NEW PRODUCTS
Perforce is offering a free Eclipse plug-in for its software configuration management system. The plug-in, which is also included with Perforce Server 2009.2, lets Eclipse users take advantage of Time-lapse View visualization and Perforce’s new shelving feature to facilitate code review. Time-lapse View provides a graphical view of the complete content history of an individual file, seeing how a file has evolved. The new shelving feature lets developers cache modified files in the Perforce Server without checking them in, to improve team collaboration, and give developers more flexibility in managing multiple projects.
Tasktop Technologies, which created the Eclipse Mylyn task-management software, and agile tool maker VersionOne have introduced VersionOne Mylyn Connector. The connector streamlines software development by providing direct access to VersionOne’s software from within the Eclipse IDE. Together, Tasktop and VersionOne will help developers view and update project artifacts in VersionOne while providing up-to-date time tracking and project status visibility for the whole team. The VersionOne Mylyn Connector is now included in Tasktop Pro, the enterprise version of Mylyn.
Salesforce.com has launched a developer preview of Chatter, its social-networking system. With Chatter, developers will be able to add social features like profiles, status updates and real-time feeds to applications built on Salesforce’s Force.com platform. The company will unveil Chatter DevZone, a community where developers can share ideas and collaborate on building new social enterprise applications on Force.com.
UPDATES
Cephas Consulting, Sparx Systems and Methodologies Corp. are including their Service-Oriented Modeling Framework (SOMF) 2.0 in Sparx Systems’ Enterprise Architect 8. SOMF is an enterprise-software modeling framework designed to be used by a wide range of organizational stakeholders, such as business architects, technical architects, software developers, software modelers, business and systems analysts, and managers.
Compuware has added new features to its Strobe database management suite to increase its visibility into IBM DB2 applications. Strobe 4.1, combined with iStrobe 4.1, provides not only detailed information on where and how DB2 applications are performing, but also provides remediation recommendations, allowing customers to avoid unnecessary hardware upgrades, according to the company. Strobe 4.1 also now provides performance details on runtime statistics, including the number of GETPAGES. If DB2 is run in a multi-CPU mode, Strobe 4.1 can provide complete multi-thread parallelism execution details. Strobe runs on the server; iStrobe is a Web-based system.
Site9 has updated its prototyping software for Web applications. ProtoShare 3.8 has new dynamic features and lets developers export a fully functioning copy of a Web application in HTML format to support usability testing. The latest release adds interactive data grids, dynamic tree views, and a new customizable component that lets developers create and add any functionality to a prototype.
PEOPLE
Eric Brewer is this year’s recipient of the 2009 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences. Honored for his contributions to the design and development of highly scalable Internet services, his work laid the foundation for the giant data centers that make e-mail, social networks, mapping and other Internet services possible. Brewer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, also enabled cloud computing with his 1994 work on the college’s Network of Workstations project. He built a cost-effective Web search service using clusters of computers.
Jerome “Jerry” York, a well-known member of Apple’s Board of Directors, passed away mid-March at age 71. When he joined Apple’s board in 1997, he was chairman, president and CEO of Harwinton Capital. Prior to that, he had been CFO of Chrysler and IBM, and former vice chairman of Tracinda, an investment firm. He played a key role in Apple’s turnaround after the return of cofounder Steve Jobs.
Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner, better known as Robin Milner, passed away last month at age 76. Milner developed LCF (Logic for Computable Functions), an automated theorem prover, and with it the ML programming language. He also developed mathematical frameworks for analyzing concurrent systems. Milner was Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, as well as Professor at the Informatics Forum at the University of Edinburgh.
