Developers

Google has opened up a new sandbox for developers designed to entice them into building richer social networking gadgets for iGoogle. iGoogle is basically a customizable home page for individuals that uses Web-based "gadgets" to deliver content to the page. The new sandbox will let developers contin...

Memory bugs, essentially a mistake in the management of heap memory, are caused by a number of factors and can occur in any program that is being written, enhanced or maintained. The fact that memory bugs can be introduced at any time is part of what makes memory debugging a challenging task. This i...

It must be tough to be 34 and already see your children overshadow you. That's what's happened to "Dungeons & Dragons," the roleplaying game that for decades has drawn geeks to roll dice and pretend to be elves, sorcerers and other fantasy heroes. It has never quite become mainstream entertainme...

Microsoft is continuing to make good on its promises of openness. The Redmond software behemoth posted an additional 14,000 pages of preliminary versions of technical documentation of Microsoft protocols that should help third-party developers -- including open source developers -- build more intero...

Over the last three years, the number of developers of the Linux kernel has tripled, according to the Linux Foundation. A research team from the organization has reported that the growth of the open source operating system into new areas is attracting more hands-on code writing of the Linux engine.

After a long and bitter battle, Microsoft's Office Open XML appears to have finally been accepted as a standard for open documents by the International Organization for Standardization. Or has it? The ISO is not going to make an official announcement until Wednesday. However, ECMA International, a p...

IBM has bought into New Jersey-based startup EnterpriseDB, an open source rival of MySQL and Oracle. EnterpriseDB closed a $10 million round of Series C venture capital financing with IBM, as well as Charles River Ventures, Fidelity Ventures and Valhalla Partners, the company said at the Open Source...

Since its launch, renegade developers have been working to make the iPhone a Linux workstation, porting tools to the device. And why not? It has enough RAM and hard disk space to make the work worthwhile. "My iPhone has 16 GB of disk space, 128 MB of RAM, a 600-plus MHz processor and a much better d...

Tony Baer has a great rundown of Monday's EclipseCon OSGi-based runtime Equinox news. Extending the Eclipse community's unity to runtimes makes a ton of sense, given that developers can focus on the applications and business logic and become far less concerned with complex deployment issues. Write o...

What a nut I was. Back when Sun Microsystems and Microsoft announced they would be joining forces on interoperability between Sun, nee Java, and .NET -- remember Steve Ballmer of "Ballmer and Butthead" fam] and Scott McNealy sitting side by side -- I thought they meant it. I pushed the envelope, jus...

In Search Of: CEO to turn IT organization that operates like a terrorist group into a Microsoft-like outfit. Vision and big-picture mentality not required. Management, administrative and detail skills sorely needed. Ability to deal with a chairman who occasionally goes off reservation during press i...

Google has announced that it's taking Google Gears to the road, a move the company said is intended to make sense out of the dense and complex process of developing for the mobile Web. Google Gears, previously only available for desktops, is software that enables device users to access online servic...

The Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley is nestled into the Berkeley Hills just off the fire trail where runners from around the area come to take on the brutal 3.5-mile climb. The lab, though, doesn't feel like it's part of Berkeley. It's located a few miles from t...

Drupal, the wildly popular open source social publishing system which has been downloaded more than 2 million times since it was released in 2001, will soon be available as a commercial distribution. The news was announced at DrupalCon Boston 2008, a convention of Drupal users, being held in Boston ...

Give office workers familiar with the Microsoft XP operating system an opportunity to try the same navigational tasks at a Linux-based desktop. Then step back and wait for the reaction. First will come the surprised look. Then questions like "where did the command line go?" will soon follow. That's ...