DevelopmentEssentials

A round up of interesting algorithms and look at how they impact your community.

Facebook now gives its developers the option of submitting their applications for review to obtain a seal of approval, but some developers aren't thrilled with the program.

Expressing a now-familiar theme, a Microsoft executive at the ApacheCon conference on Friday morning touted Microsoft's efforts to be more open, highlighting moves such as offering the company's "M" modeling language under the Microsoft "Open Specification Promise."

Yahoo will launch its platform for Web developers this week, part of an effort to attract more visitors by adding Facebook-like social networking features to Yahoo's Web sites.

In the run-up to its Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft on Friday opened a new initiative to let the developer community hear about and try early developer tools that the software giant is working on.

Google has enhanced its Google Gears Geolocation API so that developers can build applications that can track the location of laptop users within 200 meters.

The former second-class citizens of the programming world have leaped to the fore, changing the face of enterprise software development. With the rise of Web 2.0, scripting languages (also called dynamic languages) are now often considered important tools in a developer's arsenal. That's a far cry from than their old reputation as lesser tools for those who can't handle "real" programming.

A study by the boutique consultancy Voke finds corporate software development in a state of dysfunction marked by budget woes, protracted project lengths and dissatisfied end users.

The agile revolution that began in software development in the 1990s has been inexorably making its way into mainstream IT organizations. Today, one of the most adopted agile practices is unit testing, where developers write hundreds of small tests for exercising their own code. Although the benefits of unit testing are widely recognized, there's growing evidence that unit testing might have reached its high-water mark and be entering a period of stagnation or even decline.

A recent report claims that one of the fundamental benefits of open-source development, the co-called Law of Many Eyes is wrong. The idea behind the law is that since anyone can read the source code and find problems with it, they can then either fix them or report them back to the community. The end result is that you get better software.

IT's rise to prominence as a core competence that delivers competitive advantage has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the number of software development projects it must complete. Well aware of the hidden costs of unfulfilled tasks, enterprise IT managers are fast shedding their prejudices against dynamic languages in search of a quick way to cut down the backlog.

Every good carpenter has a box of tools he carries from job to job: a hammer of just the right weight, a selection of drill bits, and so on. As he gains experience, his toolbox gets heavier with new, and sometimes specialized, equipment. Similarly, programmers accumulate their own tools as they move from job to job, but these tools are digital and often include snippets of code written over the years.

Sun Microsystems is stepping up efforts to boost Java usage in Linux shops by working to remove some final encumbrances in the open-source Java platform.

JavaFX, introduced by Sun last year as a Java-based platform for building visually oriented applications, will be leveraged in the growing consumer application space.

There was a moment in history when assembly coding and the knowledge of it largely disappeared from the world. Before it, the programmers knew and cared about the binary code the CPU saw, even if they relied upon a compiler to build much of it. After that moment, the IDEs came along and did so many things automatically that programmers stopped caring about such things as linking or op codes.