The fate of Borland's developer tools group will finally be sealed in the next couple of months, as the software vendor works to finalize deal with a buyer. Nick Jackson, managing director of Borland DTG in the Asia-Pacific region, told ZDNet that the company, which announced its intention to divest its developer product lines on Feb. 8, has attracted about 16 qualified bidders so far.

Apple sent a seismic shockwave through the Mac market a year ago when it announced that was ditching its long-time processor suppliers IBM and Motorola in favor of chips from occasional arch-nemesis Intel. The announcement came on June 6, 2005, during Steve Jobs’ Worldwide Developers Conference keynote - by the end of 2007, the Apple CEO said, all Mac hardware would be running on Intel processors.

"At the Worldwide Developers Conference in August, Apple plans to provide a sneak preview of the next major update to OS X, code named Leopard. Apple is typically tight-lipped about what to expect from Leopard, so we have no idea what new and improved features await us in August. But that's not stopping us from coming up with a list of things we'd like to see in OS X 10.5." And for when you're done reading.

KDE is ditching the GNU autotools for development and building of their next version, KDE 4. Its replacement is CMake, developed by Kitware. Alexander Neundorf explains the choice in favor of CMake was mainly due to its support for all platforms KDE4 is meant to run on: Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Solaris, and even Windows. CMake generates specific command files for each of the 'native' build tools from one common source: Makefiles (for GNU make) or project files (for XCode on OS X, for MS Visual Studio, for KDevelop3). Current KDE 4 modules already build (with CMake) on more platforms than KDE 3 with autotools ever did, with full configure checking on all platforms and all compilers/IDEs. Scribus is now also moving to CMake.

A couple of years ago, PHP sat at the top of the powerful-but-easy-to-use scripting languages heap. And then - suddenly, Ruby on Rails hit the programming world like a ton of bricks. Did you really want a ditch it all for Ruby on Rails and start over? Of course not! What was needed was a new framework that incorporates many of these new advantages without dumping your previous PHP work in the garbage, Thus, the Zend Framework was born. This article shares the concepts behind the Zend Framework, including the Model-View-Controller pattern and the PHP coding standards.

Linux has one, last, chance to become the No1 OS in a particular consumer-oriented market (not counting servers): the mobile phone market. The open nature and yes, the hype around Linux has made lots of mobile-oriented companies to consider using Linux for their next-generation cellphones. But there is a major problem on the way to success, a problem which is created not by Linux itself, but by the greed and close-mindness of these same companies that endorse Linux.