software development - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Cobol skills drought persists amid mainframe migrations

  Enterprises struggling to fill demands for Cobol skills should consider an application modernisation program which could also pave the way for migration off the mainframe to an open system.

• Intel opens software development center in Romania

  Intel on Monday opened a research and development center in Bucharest that will focus on software development.

• E-books, iPad, Kindle not the death of publishing

  The publishing industry must embrace e-books and engage with the IT industry in order to reimagine book production, a Web development expert has warned.

• iSOFT to lay off 800 staff

  Australian e-health giant iSOFT (ASX:ISF) will lay off 800 staff, constituting 17 percent of its total workforce, over the next financial year in a bid to halt its sliding financial fortunes.

• Local Sybase offices wait for global green light

  A month after SAP finalised the $US5.8 billion acquisition of mobility and data warehousing company Sybase, local offices are waiting for the proverbial green light to begin integration.

• Microsoft predicts a 'poetic age' of software

  Microsoft has forecast the future of software development, labelling the developments to follow the Natural User Interface (NUI) as “poetic”.

• A 'fat-free' programming framework for the cloud

  Researchers in the U.K. are developing a lean-and-mean programming framework called Mirage that is designed specifically to support applications running on cloud infrastructure platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine.

• 'Many thousands' of pre-release Windows Phone 7 handsets prepped for developers

  Microsoft is confirming that "many thousands" of pre-release Windows Phone 7 handsets will be given to selected developers starting in July, but confusion over how that will be done continues.

• OpenCL 1.1 ratified by The Khronos Group

  The Khronos Group has ratified OpenCL 1.1, a programming standard for parallel execution of tasks across multicore processors, the standards-setting organization said on Monday.

• Apps must disconnect to survive

  If your mobile application can’t work inside a lift, or crashes though train tunnels then you need to back to the drawing board, says one Windows Phone 7 developer.

• MasterCard to cater to developers with APIs, portal

  MasterCard is launching a program for external developers interested in tapping into some of the credit card giant's internal payment and data services to create applications.

• Opinion: Can you change your default programming language?

  If you have more than one coder on your team, chances are you have standardised on a programming language. Whether it's C, Java or Python, people need to be able to read and write each other's code to do their work. The language was probably picked by some of the first coders in your team, or was based on an analysis of what was needed at the time.

• Microsoft sponsors first Aussie Python conference

  Local Python programming language professionals and enthusiasts will gather in Sydney next month for the inaugural PyCon Au, including representatives from the event's main sponsor Microsoft.
  

• Operator mobile app push sets timeline

  The first applications based on the work done by the Wholesale Applications Community will arrive in February next year, but meanwhile developers can get to work in September, the organization said Wednesday.

• iPhone OS 4.0 improvements to augment developer opportunities

  News of Apple's iPad, the forthcoming release of the iPhone OS 4.0 software update and the surrounding hype of it all has been hard to avoid. According to third party developers, the new form factor and new features have brought new opportunities.