Stories by Chris Reynolds

Borland revs up business with new-look Turbo tools

On September 5, Borland re-entered the IDE market with the Turbo brand of products. The brand first made its name in the 1980s and 1990s by providing fast, cheap programming tools such as Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo Assembler.

Adobe flexes its muscle with Flex2

Adobe hopes that Flex2 will revolutionise the way people interact with the web. At the moment, most people, including IT professionals, are inclined to think of a website as one thing and a software application as another. Flex2 has the potential to merge the two fields of endeavour, so that software applications are deployed from a web server and run inside a browser.

Firefox 1.5 delivers goodies for web developers

Mozilla released Firefox 1.5 at the end of November last year and one of its features is on auto-update mode. I note that I am now running 1.5.0.1 that was released on the 1st of February 2006.

Call of the wild lures Rhino and JAIN

As he swung through the jungle, Tarzan often wondered about the future of integrated networks and how could they be interfaced easily and managed using a common programming environment.

Studio 8 review

Macromedia has just released Studio 8 which is a bundle of several of their products for web content producers. This includes several old familiar faces as well as a couple of recent additions.

Xbox development comes in from the cold

Over the last few years, Microsoft has invested heavily in the games market with its Xbox product line. However, developing for the Xbox has required the XDK (Xbox Developers Kit), with the result that the Xbox platform has been marginalised in comparison with Windows.

IBM's adieu to code

IBM Japan has been researching a new development paradigm based on cards, sheets and fields. Called ADIEU, the work-in-progress has recently been pre-released on IBM's AlphaWorks website with preliminary documentation.

XAML : the fat 'thin client'

According to IT Minister David Cunliffe, commenting in last week’s Computerworld, there is "great potential" in thin clients. Cunliffe is correct (of course), but the thin-client options may be about to be trampled by the Windows Vista juggernaut. Microsoft is always at its most effective when developers lose control of a product and marketers gain it. That has just happened with Windows Longhorn, now renamed Vista, as it begins its migration from Redmond's development labs into the marketplace.

XAML: the fat 'thin client'

According to IT Minister David Cunliffe, commenting in last week’s Computerworld, there is "great potential" in thin clients. Cunliffe is correct (of course), but the thin-client options may be about to be trampled by the Windows Vista juggernaut. Microsoft is always at its most effective when developers lose control of a product and marketers gain it. That has just happened with Windows Longhorn, now renamed Vista, as it begins its migration from Redmond's development labs into the marketplace.

Google suggests AJAX

There are several candidates striving for mindshare in the rich internet application development environment. One approach goes by the acronym AJAX, and the leading proponent of that approach is Google, which uses AJAX in its Mail, Maps and Suggest products. (For those who have not experienced the phenomenal performance of Google Suggest, perhaps they should google “Google Suggest” and try it.)

What's your poison?

The National Poisons Centre needs easy-to-configure data kept up to date. Enter XML

Modernising data networks gets urgent

In an industry where network operators are investing to either keep their networks ahead of the game, or simply to replace aged equipment, customers are inevitably going to feel the impact as legacy networks and service platforms are withdrawn.

[]