In its 2015 report, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) identified SQL injection and cross-site scripting among its Top 10 software vulnerabilities. Again. If it feels as if you’ve been reading this same story for the last decade, it’s because you have. So why is it that we can build intelligent robots, fling unmanned … continue reading
Today’s monolithic applications are starting to become too big and too complicated for developers to maintain. When developers want to update a feature, they are forced to update the entire application. To solve this problem, organizations have been turning to a new software development approach: microservices. “Microservice architecture is the idea that rather than building … continue reading
The acronym API has come a long way. In 1980, asking about an API meant building something for a massive corporate software package. In the 1990s it meant building with the tools for a 3D card or a sound card. Today, however, the term tends to mean just one thing: RESTful Web APIs. And what … continue reading
Artificial intelligence is often depicted in films as the scientific floodgate to apocalyptic doom, a “Terminator,” “The Matrix” or “I, Robot” scenario where machines quickly turn on humanity. “Chappie,” the latest sci-fi parable from director Neill Blomkamp, portrays an AI being that learns and interacts with the world in ways that are innately human. “Chappie” … continue reading
A number of factors have come together to form a guide for Microsoft to the path that has made Azure the key to the company’s future success. That road has been bumpy, but almost always on a good trajectory. Now, as the offerings gel and mature, Microsoft has to maintain its commitments and satisfy those … continue reading
As a teenager with too much free time, Mitchell Hashimoto’s natural coding ability and love of video games got him in a bit of trouble. Under threat of legal action from Neopets and others, the enterprising 14 year-old high school freshman forcibly shut down his US$25-per-month membership site selling automated video game cheats he coded … continue reading
In the field of testing, there are many ideas and movements, some of which have formed into schools. But there is really no universally accepted standard for what testing is and how it should be performed. The attempts to establish such a standard (such as the infamous ISO 29119) are met with either ice-cold indifference … continue reading
The concept was similar to other anonymous social media messaging platforms, like Yik Yak, Secret and Whisper. But when Preetham Reddy, lead developer for RezTech LLC in Phoenix, and his team built the Sipper location-based bulletin app, he learned a few hard lessons—as most fledgling app developers do. RezTech’s app experience, while not particularly unique, … continue reading
It’s easy to look around Silicon Valley and determine that the days of the refrigerator-sized mainframe computers are over. Clouds are big, and OpenStack promises a future where everyone can run their own cloud inside their enterprise. But the core business applications of yore are still out there, running on giant machines in basements, making … continue reading
Hadoop has, for the most part, moved beyond the proof-of-concept phase and the initial chasm of adoption. More and more organizations are putting the open-source framework to work on mountains of complex Big Data. The next step in Hadoop’s evolution is getting a handle on governance. To that end, Hortonworks—the enterprise data platform provider and … continue reading
Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) is making strides these days, with many real-time voice and video communication platforms already being introduced to the Web such as Google Hangouts and Mozilla’s Firefox Hello. But in-browser capabilities still have a ways to go on the road toward standardization. “Standardization is a kind of never-ending road, and it is … continue reading
The Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) has released two specifications to help organizations increase software quality. Managed by the Object Management Group (OMG), CISQ was chartered in 2009 to create specifications for measuring source code quality that can be approved by the OMG. “[The] industry needs standard, low-cost, automated measures for evaluating software size … continue reading
This was the last year in which Big Data was an off-the-street term. As the year ended, Hortonworks was preparing to go public, with Cloudera preparing for the same outcome. Big Data will officially transition into being a big business this year. Thus, 2014 was the year when pilot projects went into production, or when … continue reading
In some ways, open source in 2014 meant more than it ever had in years prior. Where once Linux was the primary standard-bearer of open source in the enterprise, in 2014 there were too many gigantic open-source projects appealing to enterprises that it’s difficult to pick just one to hold up as the model for … continue reading
Normally an article about a programming language and framework that both have been with us for more than a decade would be anything but a page-turner. When it comes to C# and .NET, it turns out there’s a big story to tell, including things that could spell another decade of that language (and maybe even … continue reading
In 2014, “mobile” evolved into a more widely unified and interconnected concept. The last several years have seen smartphones, tablets and mobile apps take control of how we consume and compute information, redefining how we communicate with each other. A train with that much momentum doesn’t stop when the market reaches its peak; it barrels … continue reading
In 2014, the selection of cloud platforms and services was more plentiful than ever before, and it saw countless partnerships and integrations to tie them all together. Cloud users and developers are dropping eggs in many different baskets, be it Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud or open-source platforms such as … continue reading
When the term “application life cycle” was first introduced, there was no knowledge or even any practice of agile development or Continuous Delivery (CD); there were no wearables, and mobile phones were dramatically different than what they are today. What used to suggest a beginning to an end to a program’s life evolved into this … continue reading
Application performance management solution provider Dynatrace is a private entity once more, becoming an independent business and naming John Van Siclen as its new CEO. After the initial dynaTrace company, which also had Van Siclen as its CEO, was acquired by Compuware in 2011, the company assumed the role of the APM business in the … continue reading
Every year there are a number of vulnerabilities exposed and exploited, but 2014 was bad in terms of software security. In the beginning of the year, Cenzic revealed the latest results from its 2014 Application Vulnerability Trends report and found that a majority of apps have at least one security vulnerability; but it wouldn’t be … continue reading
Software vulnerabilities have existed for as long as there has been software. Organizations and their developers have been locked in a cat-and-mouse game with the legion of hackers looking to steal data. Every time one breach is fixed, another is exploited, and ‘round and ‘round it goes. So, after Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, … continue reading
Intense focus, sharp memory and pattern recognition are some of the traits that a great software tester has to have. It so happens that those traits are prominent in individuals on the autism spectrum. Autism is a term used to describe complex disorders of brain development, and a person with autism often experiences difficulties with … continue reading
For years businesses have been practicing agile, seeing notable success in time to market, productivity and creativity at the team level. Now they want to expand the scope of those benefits. If you asked development teams a year or two ago to identify the biggest agile obstacle, most of them would have said getting management … continue reading
The first rule of CodeFightClub is…it’s okay to talk about CodeFightClub. So says Andrew Hathaway, the 18-year-old software engineer from Leeds, U.K., who started the head-to-head online programming arena known as CodeFightClub. In less than a week since its launch, CodeFightClub has signed up more than 100 users via Twitter logins, and they’ve started seven … continue reading
A mobile user clicks a link in a smartphone app. Another app automatically opens inside the first to the exact page the user was looking for. When that happens, the user doesn’t question how she or he got there. It just works. Behind those responsive intra-app connections are mobile deep links, the hidden underlying mechanisms … continue reading
In the eight years since its initial release, jQuery has become the foundation of the modern Web. The popular cross-platform library has become bundled and intertwined with countless websites, developer tools and with JavaScript itself. The next step for the open-source platform is jQuery 3.0. In a recent blog post entitled “jQuery 3.0: The Next … continue reading
Microsoft describes its Visual Studio Online offering as being “based on the capabilities of Team Foundation Server with additional cloud services.” Productivity across teams is a competitive advantage that is not just nice to have anymore, and a big key to productivity is providing the tools needed for Agile development. The drive to do more, … continue reading
As agile practices continue to gain momentum, and as delivery deadlines grow shorter, the ability to quickly fix bugs and add features is imperative. Despite the hype, not all organizations have adopted Continuous Integration (CI) yet. While continuous builds and CI practices are becoming more common—and a smaller percentage of companies have embraced Continuous Delivery … continue reading
