problem, and you can accept thelimitations of your second-stage testing,but it is the third stage that has proveddecisive and has consigned so much soft-ware to the shelf. Change is a fact ofbusiness and IS life, and unless a testautomation solution can adapt to newversions of software, the benefits disap-pear. Creating automated tests willalways take more time than a singlemanual test cycle—the benefits ofautomation are only realized throughreuse. Take this away, and the corporateasset you were hoping to create becomesan expensive liability.

So go on, take a look out of the win-dow. If you are aiming for the moon,what are you driving? z

Colin Armitage is CEO of test softwarecompany Original Software.

THE VENTURE CAPITALISTS justcan’t keep that dough in their pocketsright now. With analysts placing the val-ue of Youtube.com at around a billiondollars and Yahoo considering a buyoutof Facebook.com for a similar sum, it’sclear that the bubble is back. This time,the bubble is riding atop the soapy sudsof AJAX. Here in the Silicon Valley,investment capital is finding its wayinto the hands of new companies thatseek to follow the new open-sourcemodel: Give the product away for free;sell the support and service contracts.But many of these companies are find-ing that writing good software andoffering good technical support are twocompletely different business goals.Right now, not many start-ups are ableto offer the level of service that isrequired to keep their clients satisfied.For their part, at least for now, the VCsdon’t seem to notice—or care. But asthe open-source market expands, it isservice and support failings that willpop many of these bubbles.

–Alex Handy

LEARNING THAT BERLIN, EltonJohn and Joan Jett were going to be onthe entertainment list for next week’sOracle OpenWorld proves that comingup with after-show entertainment can’tbe easy. Finding something new and

different becomesa challenge, andit’s all too easy tohire a “hot” bandsuch as AC/DShe,which seems tohave made a small

career out of playing San Franciscotrade shows. But with last year’s bandsincluding Counting Crows and a Sting/Police cover group, it occursthat OpenWorld’s organizers are going

backward in time. In a couple of years,can attendees look forward to used-to-be-big names such as ? and the Myste-rians or perhaps The Monkees?

–P.J. Connolly

SD TIMES HAS come a long way sinceits humble beginnings in February2000, going from the 28th in our sector(dead last), to No. 2 today. And I’mproud to say that I’ve been there fromthe beginning, alternately donning hatsfor writing and editing. So it is bitter-sweet that I say so long, but not good-bye. After this issue, I begin my newrole as editor of Software Test & Per-formance magazine, another BZ Mediapublication. I will miss writing for SD Times, but will still have the plea-sure of sharing the company of its out-standing staff.

–Edward J. Correia

THE PASSWORD is…disruption. It’s aterm I’ve heard spoken with pride bysoftware sellers. Most recently it camefrom VA Software’s Darryll Dewan,who runs the SourceForge Enterprisebusiness. The company has made avail-able its SourceForge Enterprise Edi-tion free for up to 15 users, hoping thatwhen those people try it, they will comeback for more licenses, which wouldn’tbe free. “Look what Eclipse did toJBuilder. Look what JBoss did to theother Java app servers. Is it disruptive?You bet, and we’re right in the middleof it.” The market is coming around toSourceForge, Dewan said, explainingthat people want a common platform,integrated with tools, with no heavy-handed process, and a collaborativedevelopment environment. It sounds tome like the market is coming around,all right…to Eclipse.

–David Rubinstein

OPINIONSoftware Development Times October 15, 2006

PresidentTed Bahr

Executive Vice President Alan Zeichick

Software Development Times

Issue No. 160

October 15, 2006

Editor-in-ChiefDavid Rubinstein

+1-631-421-4158 [email protected]

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Not especially committed, according to a recent survey conduct-ed by the BPM Forum, the not-for-profit consortium focused onbusiness process management.

Published in September, the “Compliance-Enabled Enter-prise” study found that less than half of respondents considercompliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley to be a crit-ical initiative with full management support. The study includedresponses from nearly 400 CEOs and other top executives.

27www.sdtimes.com

Software Development Times October 15, 2006 COLUMNS 29www.sdtimes.com

Not long ago, I was contacted by acompany whose very successful

domain-specific engine is used by hun-dreds of businesses to make tens of mil-lions of dollars’ worth of transactions peryear. Its Web tier used an open-sourcepresentation framework, and its codehad a liberal sprinkling of debug tracesthat outputted via another open-sourcelogging solution. The company’s Web,business and data tiers were coordinatedby a commercial application server, andin the normal course of business didmarvelously for all involved. But therewas a problem.

“When our clients do an e-mail pro-motion, the system slows down tremen-dously. For some people, it might take aminute for a page to load; others mightnever see a page. What’s going on?” Thepromotions use case involved a slightlydifferent page-navigation scheme thannormal, but the real problem was scal-ing: At 9:00 am on Monday mornings,the system would experience a highernumber of concurrent users than thegeneral use cases, when visitors arrivedrandomly. Because the system didn’tcompletely fail, but limped along, Istrongly suspected a problem involvingthe interactions between the businessand database tiers: too many round trips,clumsy query construction, connectionsnot being freed, and so forth.

My first step was to write some unittests to automate the retrieval of theWeb pages of the promotions use case.Once I had that in hand, I would moveon to unit tests to really hammer thebusiness logic and database tiers, where Iwas sure the problem lay. My first unittest retrieved the first page, checked theHTTP response code, andconfirmed the number of linesin the returned Web page.

I decided to get the writingof the stress test out of the way.I wrapped calls to my first unittest in timing code, generatedsome threads, and sureenough, with MAX_USERSset to 2, things went fine. “Letme just hammer this first pagein order to get a sense of thescaling curve,” I thought. I didn’t expect itto break, since the first page just set upthe session and presented static compo-nents. So I wrote another test that calledmy timing test, doubling MAX_USERSevery time. Four users went a little slow-er, eight a little slower still, 16 fell off a lit-tle more, and then…the system fell off acliff. A few tests finished, but others timedout and threw exceptions. It was ugly.

I reran the tests, and this time thesystem showed the disastrous behaviorin earlier runs, with only perhaps four oreight concurrent users. Sometimes even

just two concurrent users would causethe system to fail. If the app server wasrestarted, though, the ability to handle amoderate number of users would reset.Time to revisit my assumptions.

Confused, I set the logging level toDEBUG and fired up my test suite again.A strange thing happened: Although the

response time degraded signif-icantly (there were a lot ofDEBUG traces), the systemdidn’t “fall off a cliff.” TheDEBUG statements affectedthe failure mode of the system.I learned later this was one ofthe reasons the company hadasked me to take a look—turn-ing on DEBUG tracing hadbeen the first step of theirinternal trouble-shooters and

they had thereby lost their quarry beforethey ever entered the woods.

The DEBUG traces gave me theinformation I needed, and I was able toisolate the problem fairly quickly. Not asquickly as I might have, though: Theproblem occurred at a point in process-ing before any promotions-specific codewas activated. It occurred, in fact, inboilerplate code involved with associat-ing the HTTP request with a logical“Session” object. I had discovered (andquickly confirmed via a new unit test)that the vulnerability was not unique to

the promotions use case.To cut to the chase: The version of the

open-source presentation framework theyused had a race condition. The associationof an HTTP request with a logical sessionwas not thread-safe: With concurrentcalls, one thread might receive a null ses-sion and another might be assigned two(the second clobbering the first). Thiswould cause an exception to be raised onthe null-session thread, but the clobberedsession would cause a long-lasting threadcorruption in the application server. Everytime the race condition occurred, it tookout a thread from the application server,increasing the system’s vulnerability tofurther failures. As the race conditionclobbered more threads, though, the rela-tive amount of time each remainingthread spent inside the critical sectiondecreased! Eventually the system woulddegrade to one or two threads, providingthe illusion that the system was “limpingalong.” And making me ass-u-me that theproblem had to do with the database.

Luckily, my bad assumption wastrumped by my test-first approach. Thesolution was simple enough: Upgrade thepresentation framework and, in themeantime, wrap the vulnerable section inthree lines of thread-locking code. Iwould have made a lot more moneyrewriting their object-relational interface,but per line of code? I did just fine. z

Larry O’Brien is a technology consul-tant, analyst and writer. Read his blog atwww.knowing.net.

The past several months have seen a lotof ink spilled on the rise of dynamic

languages. The reason for this resurgentinterest in scripting, I believe, is the con-fluence of two factors: the speed of today’shardware and the recovery from what onepundit labeled the “Java nuclear winter.”The latter refers to a phenomenon thathas been consistently overlooked in thesuddenly chic castigations of Java.

At the time Java was launched, it rep-resented a very substantial step forwardfrom the state of the art, C++. Java’spromise of universal portability and itsbuilt-in garbage collection, immutablestrings and lack of a preprocessor or con-ditional compilation were all very differ-ent ways of looking at the world that res-onated deeply with developers. Whilethese innovations came from other lan-guages, Java was the first mainstream lan-guage to bring them all together.

I hasten to add that this was trueinnovation and Java was embraced bymany developers the same way thatRuby is today—as a brilliant alternativeto the bloated de facto language of theday. As some veteran readers will surelyrecall, there was considerable doubt asto whether Java would actually succeedin its core mission: less buggy code and

true portability. It was not until Sunworked out the last JVM kinks andMicrosoft’s attempt to extend the plat-form was finally smashed down that weall knew Java had turned the corner andwould succeed in its ambitious mission.

That period—the mid-1990s—was afertile time for the creation ofdynamic languages. PHP (re-leased in 1995), Ruby (1995),Lua (1993) and Python slightlyearlier are all part of the samegeneration as Java. And in totothey were a statement aboutthe need for a high-level alter-native to C/C++ that would beless narrow than the “little lan-guages” used in Unix (such asawk, sed and shell scripts) andnot proprietary like the many 4GLs float-ing around at the time.

Now that Java has assumed the legacyrole played by C++ in those days, devel-opers are looking anew at the alternatives.And with the great advances in hardwarediminishing the performance costs, someof those old languages have a new viabili-ty. Among the few that have not alreadybeen widely adopted, Ruby and Lua standout. Ruby, as we have discussed earlier, isin the process of crossing the chasm.

Lua, however, remains a lesser-knownalternative that has some very nifty fea-tures not commonly found elsewhere.The first is performance. In most inde-pendent benchmarks, it beats and some-times routs all other dynamic languages.It is also lightweight. The entire distribu-

tion—compiler, runtime andlibraries—fits in 1MB. Bothaspects are intentional, as theprimary application for Lua isas an embedded dynamic language in C/C++ applica-tions. Today, C and C++ areused where performance isessential, and so an embeddedlanguage has to have similarbenefits. As a result, Lua isvery commonly embedded in

games (World of Warcraft in particular)and occasionally in ISV offerings (such asAdobe LightRoom).

However, it functions just fine as astand-alone language. Among its uniquecapabilities is that its fundamentalobject is a table (or what many peoplecall hashes or maps). It uses a hash toimplement object orientation—a capa-bility made possible by implementingfunctions as first-class objects. That is,you can stuff a function into a hash slot

just as easily as you can stuff an integer.This mechanism is used for closures andfor inheritance. Single and multipleinheritance are available by setting upthe tables so that any missing functionsare looked up in parent tables. Elegant,no? Lua leverages hashes in proceduralcontexts as well. For example, functionscan return hashes, enabling them toreturn multiple values from a single call.

Of course, Lua has the usual dynam-ic features such as duck typing, garbagecollection (with the capability of taggingelements for collection) and wide porta-bility, as well as an open-source imple-mentation. In addition, Lua benefitsfrom a very active community that hascreated numerous libraries and develop-ment tools. Like Ruby before Rails, Luais a gem waiting to be discovered—thedifference is that it’s much faster thanRuby, has a tiny runtime footprint and iseasier to embed. For ISVs, in particular,it represents an important option.

I promise soon to move on from thistopic of dynamic languages. I have onemore to cover this year: Groovy, theabout-to-be-released Java scripting lan-guage, which like Lua has numerous inno-vative features plus complete Java com-patibility. Then, back to the larger travailswe all face. z

Andrew Binstock is the principal analystat Pacific Data Works.

The Language of Lua

Test-First Tactic Trounces Thread Threat

Integration Watch

Windows & .NET Watch

Software Development Times October 15, 2006

STAR West Oct. 16–20AnaheimSOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEERINGwww.sqe.com/starwest

SoftSummit Oct. 17–18Santa ClaraMACROVISIONwww.softsummit.com

Development Products Oct. 19–20ConferenceSan JoseEVANS DATA www.evansdata.com/dpc

Oracle OpenWorld Oct. 22–26San FranciscoORACLEwww.oracle.com/openworld

OOPSLA Oct. 22–26Portland, Ore.ACM SIGPLANwww.oopsla.org/2006

Trolltech Developer Days Oct. 26–27San JoseTROLLTECHwww.trolltech.com/company/newsroom/events/allevents/devdays2006

Colorado Software Oct. 22–27SummitKeystone, Colo.KOVSKY CONFERENCE PRODUCTIONSwww.softwaresummit.com

Zend/PHP Oct. 30–Nov. 2Conference & ExpoSan JoseKB CONFERENCESzendcon06.kbconferences.com

ASP.NET Connections Nov. 6–9Las VegasDEVCONNECTIONSwww.devconnections.com

Software Test Nov. 7–9& Performance ConferenceBostonBZ MEDIAwww.stpcon.com

Web 2.0 Conference Nov. 7–9San FranciscoO'REILLY MEDIAwww.web2con.com

Six Sigma in Software & IT Nov. 7–9San FranciscoWCBwww.wcbf.com/quality/5068

SuperComputing 2006 Nov. 11–17Tampa, Fla.IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETYsc06.supercomputing.org

VSLive Nov. 14–17DallasFAWCETTE TECHNICAL PUBLICATIONSwww.ftponline.com/conferences/vslive/2006/dallas

Application Integration Dec. 4–6and Web Services SummitOrlando, Fla.GARTNERwww.gartner.com/2_events/conferences/apn17.jsp

XML 2006 Dec. 5–7BostonIDEALLIANCE2006.xmlconference.org

INDUSTRY30 www.sdtimes.com

Looking for an independent voice onthe HP-Mercury deal, I finally

caught up with industry analyst TheresaLanowitz, who has left Gartner andstarted up her own firm, Voke (like inpro-voke). She shares our concernsabout the future of Mercury in a compa-ny that has not had success selling soft-ware in the past.

HP customers might thinkof the acquisition as givingthem something more, butMercury customers won’t beinterested in HP’s networkview of the world, or in Open-View, to which everything atHP slants, Lanowitz said.

Mercury’s managementteam, led by Tony Zingale,was nimble and aggressive,helping the company to a 50percent share of the software testingmarket. Its engineers, she said, havegreat visions for what Mercury’s archi-tecture needs to be for the future.

Now, it has become part of HP’s staidapproach, and the target of smaller,more nimble and aggressive companies.Empirix, another testing tools provider,is offering a free one-to-one switch fromMercury products to its own. Opportu-nities also exist for Compuware, IBMRational and others, she said.

Lanowitz speculated that theUS$4.5 billion HP paid for Mercurywas driven by bidding, mentioningsuch companies as Oracle, SAP andEMC as potential suitors. “HP isn’t oneI even would have guessed” to have aninterest in Mercury, Lanowitz said.

She believes the traditional Mer-cury customer base will be looking to

evaluate products from other compa-nies, since only a very small portion ofHP’s revenue comes from software. Ifyou’re a test tools customer, Lanowitzsaid, you’d have to be leery of a com-pany “that gets 51 percent of its rev-enue from toner.”

Shifting gears, Lanowitz said hercompany will be focusing on the appli-

cation life cycle, with a mis-sion to move the industrybeyond the status quo.“Things are largely the samesince 1999,” she said. “IT isworking on tactical things,and not being strategic. TheIT model of today is reallyoutmoded, and the applica-tion life cycle is one of thosebig areas.”

According to Lanowitz,who worked for a software companybefore moving to the analysis side,“Companies will tell an analyst some-thing they will never tell a vendor. It’slike a doctor-patient relationship.” Shenoted the disconnect between what thesoftware sellers are saying and what thedevelopment teams are saying. “In theapplication life-cycle managementenvironment, vendors think every ITorganization is humming right along,efficient and effective. But these guysare struggling. It’s a hard, hard life.”

One area in which she sees a majorchange in how business is done is inthe outsourcing of IT work. Shedescribed outsourcing as being in itsthird phase, with the first being cost-savings and the second involving figur-ing out how to make the outsourcingcompany an extension of the develop-

ment team. Phase 3 is around the off-shoring of very technical skill sets.

“People with skills that good willwork for a cool software company, likeAdobe or Microsoft,” she said. “Theenterprise can’t afford to keep thoseskills up to date.” Citibank, she said asan example, doesn’t need to pay some-one $100,000 to write LoadRunnerscripts. “They need good managers,who can make the go or no-go decisionon [deploying] applications.”

Software companies also will havepressure put on them from enterprisesto create tools that business analysts canuse in collaboration with developmentteams, to ensure that what’s being builtmeets the needs of the business. We’realready seeing some of that in therequirements management space; shethinks this will become a big marketopportunity in the coming years.

Further, the decisions on whichtools the company should use will startto be made in conjunction with theoutsourcing companies that will beusing them. “While the payment iscoming from a North American com-pany, the use is by the offshore guys,and they’ll help drive the evaluations.”

With U.S. business schools over-flowing and plenty of good seats stillavailable at computer science schools,it will be easier for enterprises to findthis type of manager, and send the cod-ing overseas. It might not be as cost-effective as it was when the trendbegan, as programmers offshore gethip to what they can ask for, but itmight be the only way for these enter-prises to stay competitive in a world inwhich more and more business is mov-ing to the Web. z

David Rubinstein is editor-in-chief ofSD Times.

Mercury and Points Offshore

Software Development Times (ISSN 1528-1965) is published 24 times per year by BZ Media LLC, 7 High St., Ste. 407, Huntington, NY 11743. Periodicals postage paid at Huntington, NY, and additional offices. SD Times is a registered trademark of BZ Media LLC. All contents © 2006 BZ Media LLC. All rights reserved. The price of a one-year subscription is US$179 for subscribers in the U.S., $189 in Canada, $229 elsewhere. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to SD Times, PO Box 2169, Skokie, IL 60076. SD Times subscriber services may be reached at [email protected] or by calling +1-847-763-9692.

Industry Watch

For a more complete calendar of U.S. software development events, see www.bzmedia.com/calendar.

Information is subject to change. Send news about upcoming events to [email protected].

RSA Security shareholders last month voted to

approve the company’s acquisition by EMC Corp. for

US$2.1 billion, adding security to EMC’s portfolio.

“Bringing RSA into the fold provides EMC with indus-

try-leading identity and access management technolo-

gies and best-in-class encryption and key manage-

ment software to help EMC deliver information

lifecycle management securely,” EMC CEO Joe Tucci

said in a statement. RSA is expected to remain in its

Bedford, Mass., headquarters and to operate as a divi-

sion of EMC.

EARNINGS: Oracle posted record earnings and rev-

enues in its first fiscal quarter, with GAAP net income

of US$670 million and GAAP revenues of $3.6 billion.

Those were increases of 29 percent and 40 percent,

respectively. Much of the driver for Oracle’s success

was growth in revenues for new packaged applications,

which reportedly climbed 80 percent. “We exceeded

our guidance on every metric and delivered strong rev-

enue growth across all product lines and geographies,”

said Oracle president Safra Catz in a statement. z

MOBILE 365 GIVES SYBASE GLOBAL, YEAR-ROUND UPTIMESybase has announced the acquisition of Mobile 365, in a bid to gain an

instant lead in the realm of content delivery networks. The deal is valued at

between US$400 million and $425 million. Mobile 365, based in Chantilly, Va.,

generated about $90 million in revenue during its fiscal year ended March 31,

2006. Revenue is mainly from its mobile data, messaging and premium con-

tent operations for operators, content providers, media companies and finan-

cial institutions around the world. “This acquisition extends our Unwired

Enterprise vision with the addition of two new enterprise channels—wireless

carriers and content providers—making Sybase the leading mobile software

and services provider in the world,” said Sybase president and CEO John Chen

in a statement. Among Mobile 365’s data services are those for interoper-

ability, interactivity and distribution of SMS, MMS, WAP and IM services. The

company claims to process more than 3 billion messages per month over its

operator-grade network, which contains connections to mobile operators,

including Cingular, China Mobile, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless and

Vodafone—nearly 700 connections in all. The transaction is expected to close

by the end of this year, and will create Sybase Mobile 365, a wholly owned

subsidiary. Marty Beard, currently Sybase’s senior vice president of corporate

development and marketing, will run the subsidiary as its president.

OCTOBER 15, 2006 • ISSUE NO. 160 Borland ...dighamm/publicity/SDTimes160.pdf · that BEA’s SOA...

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