Developers

Taking on the likes of Adobe and Microsoft, Sun Microsystems on Tuesday unveiled its new JavaFX family of products for building rich Internet applications. Based on Sun's longstanding Java platform, JavaFX includes a runtime and a tools suite that Web scripters, designers and developers can use to q...

Sun Microsystems and the OpenSolaris community it created a few years ago have officially released the Unix-based OpenSolaris operating system into the wild. The two organizations shared the news at the CommunityOne Developer Conference Monday in San Francisco. OpenSolaris is based on Sun's Solaris ...

Adobe Systems has assembled a group of industry leaders in an effort to put its Flash-based rich Internet solutions and content on most every screen -- PCs, mobile phones, MP3 players, televisions and any other consumer electronic device that might have a screen worthy of delivering content. The eff...

It is unusual, but not unheard of, for a murder case to go forward if a body has not been found. It is even rarer for the charge to be first-degree murder -- and less common still for the defendant to be found guilty. Those were the exact circumstances, though, under which Hans Reiser was convicted ...

The ideas blend together so well. Open source has been around for a long time and is built on the concept of developers working together and sharing software. Social networking has broken into the headlines as a new generation uses MySpace and Facebook as a whole new means of sharing their life expe...

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...

Larry Augustin strives for collaboration. Augustin and James Vera launched VA Research in 1993 with the hope of providing a Linux-based operating system for personal computers. After the company bought out its biggest rival -- Linux Hardware Solutions -- the company changed its name to VA Linux Syst...