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Cloned code finder offered for Visual Studio

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:35:53 GMT

An open-source technology has been launched to help developers using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 find duplicated code in their software projects.

Called Clone Detective for Visual Studio, the product allows developers to analyze C# projects for source code duplicated elsewhere. These duplicates can lead to inconsistencies and indicate poorly factored code, according to the Clone Detective Web page at Microsoft's CodePlex site for open-source projects.

Version 1.0.0.0 of Clone Detective for Visual Studio was released on August 16 under an Apache 2.0 license.

"Duplicated source code can be an indicator for quality problems," said project coordinator Immo Landwerth. "Having the same algorithm spread across the whole application in slightly different variations will lead to increased maintenance effort, which ultimately may result in inconsistencies."

Among the reasons for code duplication is "lazy" developers who only know how to cut and paste, Landwerth said. Other reasons could include architectural constraints and methodology issues.

While currently limited to C# code, the next release will add capabilities to examine Visual Basic .Net and C++ code, Landwerth said. The integraton between Clone Detective and Visual Studio was developed by Landwerth and colleague Thomas Dallmair in cooperation with Technical University of Munich.

"Clone Detective makes it easy for developers to perform a clone detection and visualize the existing clones. However, in some cases, the source duplication cannot be easily removed (e.g. the cost of removing the clones outweighs the costs of keeping them due to heavy design change requirements)," Landwerth said. "In this case, Clone Detective helps by reminding you that a given portion of code is duplicated (by a purple bar in the code editor). So if you make changes to it you should review the other occurrences and make sure you keep your application consistent."

Clone Detective leverages the university's ConQUAT (continuous quality assessment toolkit) tool for clone detection.

The next version of Clone Detective will be able to find "fuzzy clones," said Landwerth. "Fuzzy clones are clones that are almost identical but not token by token. This will allow you to find existing inconsistencies in your code base," he said.

Separately in the Visual Studio realm, TeamExpand this week is offering timesheet-tracking software for Visual Studio.Net software development teams. Functioning with the Microsoft TFS (Team Foundation Server) application lifecycle management server, TeamExpand's commercial release of its TX Chrono timesheet application allows project managers to submit and analyze timesheets.

The Web-based application features a set of notifications and reporting capabilities lacking in TFS, TeamExpand said. TX Chrono offers workflow and TFS compatibility to make software development activities more predictable and visible, the company said. Bug fixes are included as well.

TX Chrono offers:

*Automated notifications and alerts on projects, individuals and activities.
* Timesheet submission and approval.
* Individual and non-standard schedules.
* Non-standard working hours per day or week.
* Separate billable and non-billable tasks.
* Custom timetables.
* Advanced reporting.

TX Chrono is licensed at $15 per seat each month. A 30-day free trial version is available at this Web page.

LG unveils netbook PC with embedded 3G at IFA

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:26:10 GMT

LG Electronics will launch in October a netbook-class laptop PC based on Intel's Atom processor that also includes 3G wireless, it said Wednesday at the IFA show in Berlin.

The X110 will include an HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) cellular data modem that should be compatible with the newer 3G networks now being rolled out by most major carriers around the world. HSPA is typically capable of download speeds of several megabits per second, and the latest versions of the evolving technology also offer megabit-per-second uploads.

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In addition to 3G, the machine supports 802.11b/g wireless LAN and has a wired Ethernet connector.

The X110 is based on the same 1.6GHz Atom processor that many of its competing devices use and has a 10-inch WSVGA resolution (1,024 by 600 pixels) screen that, if it wasn't for the 3G, would place it very close to competing netbook PCs.

LG has decided to go for a conventional hard-disk drive in the X110 and will offer models with either 80GB or 120GB of capacity. Some netbooks use faster solid-state disks based on flash memory chips, but they typically offer much lower capacity.

It runs the Windows XP Home operating system.

The machine will be available in several colors, including white, pink, or silver. LG didn't announce the price.

Cisco buys into e-mail with PostPath acquisition

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:28:01 GMT

Cisco is buying PostPath, a maker of e-mail and calendaring software, for $215 million and plans to add those capabilities to its on-demand Web Ex Connect collaboration platform.

PostPath makes PostPath Server, an e-mail and collaboration server the company touts as a replacement or supplement to Microsoft Exchange. An archiving edition of the software is available to store e-mails in a less cumbersome fashion than Exchange does with its journaling of old e-mails. The company also offers a version of PostPath Server for VMware.

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Cisco plans to put the server in the cloud and sell an e-mail and calendaring service to its customers. "Our 'cloud-based' delivery model offers our customers rapid deployment and compelling economics," says Doug Dennerline, senior vice president of Cisco's Collaboration Software Group (CSG).

PostPath is all about requiring no middleware to interoperate with Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, Active Directory, ActiveSynch and BlackBerry Enterprise Server, among other applications. But it also promotes itself as a Linux-based replacement for Exchange that gets around some of the Microsoft platform's shortcomings, including larger data stores and higher performance in terms of how many hits per minute the platforms can handle.

Cisco bought WebEx last year to deliver software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, including instant messaging, team spaces for collaboration, wikis and document sharing.

Privately held PostPath was founded in 2003.

Cisco says it expects to close the deal by the end of October and add PostPath's 67 employees to its Collaboration Software Group. CSG is part of Cisco's recently established Software Group that oversees the IOS network operating system, network and service management, unified communications, policy management and SaaS offerings.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate

Microsoft Office Live Small Biz suffers outage, lost e-mail

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:05:08 GMT

Microsoft loyalists could be forgiven for feeling a little smug after all of the publicity over outages and lost e-mails at online services run by archrivals Apple's MobileMe and Google's Gmail.

Microsoft, it turns out, isn't invulnerable. Some users of Microsoft's Office Live Small Business have also reported intermittent e-mail outages, according to interviews and postings at discussion forums for the Web service, which is used by more than a million small companies.

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Through a spokeswoman, Microsoft acknowledged Tuesday that a "brief isolated" e-mail outage occurred last Friday.

But at least one user says he was told by Microsoft technicians that some of his e-mails were permanently lost.

"Outages you can understand, but the outright loss of data? They should be ashamed of themselves, being the biggest computer company in the world," said Joe Reilly, owner of Marine Wireless Internet in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Reilly said he is a paying customer of Office Live Small Business, which he uses to host his tech firm's Web site and provide his e-mail, through which he gets important messages, such as customer payment confirmations.

Reilly said he "became suspicious" when he did not receive "my usual 20-30 e-mails" on Monday morning. Confirming through his self-testing that e-mails were not being delivered, Reilly said he talked to Office Live's technical support, who told him that the service was "experiencing some issues."

First launched in 2006, Office Live Small Business is a service that allows small firms to design and host their Web sites, run their e-mail, an e-commerce store, Web advertising campaigns and more from a single service. Some of the services are free and some are provided for a fee.

E-mail for Office Live Small Business users is provided through Windows Live Hotmail.

The spokeswoman confirmed that Office Live Small Business and Hotmail customers were hit by a two-hour outage early last Friday afternoon.

"We are sorry to hear about this customer experience and are doing everything we can to help the customer restore his emails," she wrote in an e-mail. "This incident only affected a handful of customers and to our knowledge all customers' emails are being restored."

Not according to Reilly, who said he was reassured on Monday that mail would "trickle through in the next few hours." When that didn't happen, Reilly called back, and was told there was an "extended server outage" and that some customer e-mails had been permanently lost. After demanding a written confirmation, Reilly said he was referred to Microsoft's legal department.

Another Office Live user, Russ Bellew, said he has also experienced recent "intermittent outages," though he hasn't permanently lost any e-mails as far as he knows.

Microsoft had a much larger outage that affected multiple Windows Live services, including Windows Live Mail, back in February.

For now, the recent outage appear less severe than that incident or the problems affecting MobileMe and Gmail.

Relaunched this February, Office Live Small Business competes with services from Yahoo and others.

It is different from Office Live Workspace, an online document storage and collaboration service that competes with Google Apps.

Reilly says that while he's disappointed with Office Live Small Business, he doesn't plan to switch. "I'm kind of stuck with them," he said.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Hackers resort to 'sick' kidnap spam

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:52:50 GMT

Hackers are claiming they have kidnapped children in a bid to infect PCs with a Trojan Horse virus, says Sophos.

The security firm is warning users that e-mails entitled "We have hijacked your baby" are being sent to Web users around the globe. As well as asking for a $50,000 ransom for the "release" of the child, the messages also contain an attachment supposed to be a photograph of the child. Instead the file actually contains a Trojan horse that will steal personal information.

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"Receiving or reading these widespread emails themselves does not mean you are infected, but if users open the attachment they will be infecting their Windows computer, they will give hackers an open door to take control and steal information," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

"There's no other way of putting it -- this attack is sick. Hackers have no qualms about exploiting a family's natural instinct to defend its most vulnerable members," added Cluley.

PC Advisor is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Grim outlook for U.S. IT spending

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:39:53 GMT

U.S. companies are pulling back hard on IT spending as the economic downturn continues, a new study by ChangeWave Research has found.

ChangeWave surveyed 1,947 people involved with IT spending in their organizations. The survey was conducted Aug. 11-21. Eighty percent of those surveyed were located in the U.S., along with small percentages in Canada and other countries.

Thirty percent overall reported that third-quarter IT spending was lower than previously planned, an increase of three percentage points since ChangeWave's May spending survey. Meanwhile, only 12 percent spent more than planned.

In addition, 29 percent said spending will drop or even cease in the fourth quarter, a 5 percent increase over the last study. Thirteen percent plan to spend more.

"Thus, the brief period of stabilizing we picked up in May has given way to another major leg downward," ChangeWave director of research Paul Carton wrote in a blog post Wednesday. "In fact, you have to go way back to the middle of the last recession (August 2001) to find a ChangeWave survey projecting this big of an IT spending downturn."

Higher energy costs stood as a top factor for the spending slowdown, cited by 35 percent of respondents.

ChangeWave's findings show a turnaround is not imminent; 39 percent of respondents predicted IT spending in their companies would not rise until the second quarter of 2009 or beyond.

Oracle integrates CRM On Demand with Siebel

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:53:43 GMT

Oracle has developed prebuilt integration software for its CRM On Demand product and the on-premise Siebel CRM, providing customers with a single view of their CRM data, the company announced Wednesday.

Companies can benefit from a hybrid approach to customer relationship management, because the on-demand model allows companies to more easily add new users, while enabling data from both systems to be analyzed at once, Oracle said. The integration software employs Oracle's Application Integration Architecture framework and Fusion middleware. Pricing was not disclosed.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

Oracle's news release on the product stressed its benefits for customers. But the vendor's real goal is to fend off competition from Salesforce, which has based its entire strategy on pushing the benefits of on-demand software, analysts said.

"This is how you sell against Salesforce," said analyst Bruce Richardson of AMR Research. "You talk about that as a dead-end silo while selling end-to-end business processes."

"I don't think it will lead to an increase in demand for Siebel," he added.

Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research largely echoed Richardson, while noting that Salesforce offers Salesforce to Salesforce, a means of integrating with fellow Salesforce customers, and also has strong capabilities for tying into systems such as Siebel.

" I expect this is a strategy by Oracle to keep its Siebel customers from looking outside of the barn," he said.

On the whole, Oracle has taken a cautious approach to on-demand software. During an earnings conference call in May, CEO Larry Ellison told analysts that while the company has been selling on-demand products for nearly 10 years, it only recently began making money at it.

"The entire industry has to get better at making money selling on-demand ... That's what we're focused on before we scale the business," Ellison said at the time.

Salesforce's stock dropped sharply following its recent quarterly earnings report, which saw the company beat analyst expectations for revenue but also indications that business is slowing down.

IEEE standardizes fast Wi-Fi roaming

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:22:32 GMT

The IEEE has completed 802.11r, a standard that lets Wi-Fi devices roam quickly between access points, improving the performance of VoIP on enterprise LANs.

The IEEE 802.11 standards were originally defined with single access points in mind, but in offices multiple access points are needed. Devices can move from one access point to another, but it takes around 100ms to re-associate, and several seconds to re-establish authenticated connections using 802.1x.

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The new standard, 802.11r, known as Fast Basic Service Set Transition, allows the network to establish a security and QoS state for the device at the new access point, before it roams between the two, so the transition can take place in less than 50ms - the standard required for voice roaming.

The IEEE has been working on 802.11r for four years, and the concept has been solid since 2005, but the standard was formally approved and published by the IEEE this summer.

Till now, vendors have either used lower security options on Wi-Fi VoIP (using WEP encryption for instance) and put VoIP traffic on separate VLANs to protect the rest of the network, or implemented technology close to the eventual 802.11r standard.

Other vendors, including Meru and Extricom, has built networks where there is no roaming because all the access points are on the same channel.

IEEE 802.11r could open up a bottle-neck in enterprise Wi-Fi VoIP installations, and should allow VoIP certification to move ahead. Although the Wi-Fi Alliance, delivered a VoIP brand, known as Wi-Fi Certified Voice-Personal in June, this has had limited success, and the Alliance is expected to follow up with a Voice-Enterprise brand, including 802.11r, in 2009.

Cisco and Meru branded enterprise-grade equipment under the Voice-Personal brand, but other business Wi-Fi companies have shunned it.

"We primarily address the enterprise market, so we would certainly look for voice-enterprise when it comes out," said Roger Hockaday, Aruba's director of marketing EMEA.

"[Voice-Personal certification] is for low range stuff and SME equipment," said Alistair Mutch, worldwide business development director for Wi-Fi switch vendor Trapeze (now being acquired by Belden). "We have not submitted to the low end one as we felt it was really not worth it."

Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Samsung: Market for SSDs in low-cost PCs exploding

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:56:33 GMT

The popularity of low-cost PCs around the world is driving "explosive growth" for SSDs (solid-state drives), Samsung said Wednesday as it announced three new models of the device.

SSDs are made from NAND flash memory chips and are used to store software, songs, pictures, documents, and other data on computers. The drives hold several advantages over common HDDs (hard disk drives), including being speedier, lighter, quieter, and using far less power.

[ Stay ahead of advances in hardware technology with InfoWorld's Ahead of the Curve blog and newsletter. ]

The market for low-density SSDs will grow by 57 percent per year annually until 2011, due mainly to brisk demand for low-cost PCs, Samsung said.

The company said it will start mass producing three new low-capacity drives -- 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB SSDs -- next month. The storage drives are each about 30 percent smaller than 2.5-inch HDDs, a small size normally used in low-cost PCs and netbooks, or mini-laptops.

The new SSDs will also run faster than older-generation SSDs made for low-cost PCs, Samsung said, because they include high-performance SATA II (serial advanced technology attachment) controller technology inside.

Samsung's latest SSDs can all read data at 90MBps, while writing at speeds varying from 70MBps for the 32GB SSD, to 45MBps for the 16GB SSD, and 25MBps for the 8GB SSD.

These speeds mark an improvement over the company's first SSDs aimed at small devices, which were launched in 2006. Those devices, 32GB and 16GB SSDs, could read at 57MBps and write at 32MBps.

Samsung is the world's largest memory chipmaker.

The most popular style of low-cost PC on the market today that use SSDs are mini-laptops, or netbooks, such as the Eee PC by Taiwan's Asustek Computer.

The devices are a new style of mobile PC that weigh less than 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds), sport 7-inch to 10-inch LCD screens, carry long-lasting batteries, and connect wirelessly to the Internet. They generally cost far less than the average notebook PC as well, between $199 to $599.

Global netbook shipments are forecast to reach 8.02 million this year and then more than double to 18.3 million units in 2009, according to Taiwan's Market Intelligence Center (MIC).

Acer, the world's third-largest PC vendor, has said it expects to ship 5 million to 6 million of its Aspire one netbooks this year, while Asustek has forecast Eee PC sales at 5 million this year.

Mozilla extension would tap into typed commands

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:57:35 GMT

An experimental extension to Mozilla Firefox lets people substitute simple text commands for complex Web tasks such as putting links to maps in e-mail messages.

On Tuesday, Mozilla Labs released its first version of Ubiquity, which is related to software called Enso that was developed at a small Chicago company called Humanized. Mozilla hired three executives of Humanized in January, and Aza Raskin, the former president of that company, introduced Ubiquity 0.1 in a Mozilla Labs blog entry on Tuesday. Raskin is now head of user experience at Mozilla Labs.

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Ubiquity is designed to help ordinary people create something like mashups and to do it on a personal basis instead of in the form of a public Web page. The commands that users type in Ubiquity, such as "map" and "e-mail," find resources on the Web and can gather information from those sources in one place.

For example, someone inviting a friend to dinner could highlight the name of the restaurant, type "map," and instantly call up a Google Map showing the location of the restaurant. The user could then edit that map and place it in the body of the e-mail message. Similarly, typing "yelp" and the name of the restaurant would bring the text of reviews from Yelp.com right into the message.

In an interview, Raskin compared it to a search engine, except that Ubiquity users type in what they want to do instead of what they want to find.

Other commands that are already available include "defi," which brings up a definition for a highlighted word; "trans," which translates any highlighted text; and "twit," which takes the highlighted text and puts it up on Twitter.

It's easy to create new commands, so average users can do it without advanced Web development skills, according to Raskin.

"You don't have to wait for a developer to think of a user case. ... You can do it for yourself," Raskin said.

Users who created commands for Ubiquity can post them on the Web and allow others to subscribe to them for free.

Ubiquity may or may not be added as an extension to Firefox. Mozilla Labs is designed to be an open test environment for new ideas, with participation by anyone, in which some ideas will graduate to use in Firefox and others won't, Raskin said.

-- Additional reporting by Elizabeth Montalbano in New York.

Sharing Microsoft Office files: A 5-minute productivity tip

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:14:11 GMT

It's a typical business scenario. Several people on a project have to create a set of documents: a report in Microsoft Word, a budget spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, the final presentation to the board using Microsoft PowerPoint. One person writes the draft, and wants input or changes from other project participants. So far, so good. But that's when productivity-not to mention disk space-heads down a rat hole.

All too often, people share documents by sending the files around in e-mail. Everyone involved adds his own changes (using revision marking, if the leader is lucky), and then e-mails back that unique file. The project leader has the unenviable job of incorporating all those changes, or there's a flurry of confusion when everybody waits for Jane to finish with the file so Joe can add his own text. And never mind that the security of your document is practically nonexistent as well; what would you do if your competition happened to latch on to your latest and greatest project description? Or your sales presentation for a key client? As a byproduct, the team creates huge attachments (often with no consideration given to file size-and PowerPoint files can reach 40MB in a hurry).

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It's terribly inconvenient -- especially when there's a better way. And it takes only a few moments to learn.

In short: keep the Microsoft Office documents on a network drive to which all participants have access. Microsoft Office manages access to the files, far better than you can. If Jane has the file open when someone else attempts to bring it up, Microsoft Word will say that the document is in use (by Jane) and give Joe the option to open it as read-only (which sometimes is all that's needed) or to be notified when the file is unlocked again. (Unfortunately, none of the options include "automatically send Jane an e-mail message to tell her to hurry up already," but that cattle-prod technology has not yet been perfected.)

The benefit: Everyone works on one version of the file, so it's impossible for things to get out of sync. Your e-mail inbox (and mail server ) isn't stuffed with contradictory versions of important documents. And, since-presumably-your network servers are backed up on a regular basis (far more so than are most users' laptop computers), the documents may be more secure as well.

The downside: It requires the document editors to be connected to the office network and to be logged into the VPN. That's not especially helpful for mobile executives who imagine that the best time to work on a PowerPoint presentation is on the flight to the board meeting . Those individuals need to think ahead, and to grab a copy of the latest version from the server before they leave on their trip.

This may sound like a "Well, duh!" tip-unless you didn't know it already. I've watched too many otherwise savvy business staff blithely send huge files in e-mail-a dozen times a day.

CIO.com is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Locked iPhones can be unlocked without a password

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:43:19 GMT

Private information stored in Apple's iPhone and protected by a lock code can be accessed by anyone with just a few button presses.

The iPhone, like most mobile phones, can be locked with a four-digit code, but where other phones in their locked state only permit calls to emergency service numbers such as 911 (in the U.S.), 999 (in the U.K.) and 112 (throughout Europe), a locked iPhone can be used to make a call to any number.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

However, that's not all you can do with a locked iPhone running the latest version of Apple's software, 2.0.2.

Pressing the emergency call button at the unlock screen, followed by two taps on the home button, takes you to the iPhone's private 'favorites' page without the need to enter the unlock code. If the owner of the phone has favorite entries in their address book containing URLs, e-mail addresses or mobile phone numbers, then those entries can be used to launch the browser, mail application or SMS (Short Message Service) software, and gain access to private Web favorites, e-mail messages, and text messages stored in the phone, again without entering the unlock code.

The security flaw, revealed by a member of the MacRumors.com forum, came as a surprise to an Apple spokeswoman in London, who said she would look into the matter.

One way to avoid such unauthorized access to e-mail messages or Web favorites would be not to add e-mail addresses or URLs to favorite address book entries.

Apple pushed version 2.0 of its iPhone software as being more enterprise-friendly: some businesses had been reluctant to adopt the first version of the iPhone because it did not adequately protect corporate information stored in the device.

China aims for petaflop computer in 2010

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:22:20 GMT

China has stepped up investment in its homegrown Godson microprocessor and hopes to build its first petaflop-class supercomputer using the chip in 2010, one of the country's senior engineers said on Tuesday.

China made a decision 20 years ago not to invest in microprocessor development, and it was only in 2001 that it reversed course and began to make a serious effort in this area. As a result, its technology trails far behind that of world leaders like Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and IBM.

[ Stay ahead of advances in hardware technology with InfoWorld's Ahead of the Curve blog and newsletter. ]

But China has now made a long-term commitment to Godson and since 2006 has increased funding for it "quite a lot," said Zhiwei Xu, CTO of the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The country still lags behind its international rivals in chip development but is doing its best to catch up, he said in a presentation at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, California.

China has produced four Godson processors, the latest being the Godson 2f. It struck a deal last year with STMicroelectronics to manufacture and sell the chips, and they are now used by 40 companies in set-top boxes, laptops and other products, Xu said. The commercial name for the chips is Loongson.

Next month China will complete the design of a new version of the chip, the Godson 2g, which integrates more functionality on the silicon. Next year it hopes to include graphics capabilities on the same silicon as the main processor, much as AMD and Intel are doing today.

China is also hard at work on the Godson 3, which is aimed primarily at servers and will be the first Godson to use a multi-core design. A version of the chip due in 2009 will have four general-purpose cores, and four specialized cores for tasks like scientific computing. The general-purpose cores will run at 1GHz and be similar to those on the Godson 2, Xu said.

China hopes the Godson 3 will allow it to build a high-performance computer in 2010 that can perform at one petaflop per second, Xu said. That would match the IBM system based on an advanced Cell processor that led this year's Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

Asked after his speech if the goal is realistic, Xu said, "it's possible, but it will be hard." Besides developing the system, China will have to find markets to sell it to, he noted. The U.S. is skittish about buying Chinese equipment for government-related work for security reasons.

Godson's use in PCs has been held back by the fact that it is based on a MIPS core, as opposed to the x86 design used by Intel and AMD. To run Windows it has to use translation software to achieve x86-compatibility, and the Godson loses a lot of its native MIPS power in the process.

The Godson 3 adds new instructions that speed the x86-to-MIPS translation by a factor of 10, Xu said. "Our goal is to eventually reach 80 percent of the native MIPS performance," he said. "Right now we are at 40 percent, so we have a long way to go."

Tom Halfhill, a senior analyst at In-Stat, said the goal of a petaflop computer in 2010 might be realistic. "Why would they set a target they don't think they can achieve? That would only embarrass them," he said.

Halfhill was given an overview of the Godson in Beijing about two years ago. China was developing applications to run on Godson PCs, he said, including productivity software based on OpenOffice.

With its huge population, China can become a significant player in the microprocessor market even if it sells only domestically, he said.

"What China wants to do is develop its own technologies so that its manufacturers aren't dependent on paying licenses and other fees to other countries," he said.

Fujitsu readies eight-core Sparc64 chip

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:52:33 GMT

Fujitsu is developing an eight-core version of its Sparc64 processor, which should give a performance boost to the Sparc Enterprise Servers that Fujitsu jointly develops with Sun Microsystems.

Fujitsu's Takumi Maruyama mentioned the chip briefly at the end of a presentation at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, California, Tuesday but he provided few details, including when the processor will ship.

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It will succeed the four-core Sparc64 VII processor released in servers from Fujitsu and Sun in July. The Sparc Enterprise Servers use Fujitsu's chips and Sun's Solaris 10 operating system. The companies develop the systems together but market and sell them separately.

The eight-core processor is code-named Venus and will be manufactured using a 45-nanometer process, Maruyama said, a step up from the 65-nanometer process used for the quad-core Sparc64 VII.

It will have an embedded memory controller and offer peak throughput of 128Gflops (floating operations per second), he said. He said it is being designed for the age of "petascale computing."

"I hope I can tell you more about it at Hot Chips next year," Maruyama said.

The chip will be likely be welcomed by Sun, which confirmed in a separate presentation that its own Rock processor won't ship until the second half of 2009, about a year later than originally planned.

Rock is a 16-core processor that Sun has billed as a dramatic step forward in chip design. It will be able to address very large amounts of memory and uses innovative data "pre-fetching" techniques to achieve high levels of parallelism.

Sun says the chip will offer lightening-fast performance for databases and other enterprise applications. However, the newness of the design may have contributed to the chip's delay, which Sun disclosed earlier this year.

Can JavaFX make a play for rich Internet apps?

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:00:00 GMT

With its new JavaFX technology for rich Internet applications, Sun Microsystems hopes to leverage the strength of the Java development base and Java's ubiquitous presence on devices to make a strong run in a race it has entered very late -- and where Adobe Systems and Microsoft have a huge head start.

If this competition were a race between Olympic runners, it might be broadcast like this:

"In Lane 1, we have Adobe with its Flash and attendant Flex technologies, downloaded millions of times and popular on high-profile sites like YouTube."

"In Lane 2, it's AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), the popular RIA technique used in countless Web sites."

"In Lane 3, its up-and-comer Silverlight, backed by software giant Microsoft and used by NBC's prominent Olympics Web site."

"And in Lane 4, we have Sun's JavaFX used by Web properties such as -- well, it's still in development."

[ The InfoWorld Test Center rates the preview version of JavaFX as promising but not yet competitive with Flash and Silverlight. See why. ]

Sun believes JavaFX has a strong chance because it doesn't see there being just one winner. "This isn't the type of market where only one technology is going to win," says Jacob Lehrbaum, senior product line manager for JavaFX. But Lehrbaum acknowledged the course will be tough: "Clearly, we do have to compete for developer mindshare."

Forrester Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond thinks Sun has a shot, especially in the burgeoning market for applications running on mobile devices: "I think Sun has the opportunity to catch up very quickly in that space."

"I would say that the JavaFX platform looks very good. It has a lot of potential," said Andres Almiray, a software developer at Oracle. "It probably should have been announced three, four, five years ago," Almiray said. "The good thing is that it's finally here."

An anonymous blogger identified only as "geekycoder" lauded the technology: "Technically, JavaFX enables me to leverage [the] Java skill set and Java technology that I am more comfortable with to deliver a compelling RIA solution. Because synergy between JavaFX and Java is excellent and the fact that JavaFX is built on the Java platform means that I can ensure that I have one of the best and supportive platforms to work in. In addition, JavaFX will enable me to be more productive in making it easier and quicker to create RIA solutions," for Web 2.0.

The JavaFX road map
First revealed at the JavaOne conference in May 2007, JavaFX still is a work in progress. The official JavaFX Web page describes the project as "a powerful client technology for creating rich Internet applications with immersive media and content across the multiple screens of your life." It features the JavaFX Script scripting language for building rich Internet applications for desktop, mobile, TV, and other consumer platforms.

"JavaFX Script, the language of JavaFX, doesn't replace Swing, the core Java GUI toolkit, but provides an alternative way of programming that hopefully will bring Java technology to the masses," according to geekycoder.

A preview version of a software development kit for JavaFX for desktop applications, supporting Windows and Macintosh, was released late last month. Further deliverables are planned. JavaFX for Desktop 1.0, featuring a profile for desktop and browser deployments and a general-release SDK, is due this fall. JavaFX for Mobile 1.0, adding mobile support, is planned for spring 2009 release. TV support also is planned.

The JavaFX runtime is to be distributed with the Java VM. Licensing plans for device manufacturers also are to be revealed next spring. When manufacturers license Java Micro Edition, they will get the JavaFX mobile runtime.

JavaFX offers plug-in capabilities similar to Flash and Silverlight, but it also has a standard runtime -- the Java Virtual Machine -- to run applications outside a browser, Lehrbaum said. Other plug-in technologies will let developers use existing tools such as NetBeans or design tools such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator with JavaFX.

Why Sun thinks JavaFX will catch on
With JavaFX, Sun looks to build on the presence of Java on more than 2 billion handsets. Lehrbaum acknowledges that Java has been difficult to use, so those Java-based phones don't offer the kind of rich Internet experience found on Apple's iPhone, Palm's Palm OS, or Microsoft's Windows Mobile. He claims that "JavaFX takes that momentum and the advantages we have with Java but makes it much easier to create rich interactive and immersive experiences."

For example, JavaFX Script offers a declarative scripting language for developers to build interfaces in the way that they think about them, Lehrbaum says. "It matches the way they think about interfaces in their head and is very intuitive," he says.

JavaFX also revives the notion of client-side applets, which had been envisioned as the big win for Java in the mid-1990s. (Instead, Java took root as a dominant server-side technology.) With JavaFX, developers could build applet widgets for information access or a stock ticker.

To enable the applets revival, the Java Standard Edition SE 6 Update 10 release, due this month, will let developers write a single version of an application and run it on the desktop or in a browser. Lehrbaum claims the update will also make applet loading faster. JavaFX, meanwhile, makes it easier to build rich immersive experiences for such applets, he adds.

What early users think of JavaFX
The Java SE 6 Update 10 and JavaFX do in fact solve deployment issues for Java, says Jim Weaver, president of Java trainer jMentor, such as letting a Java or JavaFX application begin executing before the entire Java Runtime Environment has been downloaded.

Weaver describes JavaFX and the update as a "one-two punch." The update enables rich client Java to become a reality, Weaver says, whereas JavaFX Script provides the necessary simple scripting language.

JavaFX compiles down to byte code and runs anywhere the JVM runs. "You can use any Java classes within JavaFX," Weaver says. "You can leverage your Java skills with JavaFX."

"The platform promises a lot of new APIs and new abstractions to make the harder things simpler and the simpler things very easy," says Oracle's Almiray. For example, APIs and libraries take care of establishing the correct order of a drawing on the screen, he notes. JavaFX Script does offer some features not in Java, such as data-binding into the language, Almiray says. But he notes that some Java features -- such as annotations, generics, and inner classes -- are lacking in JavaFX. Almiray expects that JavaFX will succeed in the mobile arena, but says it will be tough to compete with Flex in rich Internet applications.

A muddled open source message
JavaFX initially was proclaimed to be a fully open source effort. But Sun has backed away from that stance. An FAQ page on a Sun Web site this spring reported that tools such as the compiler, runtime engine, player, and tools currently under development would not be open source.

The compiler, however, has been made open source, as have parts of the graphics libraries and some tools.

Sun plans to clarify its open source strategy for JavaFX with the Desktop 1.0 release, Lehrbaum says.