Thom Holwerda Archive

CIOs can gain competitive advantages by taking part in the open source revolution, a movement that will shake up the power structure of the IT world, said Julie Hanna Farris, the founder of Scalix. Farris explains why open source is not a fad and how it will benefit the business world.

Faces for Laszlo makes use of multiple J2EE (Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition) emerging technologies for rich Internet applications, resulting in a rich user experience on the browser. Through a JSF custom tag library, developers using Faces for Laszlo can integrate OpenLaszlo components into their web application. These components can bind to server-side data that is made available as JavaScript data structures within the browser at runtime.

Asa Dotzler, from the Mozilla foundation, has just written an interesting analysis describing why Linux is not ready for desktops yet, and suggests four main categories that must be addressed to improve this.

Mozilla has released new versions of its Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird email client to fix problems introduced by the previous updates. An update to Camino has also been released.

Groovy took a gigantic leap this past April, with the formal release of a new parser aimed at standardizing the language as part of the JSR process. If you weren't paying attention before, now's the time to start. The new syntax is chock full of enhancements to the language designed for a short learning curve and a big payoff. Resident Groovy practitioner Andrew Glover walks through most important changes to Groovy's syntax and shows you a handy feature you won't find in classic Groovy.

The Qt 4 Resource Center has published a new article about zooming and scrolling. The zoomable picture viewer article discusses the Qt classes needed and the coding details that are dealt with.

Microsft has made hard statements about perfomance improvements in Longhorn. They claim that applications will load 15% faster than in XP, while boot time is decreased by 50%. They also claimed that Longhorn will be able to wake up from sleep in 2 seconds. Users should also expect half as many reboots during patching. Time to dust of those trustworthy stopwatches.

Asa Dotzler, the community coordinator at the Mozilla Foundation, said Tuesday that he hopes to attract many corporate Windows 2000 users to the Firefox browser, since they will be unable to take advantage of the improvements in IE 7.

On Tuesday, code-analysis software maker Coverity announced that its automated bug finding tool had analyzed the community-built operating system FreeBSD and flagged 306 potential software flaws, or about one issue for every 4,000 lines of code. The low number of flaws found by the system underscores that FreeBSD's manual auditing by project members has reduced the vulnerabilities in the operating system, said Seth Hallem, CEO of Coverity.

Reports of the death of Sun Microsystems' Java Desktop System with Linux combination are exaggerated, says its chief software executive.

Today at PCBurn we're taking a look at Mark G. Sobell's "A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming". It aims to be a complete learning and reference guide to the Linux shell. We'll take a look at the salient points that a reference and teaching book should cover and see how "A Practical Guide..." addresses them.

"In this article, I'll attempt to list what I believe to be the most salient points of the economics of programming languages, and describe their effects on existing languages, as well as on those who desire to write and introduce new languages."

TuxMachines has a quick look at Mandriva Linux 2006 Beta 1. This beta has been quietly released over the weekend; DistroWatch lists the mirrors where you can download. You can see the full package list here, and a screenshot gallery here.

The open-source Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client will be updated for the second time in a week because of code changes that have stopped some third-party extensions from functioning correctly.