An anonymous reader writes "Sun's engineers have been blogging today that Sun has finally released its next generation filesystem, ZFS today by pushing out the "community" (i.e. testing) build 27 of OpenSolaris in source and binary form. There is also documentation and a a source code tour available on their site."

An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks has an article from a little while back that takes a look at the impact of schema evolution on the application. The narrative walks the reader through a usage scenario to illustrate the ease of setting up a PHP environment and integrating DB2 native XML functionality with PHP applications including web services written in PHP and XQuery."

An anonymous reader asks: "What would be the best high availability solution for databases? I don't have enough money to afford Oracle RAC or any architecture that require an expensive SAN. What about open source solutions? MySQL cluster seems to be more master/slave and you can lose data when the master dies. What about this Sequoia project that seems good for PostgreSQL and other databases? Has anyone tried it? What HA solution do you use for your database?"

An anonymous reader writes "The widespread adoption of programmer testing over the past five years has been driven by the demonstrable productivity and quality of the resulting code. Find out why and how to do it, as this article introduces you to the benefits of testing aspect-oriented code and presents a catalog of patterns for testing crosscutting behavior in AspectJ."

Rob writes "Seeking to make its presence in third-party rebranded commerce applications more ubiquitous, eBay Inc is lifting all of its API and transaction charges for developers. It's the latest action a series of moves to expand the eBay developer community. Last summer, the company opened up a collaborative website, the eBay Community Codebase, to provide a hosted project developer site for anyone willing to open source their code."

An anonymous reader writes "Making effective use of shared memory in high-level languages such as C++ is not straightforward, but it is possible to overcome the inherent difficulties. This article describes, and includes sample code for, two C++ design patterns that use shared memory on Linux in interesting ways and open the door for more efficient interprocess communication."

under_score writes "According to eWeek.com Microsoft is adopting the agile methodology called Scrum to get software built faster. Is it working? They seem to be claiming that Scrum and Extreme Programming have helped them get recent releases such as SQLServer out the door faster with better quality. Many other large organizations are also adopting agile methods including Yahoo, and Google. Are agile methods the next big thing in software development?"

hackwrench asks: "There is lots of talk about writing portable programs, but this pursuit has resulted in a lot of processor features going unused. One example is being able to write a program that purposely uses a combination of 16-bit and 32 bit. I know there are arguments that writing solely in one or the other is a performance advantage, but what are the factors involved? Is the slowness of such a combination inherent in its design or is it a result of current hardware. We are beginning to replace systems and programs designed primarily to run in pure 32-bit mode with systems designed to run in pure 64-bit mode, so I ask: Is such purity really worth it?"

An anonymous reader writes "IT professionals can automate IT management tasks by delegating them to the system, and can plan the degree of automation that is right for them and how manual managers and autonomic managers work together. This article discusses the role of the humans, or lack there of, in autonomic systems. The article claims that isn't about replacing people with machines." How have other readers experienced the use of autonomic code both good and bad?

ChocLinux writes "Linus Torvalds is cracking down on developers that add last-minute changes to the kernel during the two-week merge window. He says: 'If people miss the merge window or start abusing it with hurried last-minute things that just cause problems for -rc1, I'll just refuse to merge, and laugh in their faces derisively when they whine plaintively at me, and tell them there's going to be a new opening soon enough.'"

An anonymous reader asks: "Ok, so here is the scenario: my company has some software that is used internally and it is written in Perl. We now need to put this code on a server that has 'public' access (it's a university machine). We provide root access to the system for the purpose of learning, but we need to keep the code from being viewed or edited. Is there anything to do besides the 'perl2exe' and the ActiveState compiler? How effective are those really at protecting code?"

OSS_ilation writes "Google uses it, and Microsoft is pursuing it, so there's a lot of hype and hubbub surrounding AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). AJAX brings together some hot properties, JavaScript, HTML/DHTML and HTML, according to Julie Hanna Farris, founder of Scalix, a Linux-based, e-mail systems vendor. Scalix is using AJAX in Scalix Web Access (SWA), a Web-delivered, e-mail application. AJAX enables advanced features like drag 'n drop, dropdown menus and faster performance capabilities, which are now making their way into Web applications, she said. These kinds of capabilities represent a significant leap in the advancement of Web apps."

derek_farn writes "IBM has released an SDK running under Fedora core 4 for the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) Processor. The software includes many gnu tools, but the underlying compiler does not appear to be gnu based. For those keen to start running programs before they get their hands on actual hardware a full system simulator is available. The minimum system requirement specification has obviously not been written by the marketing department: 'Processor - x86 or x86-64; anything under 2GHz or so will be slow to the point of being unusable.'"

Conspiracy_Of_Doves writes to tell us Brett Thomas over at Bit-Tech recently interviewed Elder Scrolls producer, Gavin Carter. From the article: "The size, scope and sheer graphical grunt required for Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion requires gigahertz of processing power to run, good bandwidth to update and expand, and gigabytes of hard disk space to store. Things that a console didn't really have...until now." The interview takes a look at the development with respect to the two different platforms, PC and Xbox 360.

Simon P. Chappell writes "Much as a certain large software company located in the North-West of the United States of America might wish otherwise, there are many different operating systems and platforms in use in the world today. Software these days needs to able to operate in a disparate environment, either by communicating with these other platforms or by running on them or, increasingly, doing both. The Information Systems industry is making good progress with the communication half of the problem (even if a lot of it seems to involve large amounts of XML), but it is still struggling with the issues inherent with writing portable code. Brian Hook's contribution to all of this is Write Portable Code , which according to it's subtitle is an introduction to developing software for multiple platforms." Read on for the rest of Simon's review.

achowe writes "The winners of the 18th International Obfuscated C Code Contest have been announced. This years winners include a 'Commodore PET emulator', 'Sound generation with SDL audio', and a 'Text WWW Browser'."

Moof writes "The United States Supreme Court refused to hear a case between a programmer and his former employer. What makes this news is the fact that the court is letting stand the rulings of the lower courts: Essentially if someone owns a physical copy of software, then they are allowed to modify the code as part of their regular use, no matter what other agreements are in place."

zerojoker writes "The discussion is not new but was heated up by a blog entry from Greg Kroah-Hartman: Three OSDL Japan members, namely Fujitsu, NEC and Hitachi are pushing for a stable Kernel driver layer/API, so that driver developers wouldn't need to put their drivers into the main kernel tree. GKH has several points against such an idea." What do you think?

Bobby Jasper writes to tell us that The Firebird Database Community News has an interesting writeup on Morfik, a new development tool for beginning web applications. Morfik boasts increased developer productivity going so far as to draw comparisons between themselves and the current industry as VB 1.0 was to GUI development. After five years of development they are getting ready to release an evaluation version of their software, might be worth a look.

Christopher B. Brown writes to tell us Network World is reporting that Computer Associates is selling their Ingres database technology to a private equity firm called Garnett & Helfrich Capital. From the article: "CA released Ingres last year as an open source project, reviving interest in the dormant software. Still, databases have never been a core part of CA's portfolio. CA CEO John Swainson cast the Ingres sale as part of CA's larger effort to streamline the vast collection of applications it amassed through a decade of heavy acquisitions in the 1990s. Ingres came to CA through its 1994 buyout of ASK/Ingres"