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SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

The Industry Newspaper for Software Development Managers

ISSUE NO. 018

IBM's alphaWorks
Releases XML Technologies
For Licensing 3

RosettaNet Readies

RNIF2.0 3

Sun Launches Web Site

As Clearinghouse

For Software Design 3

Zerocode Designs Database
Apps Over Web 5

BountyQuest.com Takes

On Patent Disputes 5

APIs Holding Back

UDDI Spec 5

Parasoft Prepares

WebKing Upgrade 7

J Last Call' On

WebDav Protocol 7

Embarcadero

Buys Advanced Software,

Narrows 0-R Gap 10

Footprints 4.5 \ t lvi'li*

Eliminates Remote

Calls Over Phone, Wired Web 12

Childhood Friends Find

Recipe for Success 14

Sun's Java Embedded Server
2.0 Now OSGi-Compliant . . .17

Spyker Traces
Non-Instrumented Code ...17

Microsoft Unveils SQL

For Windows CE 18

Wind River

Acguires Dragonfly 18

Wireless DevCon 2000:

A Shift to Wireless Apps . .30

A BZ MEDIA PUBLICATION $7.95

www.sdtimes.com

iANYWHERE AS WIRELESS ASP:
'SOUP TO NUTS' FOR MOBILE DEVICES

Database developer extends to hosting services,
completes last mile of end-to-end solution

ment, said that much

BY EDWARD J. CORREIA

If you want something
done right, you have to
do it yourself.

That's why Sybase
subsidiary iAnywhere
Solutions Inc. says it's
launched a wireless app-
lication hosting service.
The mobile-database-
developer-turned-ASP is
targeting its new service
at OEMs and enterprise
developers promising
full-time access to enterprise
data systems, and citing existing
gateway providers as unsuitable
for the job.

Rob Veitch, iAnywhere s
director of business develop -

Existing ASPs
were unsuitable
for our purpos-
es, says iAny-
where's Veitch.

of the difficulty devel-
opers face when build-
ing wireless networks
is with connecting
their enterprise data to
the wireless carrier.
"As we rolled this thing
out, we found that
there's a pretty big bar-
rier at the hardware
infrastructure layer,"
he said. "Because in
order to build a wire-
less solution, you need to figure
out how to get from the carrier
to your application server."

These types of connections

commonly use frame relay or

► continued on page 18

Informix

Unveils

Arrowhead

New all-encompassing product family
to envelop XPS f new app server

BY ALAN ZEICHICK

On the eve of its eighth annu-
al customer and partner con-
ference in Orlando, Fla.,
Informix Corp. has announced
its latest earnings, as well as a
new Arrowhead product initia-
tive and other upgrades.

This summer, the two-
decade-old database company
began reorganizing itself into
two separate divisions: Informix
Software, which continues to
develop and market the
database product; and a
second division, not yet
named, which would
offer more comprehen-
sive e-business prod-
ucts and services.

Taking into account
charges of $67 million Arrowhead will be
for the third quarter, a replacement
most of which the com- database for
pany's chairman, Peter some customers,
Gyenes, said was asso- says Informix
ciated with that re- Software's Staff.

organization, Informix Corp.
(www.informix.com) showed a
loss of $85 million on sales of
$211 million for the quarter.
By comparison, the same quar-
ter in 2000 showed a net
income of $25 million on sales
of $261 million.

In a public statement, Gyenes
attributed the poor performance
to many causes, not just the reor-
ganization. "While we bore the
burden of a post-Y2K slowdown
in demand of traditional
client/server products
and weak foreign curren-
cies, the primary cause
of the company's poor
performance has been
poor execution," he said,
adding, "We now expect
to return to profitability
in the current [fourth]
quarter, before previous-
ly announced charges,
and to continue sequen-
► continued on page 36

A Clear Case for Good Management

Rationale suite upgrade emphasizes better oversight, guality

BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN

Five software versions in 22
months. Get ready for Rational
Software Corp.'s Rational Suite
version 2001, an upgrade of its
family of development tools that
the company said delivers new
strategic initiatives for change
management, quality assurance
and project management.

This marks the fifth release
of the suite, which comprises 18
Rational products for software
developers and managers.
According to Bill Taylor, Ratio-
nal's director of product market-
ing, among the highlights
of this update is the inclusion

of the Clear Case LT configura-
tion management tool and
Test Manager testing tool within
the company's four Studio prod-
ucts as part of Rational's Unified
Change Management (UCM)
initiative, which embraces the
concept of managing change
across the life cycle from design
to deployment.

Small shops can reap the ben-
efits of ClearCase LT, then move

into the more full-featured
ClearCase and ClearCase Multi-
Site versions as they grow, "with-
out retraining or retooling and
with total integration," Taylor
said. The inclusion of ClearCase
LT and Test Manager in the
Analyst Studio and Test Studio
products provides benefits of
change management not just for
code and models, he explained,
► continued on page 14

The UCM initiative fosters change management from development through
deployment by bringing in all members of the project team.

HP ACQUIRES

BLUESTONE

SOFTWARE

BY DOUGLAS FINLAY

Hewlett-Packard Co. has
reached a definitive agreement
to purchase Bluestone Software
Inc., maker of the Total-e-Busi-
ness platform, in a stock-for-
stock deal designed to strength-
en HP's position in the software
and middleware markets. Hold-
ers of Bluestone stock will
receive about one share of HP
stock for every four shares they
own in a deal said to be worth
$467.6 million.

The acquisition targets Blue-
stone's Internet-based tech-
nologies to become the integrat-
ing platform for HP's current
software offerings, such as
OpenView, an integrated net-
work management application;
Smart Internet Usage, an Inter-
net tracking and billing system;
► continued on page 36

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Software Development Times , November 15, 2000

NEWS

IBM's alphaWorks Releases XML Technologies for Licensing

BY DOUGLAS FINLAY

Buoyed by its early success in
releasing the XML parser for
Java — when several hundred
parsers were downloaded with-
in days of the posting — IBM
Corp.'s alphaWorks Web site
for showcasing new tech-
nologies recently made six
XML technologies available
for licensing. These new

releases follow closely on the
heels of the August release of
IBM's XML Security Suite,
which creates tables for secur-
ing digital signatures.

The six XML alpha tech-
nologies for which licenses are
available are Xeena, a visual
XML editor that edits XML
Document Type Definitions
(DTDs); XML EditorMaker,

for creating visual Java-based
editors in which to create and
modify XML documents; XML
Productivity Kit, for integrating
XML documents into a Java
development environment;
XTransGen, for defining and
storing the mapping relation-
ships between two XML
DTDs; XML Lightweight
Extractor, for defining sources

RosettaNet Readies RNIF v. 2.0

BY DOUGLAS FINLAY

Even as it touts convergence of
industry specifications created
by groups such as Biztalk.org
and the ebXML consortium,
RosettaNet.org. was busy final-
izing its own RosettaNet Imple-
mentation Framework (RNIF)
version 2.0, which standardizes
methods of exchanging busi-
ness data. The final specifica-
tion is due by mid-November.

"While other standards
focus on vocabularies and
schemas in describing how to
build business documents and
what should be in them, Ro-
settaNet (www.rosettanet.org)
provides more comprehensive
specifications that address how
those documents are exchanged
among the trading partners,"
said Mitch Shue, RosettaNet's
chief architect. To that degree,
he said RosettaNet had made

its mark in addressing what he
termed the process specifica-
tion — or Partner Interface
Process (PIP) — and creating
the RosettaNet Implementa-
tion Framework for it.

Shue maintained that RNIF
2.0 would be aligned more
closely with both Biztalk.org and
ebXML technologies with re-
gard to packaging and security.
Ultimately, Shue said, Roset-
taNet's aim is to see that the
standards promoted by both
groups converge. "Because Ro-
settaNet wishes to see conver-
gence in the future with other
specification bodies, we don't
want to ignore what those other
groups are doing." He said the
other groups could do a better
job of standardizing on transport
protocols in the future, for
instance, leaving RosettaNet to
focus on process specifications.

On the face of it, new fea-
tures appear to make RNIF 2.0
align more with ebXML, how-
ever. Shue said that new pay-
load features would make the
header XML-compliant, while
the body could contain any
type of file format, such as a
CAD file or PDF file, provided
in an S/MIME (Secure Multi-
purpose Internet Mail Exten-
sions) package that includes
encryption features. ebXML
offers a similar protocol to its
member companies. Shue did
say he had had "collaborative
though informal" discussions
with Microsoft officials, who
were interested in what Ro-
settaNet was adding to 2.0.

Other new features include
third-party content support,
digital signature signing, trans-
fer-level debugging headers and
a quality-of-service element. I

SilverMark Adds Test Scripts to VisualAge

Does VisualAge pass the test?

Users for IBM's VisualAge
for Java integrated develop-
ment environment now have a
new code-testing utility that
plugs directly into their IDE.

SilverMark Inc.'s Test Men-
tor Java Edition is the compa-
ny's newest offering, and is
designed specifically to allow
developers to test their appli-
cations as they code, according
to SilverMark. From within
the VisualAge IDE, Test Men-
tor provides a user interface
for testing individual compo-
nents by furnishing wizards
and automatic test-code gen-
eration, including code gener-
ation from models built using
Rational's Rose UML model-
ing software.

According to SilverMark
(www.silvermark.com), all of
the test code is generated as
Java code, and can be executed
as stand-alone applications

Test Mentor users can test individual components while they code.

using Java classes included with versions of Test Mentor for the

Test Mentor. Smalltalk language designed to

Test Mentor Java Edition is work with IBM's VisualAge for

available now, with prices begin- Smalltalk and Cincom Systems

ning at $1,250 per developer Inc.'s VisualWorks development

seat. The company also offers environment. I

of information for a particular
XML document; and XML
Master, which creates custom
Java-based logic for the manip-
ulation of XML documents.

"XML has been a major part
of the alphaWorks Web site for
some time now," remarked
Daniel Jue, manager of the
site (www.alphaworks.ibm.com),
referring to the release of the
XML parser for Java in 1998 as
the beginning of IBM's XML
open-source technology initia-
tive. The XML parser now
resides at Apache.org.

He said the six new XML
offerings were continuations of

efforts to meet quickly growing
market demand for open stan-
dards and cross-platform appli-
cations, by allowing program-
mers to go deeper into IBM's
alpha research technologies to
use them commercially to
embed in their products or ser-
vices, and speed their products
to market.

A one-time license fee of
$1,000 applies for each of the
XML technologies. Earlier
technologies available for
licensing include ClassBroker,
IRC Client for Java, SNA for
Java, Tspaces and the XML
Security Suite. I

AN ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST

Sun launches Dot-Com Builder Web site
as clearinghouse for software design

BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN

Is there a new breed of soft-
ware developer — one who
must have expertise in all the
emerging Internet technolo-
gies? Sun Microsystems Inc.
thinks so, and has launched a
community-based Web site to
go beyond code writing to pro-
vide working knowledge of
system architecture to those
new Web developers and their
managers.

Called Dot-Com Builder
(http://dcb.sun.com), the new
site is segmented into four
main areas to provide infor-
mation to users based on actu-
al experiences of Sun cus-
tomers who have tried to build
Web applications and sites.

"Web development is no
longer just about HTML and
CGI scripts," said Lew Tucker,
Sun's vice president of Inter-
net Services. So, Dot-Com
Builder, he said, gives practi-
cal, nuts-and-bolts informa-
tion to the development team
members whose responsibility
it is to pull the myriad aspects
of Web development together
into an architectural plan.

Developers who are mov-
ing through the new site
can find areas dedicated to
best practices, community,
resources and a technology
guide, Tucker said. In the
best-practices area, developers
will find case studies, how-to's,
interviews with chief designers
and other real-world informa-
tion about how these develop-
ment teams built their Web

presence. The community
area will feature discussion
groups, polls and a directory of
users with whom ideas can be
exchanged. A resources sec-
tion will have a product guide
with links to vendors; techni-
cal support; and will provide
an exchange for project out-
sourcing, in conjunction with
eLance. Finally, the technolo-
gy guide will include a refer-
ence section to other locations
of the Web covering Java,
Solaris, security and XML,
with hot links to such
resources as training sites and
white papers, Tucker said.

"It's meant to be a best-
practices site as well as a
vibrant community," Tucker
said. "When we ask developers
where they get their informa-
tion, by and large they say each
other. They don't necessarily
trust vendors" for the full story
behind a certain technology or
implementation.

Dot-Com Builder, Tucker
said, doesn't replace Sun's cur-
rent development sites, which
he said emphasize program-
ming and platform issues.
Rather, he said Sun identified
a need a level up that deals
with system architecture.
"Fundamentally, there's a
belief within Sun that if we
meet developer needs and
help them become better
developers, we think that's of
strategic importance to Sun.
It's also of value to our existing
customers, who face these
kinds of problems every day." I

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Software Development Times , November 15, 2000

NEWS

ZEROCODE
DESIGNS
DATABASE APPS
OVER THE WEB

BY ALAN ZEICHICK

Many Web-based application-
development services have a
catch: You have to host the
completed application on their
servers, perhaps, or pay them
a run-time fee. Not so with
Zerocode, a database devel-
opment site from Ampersand
Corp. The business model is to
license its interactive code gen-
erator, currently in beta, as an
interactive tool for develop-
ers — no more, no less.

"You can build as many apps
as you'd like, deploy them
wherever you want," said Allan
Maxwell, Ampersand's vice
president of business develop-
ment, explaining that the com-
pany's primary business is data-
base consulting. The Zerocode
service (www.zerocode.com)
evolved out of tools that
Ampersand's own developers
use for building client applica-
tions, he said.

According to Maxwell, the
Zerocode site lets developers
create a basic database applica-
tion, starting with the database

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Zerocode automatically captures a database's structure and data relation-
ships, and uses them to build data access applications.

design, without coding.
Because the application runs
on the enterprise's Windows
NT/2000-based servers as a
Java servlet, it can access exist-
ing enterprise data sources,
such as DB2, Oracle or SQL
Server databases, automatically
capturing their relationships
and data constructs. Once the
basic database-access applica-
tion has been created, develop-
ers can add business rules via
the Web-based interface or by
linking in custom Java objects.
"Zerocode is designed for
intranet Web applications," said
Maxwell. "It's ideal for anyone
who has large databases they
want to Web-enable. It's also
good for making databases visi-

ble to business partners." He
differentiates the applications
developed by Zerocode by
claiming that they're more
robust than other Web-based
offerings: "WebDB from Ora-
cle enables you to go from a
database structure to a single
Web page," he said, "but it
won't give you multiple Web
pages, or maintain the relation-
ships between multiple pages.
Zerocode does that."

Zerocode is priced at
$10,000 per developer per
year, with no limit on the num-
ber of applications built or
where they can be deployed.
According to Maxwell, the
product should be out of beta
before December. I

APIs Holding Back UDDI Spec

BY DOUGLAS FINLAY

It's all in the API, as testing and
checking of the application pro-
gramming interfaces are the
only roadblocks to releasing
version 1.0 of the newly formed
Universal Description, Discov-
ery and Integration (UDDI)
registry standard specification,
according to Bob Sutor, IBM
Corp.'s program director for e-
business standards and strate-
gies and a member of the fledg-
ling UDDI consortium.

More than 30 companies
are working to adopt UDDI as
a universal business-to-busi-
ness registry access standard in
which companies can commu-
nicate with one another to
learn about business services
each offers.

While a preliminary working
specification has been available
at the www.uddi.org site since
the consortium's inception on
Sept. 6, finalization of a stan-
dardized method for accessing a
database registry that includes
companies, their services and

the protocols they use to com-
municate is being delayed from
release so that UDDI members
can test to ensure all Web sites
are interoperable. "When we are
confident we have what we want
in place, then we will release it,"
said Sutor.

Sutor maintained there will
be two ways in which to access
the database registries of the
UDDI initiative to enable dis-
covery of companies' services —
going to a Web site and enter-
ing information about the
business and its services from a
browser, or querying through a
database. "We really expect
users will query through the
database, and that's why we
have the APIs," he said.

With Ariba Inc., IBM and
Microsoft Corp. servers being
utilized to store the UDDI data-
base registries during the initial
specification development, once
the APIs are completed and put
in place they must be tested to
see they accurately access the
data requested from each of the

three vendor servers. Sutor fur-
ther suggested that updates to
the registry data will need to be
synchronized at least once per
day so that it will be the same
data regardless of what server it
is accessed from.

UDDI will use the Simple
Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
to enable any company to con-
tact the registries and get a
response. Because data in the
registries is in XML, Sutor said,
SOAP was found to be the best
method for transporting the data
in the registries. But he also
said that once companies learn
about one another through the
registry, they will be free to
utilize other transport protocols
such as those from ebXML
and Rosettanet to communicate
among themselves.

"Not only will the registry
find a suitable company that
offers services compatible with
another company's needs, but it
will find compatibilities in the
way the companies can do busi-
ness with one another," he said. I

A Bounty on Your Head

Intellectual property rights challenged on Web
as BountyQuest.com takes on patent disputes

BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN

The U.S. battle over intellectual
property is as old as the Consti-
tution, which gave Congress the
power "to promote the progress
of science and useful arts"
through the awarding of exclu-
sive rights to those works.

When patent applications are
filed, it is the job of a patent
clerk to research all that has
been done before, to make sure
the claim meets the legal re-
quirements of new, useful and
not obvious. This can be an
enormously expensive and time-
consuming task, and one that
can result in businesses losing
the ability to roll out a new prod-
uct or technology, or in extreme
cases, even survive. As technolo-
gy and the Internet advance at a
furious pace, with somewhere in
the neighborhood of 2 billion
unique Web pages, "all that has
been done before" becomes
larger and larger in scope.

Charles Cella, CEO of
BountyQuest Corp., has his
own spin on reform. He wants
to turn software "experts" — de-
velopers and engineers, gurus
and Ph.Ds, lawyers and compa-
nies — into bounty hunters,
searching for patent or other in-
tellectual-property violations
that can be litigated, settled, re-
futed or defended.

Patent lawyers, when con-
tacted over a dispute, often
comb databases and hire out-
side researchers to test a new
patent application against exist-
ing technologies. "We were sup-
posed to leave no stone un-
turned," said Cella, who worked
as a patent attorney at the
Boston firm of Foley, Hoag and
Eliot. "But digging for informa-
tion is extremely expensive. So
we thought, why not get the
broadcast out there and ask
people to look around them to
see if the answer is there."

Thus was born Bounty-
Quest. com, Cella s Web site
dedicated to substantiating or
refuting patent claims and ap-
plications. "How do you get the
people with the knowledge to
do the research for you? You
make it worth their while," he
said. Corporations seeking to
validate or refute patent claims
can take money that would be
spent on attorneys and searches
and offer it to people know-
ledgeable in a particular tech-

nology area as an incentive to
come forward with information
that relates to the claim.

The site was launched Oct.
18, and Cella said that before
lunch that day, he received the
first posting of a patent claim.
For a posting fee of $2,500 and a
minimum bounty offer of
$10,000, companies can tap into
a global base of knowledge to
support or deny patent applica-
tions. If the posting yields a suc-
cessful find, the bounty hunter
receives the payment, and
BountyQuest receives an addi-
tional 40 percent of the bounty
from the offering party.

The Web site has two core
purposes, Cella said. The first is
to tap into knowledge of people
all around the world and reward
them for it. The second is to
make the patent system work
better. "Patents are a double-
edged sword," Cella said. "We
are rewarding innovation, but it
also gives the legal right to sup-
press competition."

The stakes, he said, are high.
The most classic cases involve
companies whose operations are
threatened by the filing of a
patent application by a competi-
tor. Last year, Cella said, more
than 2,000 patent cases went to
trial. He also cited a steep in-
crease in patents in the Internet
arena. In 1997, he said, only 150
patents were issued for Internet
technology. By 1999, more than
10,000 had been awarded.
Patents also were being issued in
areas Cella said were previously
thought to be nontechnical, such
as business methods. Perhaps
the most famous of these cases
surrounds the "one-click" order-
ing method patented by Jeff Be-
zos of Amazon.com. Book pub-
lisher Tim O'Reilly criticized the
patent, calling it bad for innova-
tion and emblematic of what is
wrong with the patent system.
Both, interestingly, are investors
in BountyQuest, on which
O'Reilly has posted a bounty on
Bezos' patent.

The Web site also provides a
place where an inventor can
post his or her idea to see if it al-
ready exists before undertaking
the expensive and time-con-
suming task of filing a patent
application. Information about
patents, the patent process and a
chat area also have been set up
on the site. I

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www.sdtimes.com

Software Development Times . November 15, 2000

NEWS

Parasoft Prepares WebKing Upgrade

Version 3.0 measures performance, validates XML data

A properly functioning Web
site is critical. In the case of a
small site, or one based on stat-
ic pages, it's pretty easy to see if
the HTML code is correct and
that none of the links are bro-
ken. It's more difficult, how-
ever, to thoroughly test dynam-
ic Web sites.

One problem is that the Web
sites are built, deployed and
modified incrementally, often

without much testing. Another
is that tried-and-true tech-
niques for performing QA on
client/server applications may
not work on Web sites filled
with tiny bits of code written in
scripting languages, many of
which rely upon external ser-
vices to provide their function-
ality. When new technologies
like XML become involved, the
problems grow even trickier.

W J* J M P_ J^_ f_ • _ _

WebKing reports on the performance of individual Web pages and scripts.

Parasoft Corp.'s answer is
an upgrade to its WebKing
testing tool. The new version
3.0, which entered beta at the
end of October, adds the abili-
ty to validate XML data to its
test-case scenarios. The new
version also can perform load
testing of either an entire
application, or of individual
units as they're developed.
According to Parasoft (www
.parasoft.com), the tool per-
forms both black-box and
white-box testing, making it
applicable for validating the
construction of a Web site dur-
ing development, as well as
ensuring that a deployed site
remains err or- free.

According to company
spokesperson Paula Moggio,
WebKing 3.0 might be com-
pleted by the end of 2000 or
early January 2001. Pricing
starts at $15,000 for 100 devel-
opers or testers. I

'Last Call' on WebDAV Protocol

Draft of version-control spec goes to IETF working group

as a higher level of interoper- said, "because it's the only

ability goes," Clemm said. choice, and it's written to the

The implementation of Visu- lowest common denominator."

alAge for Java, integrated with SCC is a COM interface,

A final draft of the standardized
versioning specification of the
Web Distributed Authoring
and Versioning protocol was
submitted to the Internet Engi-
neering Task Force (IETF) on
Oct. 1, and its acceptance now
is expected early next year,
according to Geoff Clemm,
chief software engineer at
Rational Software Corp., who
wrote the specification.

When completed, Web-
DAV will allow for Internet-
based authoring and version-
ing for tasks ranging from
simple document manage-
ment to collaborative software
development and configura-
tion management.

The version 10 specification
is undergoing a final review
period that could last six or sev-
en weeks, after which any clari-
fications or modifications will
be made before it goes to the
IETF's Steering Group for
finalization as version 11.

Clemm said Rational (www
.rational.com) has worked with
IBM Corp. on an implementa-
tion based on version 4 of the
WebDAV spec that should be
released in the spring of next
year. "We wanted to get going
architecturally, as well as have
something to show IETF as far

Rational's ClearCase, does not
have advanced versioning capa-
bilities, and things such as activ-
ities and change sets won't
show up in that implementa-
tion, Clemm explained. He said
the companies will work to get
the VisualAge for Java imple-
mentation up to speed with ver-
sion 11 after it is finalized.

Among the companies
working on aspects of WebDAV
with Rational are IBM, Macro-
media, Merant, Microsoft and
Oracle. The open-source com-
munity has embraced the idea
of collaborative Web authoring
"by revisiting the whole archi-
tecture of CVS to make it
appropriate for use on the
Web," Clemm said. CVS, an
open-source library system, is
limited because it talks only to
CVS clients, he said.

The need for WebDAV,
Clemm said, came about be-
cause there is only one standard
for versioning, the Microsoft
Source Code Control Interface
(MSCCI or SCC), which he
said works only on Windows
and is not even supported by
Microsoft. "It's used," Clemm

is a

Clemm explained, that if used
as a client, can plug only into
any Microsoft server that sup-
ports the interface. "A browser-
based interface isn't desirable,"
Clemm said, "because you can
only do check-in and check-out,
and it can't do client-side edit-
ing and compiling. It's a clumsy
architecture."

The open-source movement
has embraced the concept
and is working on something
called Project Subversion
(http://subversion . tigris . org) , a
rearchitecture of CVS that
allows for a higher level of con-
figuration management without
a central controlling mecha-
nism, he said. Added features
to CVS are the ability to handle
directory changes, file renames
and other changes to metadata;
shortcuts and multiple hard
links; commits that will not take
effect until the entire commit
has succeeded; and the ability
to remember merges.

Also, a WebDAV module in
Apache 2.0 is being upgraded
to handle the new versioning
extensions in the protocol,
Clemm said. I

COMPANIES

Percussion Software Inc. agreed to partner with Information Archi-
tects Corp. (I A) to combine Percussion's ^^ P&rr ucoVirv

Rhythmyx Content Manager for XML with ju« f u **** j«ipi**

iA's SmartCode content delivery system to provide real-time syndica-
tion and aggregation of content from varied data sources for distribu-
y\ tion to Web sites or mobile

devices such as cell phones or handheld computers, without the need
to replicate business logic. Further, Percussion will license iA's PDF-to-
HTML converter for resale to its customers . . . E-business applica-
tions provider RightWorks Corp. has agreed to a development part-
■ .;" _A k - nership with Vignette Corp. to integrate

riQhtV#©JFkS Vignette's V/5 e-business application plat-
form, including eBizXchange transaction
VIGNETTE and P rocess to0 '' eCont ent management
tool and elntegrate technology, into the
RightWorks application suite . . . Linux distributor Caldera Systems
Inc. has certified Oracle Corp.'s Oracle 8i database to run on Caldera's
OpenLinux eServer 2.3 to offer Linux users a low-cost Internet appli-
cation development and deployment platform featuring

Cerebellum

a suite of enterprise products. Meanwhile, Oracle is also
seeking certification from Caldera to run Oracle's Inter- *- Ai-l 1 !- KA
net Application Server 8i (Oracle iAS) on the OpenLinux eServer . . .
Sequoia Software Corp. has formed an alliance with Software Tech-
nologies Corp. (STC) to port STC's exchange eBusiness Integration
Suite to Seguoia's XPS XML server. STC claims that its suite will enable
Seguoia customers to tightly integrate XPS with enterprise applica-
tions to eliminate the need for customizing applications, resulting in
lower costs to Seguoia customers . . . Enterprise Commerce Software
Inc. has joined Cerebellum Software Inc.'s technology partner pro-
gram to enable Enterprise Commerce customers to map prebuilt e-
commerce components to a back-end data
source without the need to write code, using
Cerebellum's Internet Data Integration (IDI) technology. ..Metro Link
Inc. has formed a strategic alliance with OnCore Systems Corp. to
implement Metro Link's X-Window System server with OnCore's oper-
ating system with embedded Linux and Unix capabilities. The combi-
nation will provide a complete graphical solution to customers in the
mission-critical and avionics communities requiring full-featured
platforms and FAA-RTCA/EUROCAE D0-178B certification . . . Sun
Microsystems Inc. has released StarOffice source code to Open-
Off ice.org to enable programmers to build improvements into the suite
and contribute new components. Sun also released XML file formats
and StarOffice API specifications . . . Zucotto Wireless Inc. is part-
nering with NTRU Cryptosystems Inc. to port NTRU's security tech-
nology to Zucotto's Java-based Whiteboard
software development kit. The combined tech-
nologies are seen as providing sophisticated security encryption to
programmers developing embedded wireless applications . . . Aladdin
Systems Inc. and Conducent Inc. will jointly create an SDK for use for
MacOS that will provide free ad-supported software to Mac users.
There will be no license fees charged for the SDK. Advertising banners,
animation and other advertising content provided by Conducent can
appear in any part of the software application's user interface. Aladdin,
which makes the Stufflt Expander utility program used on the Macin-
tosh OS, will develop advertising software components under license
from Conducent.

, PRODUCTS ,

The EAServer from Sybase Inc. has passed Sun Microsystems Inc.'s
Java 2 Enterprise Edition platform compatibility test suite. Sybase

I claims that EAServer provides support for the J2EE speci-

■ 4 fication, including Enterprise JavaBeans, Java Servlet, Java
M „_ Naming and Directory Interface components, JTS, the Java
4 . L ""_ Transaction API and JDBC. The EAServer 3.6.1 is scheduled
to ship this month; deployment pricing starts at $2,995 . . . NQL Inc.
has released a beta version of its Network Query Language for Java
(NQL Java Edition) for the Linux operating system. Targeted for
desktops and servers where Java 2 has been ► continued on page 30

tru

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NEWS

Software Development Times . November 15, 2000

www.sdtimes.com

Embarcadero Buys Advanced Software, Narrows 0-R Gap

BY DOUGLAS FINLAY

In a move designed to narrow
the gap between object and
relational database modeling,
Embarcadero Technologies Inc.
signed a definitive agreement
to acquire Advanced Software

Technologies Inc. for $13 million
in cash. The purchase, expect-
ed to fortify Embarcadero's
position in the Java develop-
ment community responsible
for building e-business appli-
cations, will enable Embar-

cadero customers to create
synergies between its ER/Stu-
dio data modeling product and
Advanced Software's GDPro
object modeling product.

Stephen Wong, Embar-
cadero's chairman and CEO,

said of the purchase that its
ER/Studio customers were
showing increasing interest in
building software that could help
deliver Java and Web-based
applications. "The addition of
Advanced Software will enable

Only one company

electronically licensed over

$40 billion of software.

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us to better satisfy these market
demands while strengthening
our position across the database
application life cycle."

Greg Schottland, Advanced
Softwares president and CEO,
claimed the acquisition would
benefit both companies by pro-
viding additional value to other
companies looking for overall
solutions to e-business applica-
tions and database modeling.

The acquisition will propel
E mbarcadero (www. embarcadero
.com) squarely into the Java
community by enabling it to
offer the GDPro product as a
Java-based solution. Cameron
Skinner, Advanced Software's
chief technology officer, said
because of GDPro s Java fea-
tures and rich data modeling,
programmers could quickly
model their database require-
ments and couple them with
object modeling to manipulate
the database. Combining both,
he said, would provide a level of
functionality superior to each
products individual capabilities.
He also maintained that reuse of
components would enable less-
skilled programmers to be more
productive when using GDPro.
The Advanced Software name
was expected to remain until the
new year. I

VISICOMP UPDATES
JAVA DEBUGGER

If seeing is believing, then Visi-
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Written in Java, VisiComp
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Instance variables that are dis-
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It runs on

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NEWS

Software Development Times . November 15, 2000

www.sdtimes.com

IT: Phone Home on Projects No More

Footprints v. 4.5 eliminates remote calls over phone, wired Web

BY DOUGLAS FINLAY information about projects with- revved FootPrints v. 4.5 Web- instant messaging, and cus-

Remote calls are out. out the need for remote calls based project tracking software. tomizable browser screens to

Programmers and develop- into corporate networks, thanks Other features of 4.5 include present information in a more

ment managers working re- to Unipress Software Inc. s wire- more flexibility to create ad-hoc personal format,

motely will be able to share less/pager support in its newly escalation, remote control and FootPrints is targeted at

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large development depart-
ments that require project
management — such as track-
ing when source code is
checked out for use, who last
worked on code, and which
projects programmers are cur-
rently working on — tied into
their source-code manage-
ment strategies. Mark Krieger,
Unipress' (www.unipress.com)
president, said the new wireless
support was designed to enable
both managers and program-
mers to have access to project
information and files while in
the field without making remote
calls into corporate systems.

"If a manager or program-
mer is on the road with their
handheld computer and with-
out access to the Web, and they
want to check their assign-
ments, their priorities or updat-
ed work tickets, they can do so
through the handheld using e-
mail," said Krieger.

Yet, while remote is eliminat-
ed with one feature, it becomes
the boon of the new live chat
feature in 4.5. Unipress vice
president Fred Pack explained
that a manager in one office,
while in communication with a
programmer in another office,
could invoke the remote control
feature to receive a copy of the
programmers screen in which a
job was executed, then use the
remote chat feature to discuss
the contents on the screen.
"Once the manager has seen the
screen using the remote control
feature, he can use the live chat
box to discuss the errors he finds
in the way the job may have
been handled," Pack said.

Also new to FootPrints v. 4.5
is increased flexibility in escala-
tion. "Managers and program-
mers can now create ad-hoc
escalation," Krieger said, "in
which the program will remind
the user at a predetermined
time in the future designated
by him what the status of a job
in progress is."

Rounding out the enhance-
ments found in 4.5 are customiz-
able screen features. "Managers
and programmers can list all
the active tickets currently in the
queue, such as the tickets
assigned to him or her, or tickets
assigned to others in the devel-
opment team," said Pack.

FootPrints v. 4.5., available
immediately, is priced at $995
for the first three programmers
and $795 for the next three
programmers, and offers a slid-
ing price scale as more pro-
grammers are added to it. It is
available immediately. I

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NEWS

Software Development Times . November 15, 2000

www.sdtimes.com

Recipe for Early Success

A childhood with IBM PCs results in a 23-year-old r s hot start-up

BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN

S ameer Samat grew up in a box.

More specifically, one of the
first IBM Personal Computers.
"My dad worked for IBM," he
explained. "So when the first
PC came out, even though it
was really expensive, we were
the first kids on the block to
get a PC."

Now, Samat is on a course to
make enough money to buy that
block. Yet the route this remark-
able 23-year-old has taken seems
rather, well, unremarkable.

When Samat was in first
grade, his family moved to Ger-
many, where he did not know the
language or any other children.
"It was isolating," he said. "It was
me, my family and the comput-
er." A year later, his family
moved again — to San Jose,
Calif., where Samat befriended
Sean Brady. The three of
them — Samat, Brady and the big
beige box — quickly became
inseparable, even though as
Samat recalled, there were only
about three things you could do
with the computer.

"The blinking cursor, when
you're a kid, is quite an attrac-
tion," said Samat. "Kids can
learn languages quickly, so we
just started hacking. As a kid,
you've got the time." So Samat
and Brady began hacking and
were programming by the sixth
grade, when they were joined
by their friend Josh Dammeier.
"All our dads and moms worked
at computer companies, so we
were sort of bred to think this
way, if you will," Samat said.

It seemed a natural progres-
sion then, that when the time
came for a decision on colleges,

Friends and company founders Chris Harris, Sameer Samat, Josh Dammeier
and Sean Brady have millions of reasons to smile.

the boys decided to major in
computer science, enrolling at
the University of California at
San Diego. "We could do a lot
without knowing the theory
behind it," Samat recalled. "We
learned how, but not why." At
college, the boys met Chris Har-
ris, who also was looking forward
to a future in computer science,
and their journey accelerated.

During their course of study,
they came upon what they
believed was a huge hole in the
software market. "The things
they tell you in class about object-
oriented design, everyone talked
about reuse." But the boys found
that there was no code to reuse;
there was no repository of source
code to tap. So pooling their
expertise in information retrieval
and database building, the four
friends began working on the
technology that would allow
them to search out and store
source code from the Internet.

Summers, meanwhile, were
split between signing up for the
usual internships and deciding
to develop their own technolo-

gy. "They play games with you,"
Samat said of the technology
companies. "Under the table,
they're telling you not to go
back to school, and our friends
were saying things like, 'Why
not just go to work for Microsoft
and make a lot of money?' "

READY FOR SUCCESS

Over the summer of 1999, the
friends completed work on
their content aggregation tech-
nology, and Sourcebank, their
code search engine and reposi-
tory, was created. That was only
the beginning, however. The
boys saw that their technology
could be applied not just to
gathering source code, but to
searches particular to any verti-
cal market. "Our technology is
based on artificial intelligence
and machine learning," Samat
explained. "We train the soft-
ware to perform different func-
tions in different markets, but
the code is the same and the
engine is the same. It's very
data-driven."

By Aug. 1, the site was

deployed. "It was very home-
grown," Samat said, adding, "I
wrote the first press release."
The boys were putting in 80-
hour workweeks. The company
hit the radar in a hurry. "We had
two acquisition offers in the first
week, and VC guys were all over.
For four college students, it was
a lot of money."

It was somewhere in the
neighborhood of $4.2 million,
the bulk of which was provided
by Windward Ventures. "If no
one told you Samat was 23, you'd
never know it," said David Titus,
managing partner of Windward.
"He had developed very quickly
a technology platform and a cus-
tomer. We like customers.
They're the best judges of tech-
nology there are."

Titus said his firm liked the
fact that the boys had brought in
an experienced CEO, Neil Sen-
turia, that the firm knew and
liked. Senturia last year sold
ATCOM/INFO, his software and
services company, to CAIS Inter-
net Inc. for more than $100 mil-
lion and had gone into semi-
retirement. "I played nine rounds
of golf in four days and I was
done," he said. Enter the boys.

"They sent me a five-page
plan, but one sentence really
interested me," Senturia said.
"So we get to a meeting, and
they have six computers, miles
of Ethernet cable and 29 pizza
boxes. I said, Turn to page 3.
See this sentence? If you can do
this, I'm in.' The sentence said,
'We can do this across multiple
applications.' It wasn't just
endemic about source code."

Senturia said offers kept
coming in. "In mid-March, we
had a deal where it looked like
we could get $40 million," he
said. "I said to them, 'Do you
want it, or do you want to keep
going?' I felt like Regis Philbin.

That was a defining moment."

Sourcebank ultimately begat
Mohomine, which is the compa-
ny that develops content aggre-
gation tools across the vertical
markets. Samat explained that
Mohomine builds topic-specific
databases by mining the Web,
and then licenses them to cus-
tomers. His example: When you
search the Web for information
on Java, you find out more
about coffee shops and Indone-
sian jewelry than you do about
a programming language. "The
Web is growing at an explosive
rate, and the tools that current-
ly exist to manage and organize
content aren't going fast
enough," Senturia said. "Water's
pouring in and we're bailing
out with a thimble. Now we've
come up with an automatic
pump. That premise was suffi-
cient to raise money and create
a company."

Samat is humble about his
success — his company has
grown to 50 employees, includ-
ing 31 software engineers, and
the boys are earning way more
than most 23-year-olds. "I have a
used [Acura] Integra," he said.

■V j BT

k '

The boys landed a big fish when they
brought in Neil Senturia as CEO.

"We're just having a good time,
making sure the technology was
fun to work on."

Sameer Samat and his friends
still enjoy living in the box, the
place of their childhood. Only
now, it's a much bigger box. I

RATIONAL

< continued from page 1

but for requirements and test
assets as well. ClearCase LT
costs $1,500 per seat, a price
point he claims makes it more
accessible to smaller shops.

Another new initiative from
Rational is called Quality By
Design, which emphasizes test-
ing early and often during a
development project. The com-
pany is introducing the Quality
Architect testing tool, which is
included in Rational's Develop-
ment Studio set of products, a
subset of the entire Rational
Suite. The Quality Architect,
Taylor said, allows for compo-

nent testing even when other
components are not yet fin-
ished. "We're really building
component validation right into
the modeling phase," he said.
"Most problems are found late,
when they're expensive to fix.
We use an iterative develop-
ment process to catch problems
earlier on, with testing at the
component level." Quality
Architect works within Ratio-
nal's Rose Enterprise Edition
modeling tool to create test dri-
vers and stubs that can emulate
incomplete EJB and DCOM/
COM+ components.

Rational has also released
Purify for Java, a memory pro-
filer that targets how much

memory is consumed by an
application, where it is con-
sumed, and identifies if and
when a forced garbage collec-
tion would help performance.
With byte-code insertion capa-
bility, precompiled source code
is not necessary; the tool can
work off an executable only,
Taylor explained.

SUITE CUSTOMIZATION

The Suite 2001 includes an API
for enhancements, plus the
Rational Process Workbench,
which is a tool for customizing
the Unified Process, giving cus-
tomers greater flexibility to tai-
lor the tools and processes to
their specific needs, Taylor

said. Also, a detailed road map
for building applications using
the suite tools for IBM Web-
Sphere is built in, as are guide-
lines for developing to the
Microsoft .NET platform. In
addition, the Rose modeling
tool includes a new Java frame-
work for Java 2. A developer
can specify which Java platform
he is working in, and a Rose
wizard will prepopulate the
model with the appropriate
Java classes, reducing the
reliance on handwritten code,
Taylor said. "It automates the
error-prone and mundane part
of Java development," he said.
Further, he added, a developer
can create a Java class in the

model and specify whether he
wants to create a session or
entity bean, and the tool will
automatically expand the class
to add more classes or associa-
tions required to complete the
object. The developer can then
use his IDE of choice to add
business logic and complete
the application, he said. Devel-
opers can test deploy a single
EJB-JAR file, facilitating test-
ing against any Java-compliant
application server.

Prices vary, based on whether
a customer purchases an individ-
ual tool, an individual studio or
the entire suite of products, but
Taylor said prices have not
increased since the May rollout. I

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www.sdtimes.com

Software Development Times . November 15, 2000

EMBEDDED NEWS

Sun Heads for Home

OSGi-compliant JES 2.0 offers OEMs r ISVs gateway platform

BY EDWARD J. CORREIA

Are you ready for an Internet
lifestyle?

If so, the first thing you'll
need, says Sun Microsystems
Inc., is a residential gateway. And
there to provide one is the Java
Embedded Server 2.0, the latest
version of Sun's OEM-targeted
home gateway software platform,
which is now OSGi-compliant.

The Open Services Gateway
initiative (OSGi), founded in
March 1999, is a multivendor
effort to standardize the way
home appliances and computing
devices communicate, and a nec-
essary step in home automation.
The OSGi specification provides
the framework to enable service
providers to securely deploy and
manage multiple applications
and services on a gateway device.

"It's about managing the
next-generation Internet life-
style, so to speak, when every-
body's always connected wheth-
er they're in their car, on their
cell phone or at home." said
Raj Mata, senior manager, of
product marketing at Sun, who
listed some of the managed
services made possible by the
platform, such as entertain-
ment-on-demand, home secu-

rity and energy management.

Part of that lifestyle, he said,
might depend on application
interdependencies, which Mata
illustrated using the example of
an audio-on-demand application
that depends on a billing service.
If the audio program is request-
ed and the billing program is not
resident in the gateway, "the
framework will automatically
load the service from the net-
work," he said.

JES 2.0 is Sun's first foray into
OSGi compliance, and forms the
basis, Mata said, for allowing
OEMs to build gateway devices
that bridge the gap between
broadband networks like DSL
and cable on one side, with
home- device networks such as
Home Audio/Video interoper-
ability (HAVi), UPnP, Bluetooth,
wireless Ethernet and Sun's own
Jini specification on the other.
"As the market evolves, I think
there are going to be multiple
networks in the home to start
with," Mata said.

Mata described Sun's vision
of the networked home: "Your
entertainment cluster — your
audio/video devices — will prob-
ably be on a HAVi network in
the home. Your energy manage-

ment, home security and heat-
ing controls will probably be on
a power line network, and your
messaging and telephony ser-
vices are going to be on a phone
line network. JES is designed to
work with all these technologies
simultaneously, and can dynam-
ically detect all of those tech-
nologies and devices on those
networks." Device builders, he
continued, need only provide

the appropriate physical con- for industrial, transportation and
nections from the gateway to home automation. Sun also has
the target device. been working with Sony Corp. to

bring JES capabilities to the
HAVi specification.

Mata said that although the
fledgling OSGi standard does
not yet have a certification
process, JES has passed all avail-
able OSGi compliance tests.

Available now, the single-
user version of the JES 2.0 devel-
oper edition, which includes
the Forte for Java community
edition Java IDE, can be
downloaded at www.sun.com
/software/embeddedserver/buy I

OEMS ON BOARD

Invensys Control Systems, which
produces home control systems,
has licensed JES 2.0 and will col-
laborate with Sun to build Con-
trolServer 2, a residential gate-
way device based on the Sun
platform that will reportedly
include a power line network
bridge. Sun also is working with
network automation company
Echelon Corp. to adapt JES to
Echelon's LonWorks platform

Spyker Traces Non-Instrumented Code

Think of it as caller ID for
embedded systems.

Embedded RTOS developer
LynuxWorks Inc. has released
Spyker, an event trace and visu-
alization tool for debugging
LynxOS, Blue Cat Linux and
other Linux distribution kernels
and applications, all without
modification to source code,
according to the company.

LynuxWorks (www.lynux
works.com) claims Spyker to be
the only commercial trace tool
that can deliver trace data with-
out an instrumented kernel or
libraries. Similarly, LynuxWorks
says the tool can display appli-
cation event traces without

AVIDWireless Simplifies Mobile App Development

BY EDWARD J. CORREIA

Mobile programming and net-
work tools vendor AVIDWire-
less has released AVID Rapid-
Tools, a Java-based toolkit that
the company claims will allow
developers to create applica-
tions for mobile devices that
are independent of device type
and display format. AVIDWire-
less is a division of Voice-
DataWare Inc.

AVID RapidTools reported-
ly consists of a platform-inde-
pendent Java server compo-
nent and a set of JavaBeans for
handling multiple server con-
nection sessions, user personal-
ization and data access. Among
the beans is AVIDDisplay,
which is responsible for for-
matting output for a particular
user display.

The key to making this possi-
ble, according to the company
(www.avidwireless.com/ART
earlyrelease.htm), is a set of serv-
er-side methods (functions with-
in JavaBeans) that are called by
the mobile application that per-

-4 m

■■•■ 4jBv

* — i i — *■

Custom plug-ins let a single appli-
cation service many device types.

mit it to interact with the device,
and which in turn call a plug-in
for the appropriate device. This
plug-in architecture is extensi-
ble, and will initially include
support for HTML, iMode/
CHTML, Palm VII/PQA and
WAP/WML.

Rodney Montrose, AVID-
Wireless' founder and presi-
dent, said that all too often he
has found that while IT staff has

plenty of knowledge, it isn't
always the right knowledge for
creating mobile applications.
"The average IT shop under-
stands their customers' needs,
but not necessarily wireless or
Java [technologies]," he said.
"AVID RapidTools allow IT
[people] to produce applica-
tions which work on almost
every mobile device." A devel-
opment kit also includes pro-
gram templates that the compa-
ny says permit staff developers
with no wireless programming
experience to quickly generate
useful applications using an
English-like syntax.

To deploy the tools, the serv-
er must be equipped with any
Java 2 platform, the Java Servlet
API 2.1 or later, plus a JDBC
driver for an existing database,
the company said. The full set
of AVID RapidTools, which
includes a single server license,
developer kit, all available plug-
ins and documentation, is
priced at $4,995. The developer
kit alone costs $495. I

modification to application
source code.

To accomplish this, Spyker
monitors the operating-system
kernel libraries and applica-
tion code and collects time-
stamped events, displaying
them visually to enable easy
debugging and identification
of performance bottlenecks,
according to the company.

Spyker for LynxOS, the
company's Linux-compatible
RTOS, was scheduled for
release last month, with Linux
versions to follow at the end of
November. The trace tool will
be priced at $999.

LYNUXWORKS
FILES WITH SEC

In related news, LynuxWorks
last month announced that it

intends to go public. The com-
pany has filed a registration
statement with the U.S. Secu-
rities and Exchange Commis-
sion relating to the proposed
initial public offering of its
common stock.

If approved, the shares will
be offered by an underwriting
group managed by Deutsche
Banc Alex. Brown, Prudential
Volpe Technology Group, Dain
Rauscher Wessels, and ABN
AMRO Rothschild LLC, a
company report stated. Lynux-
Works has been a privately held
company since 1988 when it
started as Lynx Real-Time Sys-
tems. It renamed itself in May.
It has been financed by both
private and corporate invest-
ments from Intel, Motorola,
Turbo Linux and others. I

J Builder 4 to Target
Palm OS Devices

Playing to a captive audience of
70,000 Palm OS developers,
Inprise Corp. has released an
updated preview version of
JBuilder Handheld Express, an
extension to the newly released
Borland JBuilder 4 rapid devel-
opment environment that will
permit JBuilder users to target
the Palm platform with J2ME-
compliant applications.

According to the company,
the extension will feature a set
of wizards to steer program-
mers through the development
of applications conforming to
Sun's Java 2 Micro Edition
specifications. JBuilder 4,
which was released in Septem-
ber with a bevy of new features
including J2EE JavaBean devel-
opment support, will support
all of Sun's device profiles,
including the mobile informa-

tion device profile currently
under development through
the Java Community Process.
Applications will run on any
device that contains a run-time
environment for Sun's connect-
ed device limited configuration
specification, the company said.
The updated preview version
of Handheld Express for
JBuilder 4 can be downloaded
now for free at www.borland
.com/jbuilder/hhe. The JBuilder
4 development environment
includes Linux, Solaris and
Windows host versions in a sin-
gle box. The JBuilder 4 Foun-
dation entry-level version,
which includes an editor, com-
piler and debugging capabili-
ties, is free for download at
www.borland.com/downloads
or can be ordered on CD-ROM
for $49 with manuals. I

is EMBEDDED NEWS

Software Development Times . November 15, 2000 .

www.sdtimes.com

SQL for Windows CE Is Released

Microsoft's enterprise-class relational databases aimed at handhelds

BY EDWARD J. CORREIA

With last months Professional
Association for SQL Server
conference to set the stage,
Microsoft Corp. released SQL
Server 2000 Windows CE Edi-
tion, opening doors to a new
set of database -aware applica-
tions for Windows CE devel-
opers to build.

Developers currently using
Microsoft SQL Server develop-
ment tools will feel at home
with the Windows CE edition,
according to the company; it
employs a similar API, interface

and SQL grammar. In fact, the
skill set required to develop
solutions is similar to those of
Visual Basic or Visual C + + , the
company said.

Microsoft's handheld version
of SQL preserves support for
transactions and varied data
types, features an optimized
query processor, and can occupy
1MB of device memory. Howev-
er, memory consumption could
reach as much as 3 MB depend-
ing on processor and selected
components, Microsoft said.

Client software will operate

on devices running Windows
CE version 2.11 or later for the
Handheld PC Pro and Palm-
size PC platforms. Windows
CE 3.0 or later is required for
the Pocket PC. Suitable servers
are equipped with Windows
2000 or Windows NT 4.0 Ser-
vice Pack 5 or later.

Microsoft says the SQL Win-
dows CE Edition can service
clients whether or not they have
a persistent connection to a serv-
er. It does this through the data
synchronization functions of
remote data access (RDA) and

merge replication components,
both of which support HTTP
and encryption. Both compo-
nents can be found in SQL Serv-
er 2000. However, SQL Server
7.0 and SQL Server 6.5 with Ser-
vice Pack 5 or later support SQL
Server for Windows CE but do
not support merge replication.

Developers need to be
equipped with a Windows
NT/2000 workstation (Win-
dows 98 does not support Win-
dows CE desktop emulation)
and Embedded Visual Tools
version 3.0 installed with at

least one of Microsoft's Palm-
size PC, Handheld PC Pro or
Pocket PC SDKs installed.

Licensing of SQL Server
2000 Windows CE Edition is
covered under the SQL Server
2000 Developer Edition, which
is priced at $499 and includes
unlimited deployment of the
SQL client software to Win-
dows CE devices. According to
Microsoft, devices also may
connect to back-end servers if
those servers are covered by a
per-processor SQL Server
license or if the client has an
SQL client access license. Eval-
uation and full versions of
Microsoft developers' products
can be ordered from http://
developerstore.com/devstore. I

Wind River Captures Dragonfly

RTOS giant acquires expert VXWorks consulting firm

Embedded developer Wind
River Systems Inc. continues to
grow through acquisition. The
latest bug to hit the RTOS
giant's windshield is Dragonfly
Software Consulting Inc., most
of which Wind River acquired
last month in an all -cash transac-
tion. Details were not disclosed.
Dragonfly, which was for-
merly based in Beaverton, Ore.,
had specialized in Unix soft-
ware design and implementa-
tion. The company was working
mainly to implement Wind Riv-
er's Tornado development envi-
ronment and VxWorks RTOS
on various microprocessor
families, a Wind River (www
.windriver.com) report said.

Wind River, which
characterized the con-
sulting firm as being
expert in VxWorks, had
recently designated

pany's desire to seek
niche markets. "Wind
River is constantly stri-
ving to offer customers
the highest level of
specialized engineer-
ing talent," he said.
"The engineers at
Dragonfly are skilled

Dragonfly as its MIPS
engineering team, in The purchase
recognition of its work reflects a move
with Wind River's MIPS toward special-
Center for Excellence ized niches, says in low-level hardware
microprocessor-maker Wind River's St. bring-up and know far
partnering initiative, and Dennis. more about the hard-
for its extensive contri- ware tools and micro-
butions to the beta release of processor chips than most

VxWorks AE, the advanced edi-
tion of Wind River's flagship
real-time operating system.

Tom St. Dennis, Wind Riv-
er's president and CEO, said
the move emphasizes the corn-

software specialists." He
added that while Dragonfly
has worked on a variety of
microprocessors, its expertise
on the MIPS architecture was
of particular interest. I

'THINKING' OVER PALM OS DATABASE

Writing a database application
for handheld computers is now
more than just wishful thinking.
ThinkingBytes Technology Inc.
has released a software devel-
opment kit enabling third-party
programmers to write database
application plug-ins compatible
with the company's ThinkDB
relational database manager for
the Palm operating system.

Programmers interested in
creating database plug-ins for
ThinkDB sign up at www
.thinkingbytes.com, and the
company provides access to
the ThinkDB program code
with which to develop applica-
tions. Armando Neves, chief
technology officer, said that
the free plug-ins would give
programmers an opportunity

to write internal Palm OS
database applications that
connect to external applica-
tions. "Programmer applica-
tions would access external
programs for purposes of cal-
culation, report printing and
faxing, for example." He
added that results from exter-
nal programs would then be
ported back into the internal
applications and stored.

Once written, programmers
submit the application for
approval to the company.

If the company approves
the plug-in, it will then certify
the plug-in as compatible with
the ThinkDB program, per-
mitting the programmer to
privately market the applica-
tion. Neves said the company

would also aggressively market
the plug-ins to vertical mar-
kets such has health care, edu-
cation and services.

The company's newest ver-
sion of ThinkDB, version 2.0,
enables programmers to create
and edit databases for handheld
computers running the Palm
operating system. Features
include the ability to create as
many as 100 databases contain-
ing 36 fields each; customizable
views providing for resizing
columns; and a forms designer
for designing record entry
forms. 2.0 adds synchronization
to the database, enabling
ThinkDB to synchronize with
desktop database applications.

Pricing for 2.0 was not avail-
able. I

■ANYWHERE

< continued from page 1

other dedicated-line technolo-
gies, Veitch said, which are
expensive and can require
months to put into place. Such
costs can discourage companies
small and large from initiating
even pilot projects, he said. "It
is particularly difficult with
some of the most common net-
works in use here in North
America," such as those of Bell
South, which Veitch said do not
support IP protocols and there-
fore cannot leverage the Inter-
net for data transport.

Of the other companies
offering wireless gateways in
the U.S., including AT&T
(Wireless PocketNet), the Go
America portal and Palm Inc.
(Palm.net), none offer suitable
services for industrial or B-to-B
applications, according to
Veitch. "You really want more
than a WAP [Wireless Applica-
tion Protocol] or HTML con-
nection," he said. The others
offer "microbrowser access
only, with very limited data
entry functionality," and lack
the necessary speed and relia-
bility for the "always-available
iAnywhere architecture." For
that, Veitch said, "you want to
work at a message or IP level."

The iAnywhere service fur-
ther differentiates itself, Veitch
said, by being a one-stop shop.
"With the wireless gateway and
hosting, we offer something that
nobody else offers: a single point
of sales and support," that sup-
ports WAP, HDML (Handheld
Device Markup Language), as
well as protocols used by
Palm.net and other networks.

Like its competitors, the
iAnywhere (www.sybase.com)
hosted service will provide a

gateway service with dedicated
connections to carriers, Veitch
said, but iAnywhere's gateways
will use the Internet and VPNs
to connect to the applications.
"We're targeted at the develop-
er and at enterprise pilot pro-
jects. The benefit we offer
OEMs is that we provide a very
easy path to [allow them] to
extend their mobile applica-
tions." Programs may reside on
the customer's server, or can be
hosted by iAnywhere or by a
third-party ASP.

The hosting service is the
final cog in iAnywhere's cradle-
to-grave solution for building
and maintaining wireless net-
works to access enterprise
databases. The iAnywhere
mobile database solution con-
sists of a development suite,
wireless server and related
server, and client components
that permit clients to operate a
database application indepen-
dently of the server. Offline
changes to the database use
synchronization messaging to
update and to be in touch with
the enterprise whenever the
client is in range.

Veitch said that the tradi-
tional markets for adopting
new technologies — financial
and medical sectors — also will
embrace the emerging wireless
personal technology. "What we
see is that the next generation
of banking applications will
take advantage of the signifi-
cant computing power that is
going into small devices,"
including phones and handheld
computers, he said. For exam-
ple, iAnywhere has partnered
with Ericsson to build a
"mobile banking terminal,"
Veitch said, which will enable
access to personal financial
data any time, anywhere. I

Why do some pratforms

This little PDA went to market,

This one stayed home

and devices succeed where
others fail? Applications,
Palm" used Code Warrior
lo create the Palm OS':
Now more lhan Sfl,QQB
developers use CodeWarrlar
to build a full range of
applications for business and
personal uses. Result? The
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are market leaders.

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OPINION

Software Development Times . November 15, 2000.

www.sdtimes.com

EDITORIALS

HP: The Software Company?

At the end of October, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced
dts purchase of Bluestone Software Inc. As HP con-
tinues to reinvent itself under the leadership of Carly Fio-
rina, the idea that the company would want to have its
own application servers, e-commerce servers and even
software infrastructure for mobile transaction processing
is not unexpected.

Still, one must admit that HP's greatest successes haven't
been in software, but in hardware. From test-and-measure-
ment equipment to laser printers, from Intel-based servers
to Unix-based minicomputers, the company has excelled
largely because it didn't compete against software makers.
With few exceptions, HP's software products have been
minor players on the world stage. The company's only out-
of-the-ballpark software success has been its OpenView
management platform.

So now Hewlett-Packard is going into the application
server business, hoping that its customers will see HP's
Software and Solutions Organization as a preferred glob-
al business partner for J2EE/XML transaction services.

Will the acquisition of Bluestone move HP closer to its
stated goal of being seen as a complete Internet services
company, not just a hardware maker? Time alone will tell
whether the acquisition of Bluestone, and the new business
it brings, will offset the loss in revenue caused by the other
app server makers' new view of HP as a direct competitor,
rather than as a potential hardware deployment platform
and services partner.

Informix 2.0

As first reported two months ago, Informix Corp. is
splitting into two companies: one focused on data-
bases, the other on electronic business and Internet infra-
structure software.

It's about time Informix did something. Its stock is
trading at near a 52-week low of 3 3 A, down more than 80
percent from its high on April 7. It remains a member of
the billion-dollar-market-cap club — but just barely.

Informix offers a bewildering array of current and lega-
cy database technologies, some home-grown, others
acquired. Unlike many companies in the enterprise soft-
ware market, Informix continues maintaining and even
improving its oldest products nearly indefinitely, which
certainly makes its customers happy, but presents them
with little reason to migrate to Informix's newer products.

The idea of separating database from e-business plat-
forms is a good one. But the first thing its new database divi-
sion did was unveil a new initiative, Project Arrowhead,
designed to create a new product family that will combine a
revamped Extended Parallel Server database, an application
server licensed from an unnamed partner, a Web server and
tools. Sounds like an e-business platform to us.

Various analyst projections show Informix back on the
growth path for fiscal year 2001. If not. . .well, financially,
Informix may be undervalued, and would make an attrac-
tive takeover target for not only its core database tech-
nologies such as Cloudscape, Foundation 2000 and Red
Brick, but also its content-management and e-commerce
applications. Hmm, maybe Carly Fiorina would want a
well-known object-relational DBMS to go with her new
Bluestone application server. I

GUEST VIEW

THE FUTURE USER INTERFACE

The most salient feature of the
future user interface will be
its omnipresence. As embedded
devices grow pervasive, and as
the Internet is increasingly relied
upon for daily tasks, the common
abbreviation, UI, may soon be in-
terpreted not as User Interface,
but as Ubiquitous Interface.

Consider the role of
the user interface in the
humble chore of chang-
ing a washer. Lying under
a sink, a plumber voice-
inputs the serial number
of a broken washer into
the Electronic Perfor-
mance Support System
(EPSS) that is embedded
in his uniform (the washer is an
older one, so it doesn't have its
identity electronically tagged).
The EPSS automatically search-
es the Internet, and pages a
plumbing-supply delivery truck
that's nearest to the plumber.
The driver, busily dodging heavy
traffic, voice-inputs the plumb-
er's needs to his EPSS, which
checks the truck's inventory, and
discovers that it lacks the appro-
priate washer. The driver calls
the plumber and advises a sub-
stitute, and relays a holographic
image of the recommended
washer. The plumber uses a see-
through visor to display aug-
mented reality, so that he can
confirm that the recommended
substitute is a good fit. He
informs the driver that the sub-
stitute washer is acceptable.

Since the user interface will
be everywhere, consumers will
place a high value on integration,
intelligence and compatibility.
Notice how the EPSS of both
the driver and plumber are
Internet-enabled. The better the
integration, the greater the con-
venience. Rather than use his
voice input, the driver would
have preferred that the one
EPSS relayed the plumber's
needs directly to the other.

The preferences of a plumb-
ing-supply truck driver may
seem mundane while discussing
the latest technological break-
throughs, but the desires of ordi-
nary people will be significant in
shaping the future user inter-
face. No matter how much we
admire the most recent ad-
vances, consumer choice deter-
mines what is actually utilized.
The search for the Holy Grail of
the "killer app" — an application
that will lure the public into buy-
ing the latest innovation — illus-

trates the fundamental truth that
technology serves people, not
the other way around.

The convenience that con-
sumers demand is illustrated by
the use of voice input in the
above scenario. Speech recogni-
tion is ideal for "hands-free"
tasks, such as driving a truck.
Some analysts, excited
by the intense interest
in adding speech recog-
nition to embedded de-
vices, have predicted
that typing will soon be
as outdated as punching
holes in a computer card.
The future utiliza-
tion of different input
methods has been illustrated
by science fiction. Readers may
remember the television drama
in which the bold spaceship
captain, desperate for a piece
of information, strolled confi-
dently to the command deck
and uttered the magic word,
"Computer!"

What we didn't notice was
that, apart from the captain,
everyone on the deck was typing.
A typical crowded office that
instituted a user interface that
was solely vocal would soon
drown in a wave of deafening
chatter. Workers involved in tech
support, sales and mail orders
would have difficulty simultane-
ously using a computer and a
telephone. Even composing a
simple memo could be embar-
rassing, because of the poor
quality of early versions. Workers
could wear earphones, but that
would decrease normal interac-
tion with both telephones and
other employees.

Even portable appliances,
which are a promising field for
speech recognition, require
more than vocal input. A task as
routine as checking a bank bal-
ance while in a public place
would be challenging because of
the risk of revealing the user's
secret access code. Not many
would want to announce the
date and time of their colon
exam while standing in an eleva-
tor. Fewer would want to listen.
Developers understand that
consumers prefer an intelligent,
integrated user interface that
provides the option of typed
input. Examples of currently
available "wearable keyboards"
include the Chord keyboard and
IBM's Half-QWERTY. Key-
boards will not even be neces-
sary for typing input. Consumers

may choose the option of typing
input with motion-sensor rings,
or touch-screens.

Hardware, however, is only
one aspect of the user interface.
The sophistication of the user
interface is defined less by the
choice of hardware than by the
extent of its intelligence.

Predictive input is an exam-
ple of how intelligent software
can improve the convenience
of current hardware. Predictive
input employs sophisticated al-
gorithms that apply linguistic
data (including frequency) to
accurately complete a word. A
veterinarian types "h" and the
word is automatically finished as
"horse." Soon, word completion
on the basis of context will be
available. The entry "The Amer-
ican northern b. . ." will be accu-
rately completed as "The Ameri-
can northern border" whether or
not the word "border" has been
used before.

Since predictive input re-
quires fewer keypresses to input
text, it is extremely practical for
the awkward smaller keyboards
found on some Net appliances. I
am often approached by manu-
facturers who desire easier-to-
use predictive fast input, which
would attract more customers.
No hardware changes are neces-
sary to create a more convenient
user interface. A small-footprint
text-input- and- display layer can
be added to any Net appliance
(or Web-based app, for that mat-
ter) that will enable the user
interface to accept predictive
input. Consumers prefer to
input text with as little work as
possible — meaning that manu-
facturers who add predictive text
input to their embedded devices
will have a competitive edge.

While technology allows the
user interface to be virtually
everywhere, the high level of
convenience demanded by con-
sumers will necessitate a superb
degree of compatibility and
integration. Market forces will
pressure Net appliance manu-
facturers, software developers
and ASPs to upgrade the intelli-
gence of current user inter-
faces. The implementation of
intelligence to improve interac-
tion for all input methods will
be the hallmark of the future
user interface. I

Arte Mazur is the founder and
CEO of Slangsoft Inc. He can be
reached at arie@slangsoft.com.

www.sdtimes.com

■ Software Development Times , November 15, 2000

OPINION

ALAN WATCH

CATCHING THE M-COMMERCE WAVE

Wired is tired, say the pun-
dits. Forget DSL, forget
cable modems, forget broad-
band. Forget Netscape, forget
Internet Explorer. Forget B-to-
B, forget portals. The real action
is in mobile electronic com-
merce. Move over, HTML; its
all about the Wireless Applica-
tion Protocol, with XML acting
as a core component of WAP.

Everyone's favorite example
of m-commerce is of a young
urban professional strolling
around downtown Los Angeles
on a hot summer afternoon.
When he gets within a few
blocks of a B as kin Robbins
franchise, the phone beeps and
offers a special deal, good for
the next 15 minutes only, on a
double-Dutch chocolate waffle
cone — along with directions to
the store.

Similarly, m-commerce pro-
mises to alert teenagers to the
hottest new song by their
favorite band. Teens can listen to
samples right over the phone or
on an MP3-equipped handheld;
if they like what they hear, they
can push one button to order the
CD for next-day delivery.

Because mobile Internet
devices are personal and perva-
sive, m-commerce sounds like
heaven to marketers. Companies
at all points in the wireless deliv-
ery value chain, from the retail-
ers to software developers to ad-
placement firms to service
providers to handheld equip-
ment manufacturers, are scram-
bling to catch the new wave.

Forrester Research says, "A
third of all Europeans will use

the Net through mobile phones
in 2004. Operators will try to
control content and commerce
services in the early years, but by
the end of 2002 new mobile
Internet providers (MIPs) will
deliver open access to the Net
for all." Another research group,
Strategy Analytics, says that
the m-commerce market
could reach $200 billion
by 2004.

What's particularly ex-
citing for many of these
companies is that the
m-commerce wave is
potentially bigger than
the browser-based e-
commerce phenomenon.
First, cell phones, two-way
pagers and even handheld com-
puters are less expensive than
desktop or notebook comput-
ers — and there's talk about offer-
ing devices for free, as long as
the end customer agrees to pro-
vide accurate demographic data
and receive targeted advertise-
ments. Second, when equipped
with wireless Internet access,
they're not dependent on fixed
locations, such as homes, offices
or schools. Those two factors,
added together, mean that m-
commerce might straddle both
sides of the digital divide, provid-
ing access to the Information
Superhighway for a wider array
of consumers from a broader
slice of the socioeconomic pie.

Many of the m-commerce
opportunities, unlike today's full-
featured browser-based Inter-
net, really make sense for con-
sumer retail sales and service
offerings. When companies like

MapQuest.com Inc. figure out
how to localize and repurpose
their maps, driving directions,
travel guides and traffic reports
into a Nokia cell phone's
screen — and can either convince
consumers to pay for the maps or
can devise an appropriate adver-
tising scheme — m-commerce
will really be cooking. (Only last
week a subscriber asked us when
SD Times will be available in a
format suitable for download-
ing into a wireless Palm
Connected Organizer.
The answer: "Not yet.")

TOOLING AROUND

As software develop-
ment managers, our
role in the m-com-
merce revolution will
be analogous to our
position in the creation of
Web-based systems. This time
around, however, I think that
IT will be better prepared.

Many early corporate Web
sites evolved out of guerrilla
marketing departments or
rogue sales departments — built
and deployed using tools like
Microsoft's FrontPage or Ado-
be's Page Mill without assistance
from information- technology
professionals. That was fine
when most Web sites were
nothing more than brochure-
ware, but over the past two or
three years, the need for back-
end integration, security and
dynamic content taught busi-
ness managers that Web devel-
opment was software develop-
ment. Fortunately, it appears
that the tools of the m-
commerce revolution will come
from companies already familiar
to software developers. For
example, the Oct. 15 issue of

SD Times included an an-
nouncement from Java tools
developer KL Group Inc. that it
was renaming itself Sitraka Inc.
and dividing into two separate
divisions: one to focus on its
traditional JClass and JProbe
tools, the other to build applica-
tions for managing wireless
applications. In the same issue,
application server vendor Gem-
Stone Systems Inc., recently
acquired by Brokat AG, dis-
closed that the future of the
GemStone/J platform would be
as a Java and XML-based server
specifically targeting m-com-
merce applications.

That's not to say that m-com-
merce will be smooth sailing,
because it's not clear how every-
thing's going to work. With the
wired Internet, most transactions
were "pull," based on a browser's
accessing a URL; "push" meant
either a special client/server
application running on a desktop
or a target e-mail. With wireless
electronic commerce, "push" will
be more important — and may
require intricate (and expensive)
arrangements with wireless ser-
vice providers and gateways,
perhaps with specific terms and
conditions for content types
and formats. Marketers may be
required to match their mes-
sages against consumer demo-
graphic profiles and stated pref-
erences and even possible
legislation regarding privacy.
The demands of localization
add to the challenges of imple-
menting m-commerce.

Hmm, I think it's time for a
snack. I wonder where the near-
est Baskin Robbins is. I

Alan Zeichick is editor-in-chief of
SD Times.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

APIs DON'T TELL
WHOLE STORY

In the Oct. 15 issue ("Will the
Real-Time Linux Please Stand
Up?," page 13), MontaVista
CEO Jim Ready is quoted as
saying a resource kernel module
enhancement moves away from
Linux standards. "TimeSys
claims some very advanced
scheduling and other propri-
etary enhancements to Linux
which [require] their own pro-
prietary APIs," which he said
equate with a lack of portabili-
ty. In response: It is true that
the TimeSys enhancements
(Resource Kernel) have their
own proprietary APIs. Howev-
er, you do not need to use our
APIs in order to receive the

added features. The Resource
Kernel allows you to dynamical-
ly assign CPU/Network reser-
vations to any Linux application
(binary) as is. We also 100 per-
cent maintain application/
driver portability on our distri-
bution. The resource kernel is
also designed as a loadable
kernel module which can be
"plugged" into any distribu-
tion. We and MontaVista mod-
ify the underlying kernel to
add kernel pre-emption and
other enhancements (RT-
scheduling), which we hope
will be adopted by the Linux
community.

David Tannenbaum
Director of Marketing
TimeSys Corp.

VIEW OF HELP NEEDS HELP

In the story "Help Is on the Way
From ForeFront" (Oct. 1, page
7), I want to [clear up] a miscon-
ception that [ForeFront Inc.
president] David Granger has.

While the RoboHelp author-
ing environment runs on a Win-
dows platform, our WebHelp is
an HTML-based Help format
that is cross-platform and brows-
er-based. Unlike WinHelp and
Microsoft HTML Help, it can be
deployed on non-Windows oper-
ating systems including Unix,
Macintosh, Linux and Solaris.

In addition, RoboHelp Office
9.0 provides the flexibility to
combine its Help development
features with the capabilities of
any other popular HTML editor
(such as FrontPage, Dream-
weaver, HomeSite and many

more). This gives RoboHelp
users the best of all worlds, and
turns any HTML editor into a
powerful Help development tool.
RoboHelp supports all major
online Help formats including
WinHelp, Microsoft HTML
Help, WebHelp, JavaHelp, Ora-
cle Help for Java and more.

Stephanie Huff

Public Relations Associate

eHelp Corp.

CORRECTION

The XML DevCon event, held
in New York in June, had 4,800
attendees, including both paid
conference delegates and those
admitted free to the exhibits
only. The number of paid atten-
dees was incorrect in an article
in the Aug. 1 issue ("XML Dev-
Con a Hit in New York" page 1).

Software Development Times
November 15, 2000 - Issue No. 018

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Ted Bahr

Executive Vice President

Alan Zeichick

e-business software

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IBM is a registered trademark and WebSphere and the e-business logo are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. Other company, product and service names may
be trademarks or service marks of others. ©2000 IBM Corporation. All rights reserved.

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Software Development Times . November 15, 2000

SPECIAL REPORT: TEST/QA

Code coverage is a commonly overlooked
test procedure, and one that can easily
get software managers-and their
companies— in hot water

BY EDWARD J. CORREIA

Bf you think your software is being
thoroughly tested, you may be in for
a surprise.
A recent study published by
International Data Corp. found that
nearly 75 percent of companies conduct-
ing business on the Web with revenues in
excess of $200 million have suffered Web
site failure within the past six months,
mainly due to software bugs and compli-
cations relating to software upgrades.
Some may recall the headline-grabbing
site failures of Charles Schwab & Co.
Inc., eBay Inc. and E-Trade Securities
Inc., all of which were attributable to
software problems. And NASA's Mars
probe disaster tells a dire tale of the need
for extensive code coverage testing.

But according to Richard Bender,
senior vice president of Caliber-RBT
product management at Technology
Builders Inc. (TBI), the problem is not
limited to commerce Web sites and space
flight. Bender said that during the more
than 200 software audits his company has
conducted, only about 30 percent to 40
percent of the code, on average, was actu-
ally tested prior to release.

When explaining the need to use QA
tools as an integral part of any
testing strategy, Bender said he
often finds informational voids in
the corporate culture. "When I
ask executives what they have
done to handle the quality of
what they're producing, most of
the time I get blank stares," Ben-
der said. TBI (www.tbi.com) Software litiga-
develops and markets Caliber- tion is more com-
RBT, a requirements-based test- mon than most
ing tool that includes a functional people realize,
code coverage module. "We have says TBI's Bender.
to educate senior management
on quality issues, because they're still
viewing this as a techie issue and not a
bottom-line business issue," he said.

Zohar Gilad, vice president of prod-
uct marketing at Mercury Interactive
Corp., agrees. "Testing is a CEO prob-
lem," he said. "If your mission-critical
Web site has poor performance or func-

tional errors, your customers are going
to shop elsewhere. So it's not a develop-
er problem anymore. It has become a
much bigger issue because of the impor-
tance associated with it."

Mercury (wwwmercuryinteractive
.com) develops Web performance analy-
sis and management tools, which it also
markets as a critical element in designing
a testing plan. Gilad said that although
load testing has a long way to go before it
is fully accepted throughout the industry,
"testing has become a staple in e-busi-
ness jobs worldwide. Testing is not a lux-
ury anymore; it is a must. If your prod-
ucts are not reliable and performing well,
your revenue is going to be hurting."

Still, society has come to expect prob-
lems with software. "If we had the same
kind of defect rate in a car, an airplane or
a copier, those companies would be out
of business in a hot minute. But we seem
to accept this in software," Bender said,
adding that internal users seem more
willing to put up with poor performance,
but an Internet customer will not.

Many developers
lack incentive to

kn»l

DON'T RELEASE UNTESTED CODE

Bender warned that voids in quality
assurance often can have dire
consequences; software litiga-
tion is more widespread than
most people realize. "Anytime I
talk to counsel at a large soft-
ware company, all of them — 100
percent — are involved in soft-
ware litigation continuously."

Bender is frequently called
upon by the legal departments
of companies to be an expert
trial witness, and has testified in
a number of cases, always for
the prosecution. The majority
of software litigation, he said, centers
around breach of contract. In every case
in which Bender has testified, code cov-
erage tools were used to reveal how
much of a program's code was actually
tested. And in every case, it was proved
that "the software supplier did not reach
any level of due diligence in the testing

of the product before they delivered
it," making it unfit for use, and

thereby voiding usage contracts.

Part of the problem, Bender said, is a
lack of standards of quality. "We don't
have the standards in the software indus-
try that they have in, say, the medical,
engineering or accounting pro-
fessions, where you can get sued
for malpractice." In those indus-
tries, there are clearly defined
rules about what constitutes mal-
practice, Bender said.

The problem continues to
mushroom, according to Sam
Guckenheimer, Rational Soft-
ware Corp.'s senior director of write good code,
technology for automated test- says Rational's
ing, because many developers Guckenheimer.
lack incentive to write good
code. "Developers usually get measured
in lines of code or something similar, so
the time they spend on testing their
code before delivery doesn't really get
counted. And the quality, or lack of qual-
ity, of code they deliver tends not to get
measured," he said.

The findings of TBI's software audits
bear that out. "Whether you're talking
embedded or supercomputer or any-
thing in between, at the end of all our
testing we found a defect rate of rough-
ly five defects per 1,000 lines of exe-
cutable code. And for client/server apps

the number is about 7.2," Bender said, a
defect rate that he considers high.

"Right now, everyone's worrying
about shorter time-to-market because of
the Internet time pressure," said Guck-
enheimer. "We're all trying to grapple
with what we call the new software para-
dox, which is the need to pro-
duce higher quality in much
shorter cycle times because of
the expectations that the Web
has brought."

As a result, Guckenheimer
continued, testing can sometimes
take a back seat. "The classic [sce-
nario] is that testing gets
squeezed in at the end and cut
short, and you have these horri-
ble, bitter project meetings where
the testers say, 'We need more
it's not ready' and management
Too late; we're going to ship any-
way' So you get the kind of headline fail-
ures that you read about."

Rational (www.rational.com) offers
an extensive array of development
automation and testing tools to address
these problems, one of which is Pure-
Coverage for Visual C++, Visual Basic
and Java developers, a code coverage
tool that is part of its TestStudio Suite.

Cleanscape Software International,

which also markets development automa-

► continued on page 28

time;
says

Hosted Apps Lend Helping Hand

Developer shortage spurs growth of outsourced services

BY EDWARD J. CORREIA

It's hard to find good people. That's par-
ticularly true in the software develop-
ment market, where it's nearly impossi-
ble to find good developers, let alone
use them to also do application testing.

According to Tanya Osadchuk,
senior technical consultant at search
firm Witthauer Associates Ltd. (www
.witthauerassoc.com), there are far
more programming jobs open than

there are qualified people to fill them.
"An abundance of candidates are being
passed up because they don't have the
three-plus years of experience that
most companies want." Osadchuk, who
specializes in placing Java developers,
said that some of her clients have
resorted to outsourcing.

Testing- tools vendor Mercury Inter-
active Corp. has spent the past 11
► continued on page 27

SPECIAL REPORT: TEST/QA

■ Software Development Times . November 15, 2000 .

www.sdtimes.com

Software Implementation a Risky Business

Cigital offers risk-management strategies from the perspective of business

BY DAVID RUBINSTEIN

Software confidence for the digital age.
That's Cigital Inc.'s mantra.

Formerly known as Reliable Software
Technologies Inc., Cigital appeared as its
new name in September, heralding the
company's attempt to position itself as a
leading authority on software risk man-
agement and the impact software failures
can have on businesses.

Cigital CEO Jeffery Payne sees four
main issues in assessing the impact of soft-
ware failure: brand, revenue, liability and
productivity. Using the example of the
Ford Motor Co., Payne said that even
though Ford is not in the tire business, its
brand was hurt when serious problems
with Firestone tires arose. Similarly, a
manufacturing company could be hurt
because a piece of software it depended
upon failed. Software failures also can
result in lost revenue, he said, citing Her-
shey Foods, which claimed to have lost
money as a result of an incomplete soft-
ware project causing the inability to ship
candy in time for Halloween 1999.

The issue of liability is a relatively
new one, Payne said, as companies try to
hold software vendors responsible for
lost business due to software failure. The

trend for this began as companies sought
out Y2K-related bugs within their orga-
nizations. He spoke of a recent case in
which FoxMeyer Drug Co., a drug dis-
tributor, is suing Andersen Consulting
and SAP for $500 million each for what
it claims was a costly, error-filled instal-
lation of an SAP integration system.
Finally, there is the lost productivity of
workers unable to do their jobs because
back-end systems fail, or Web applica-
tions do not work and employees cannot
do what they are paid to do.

"Software is a business issue, not a
technical issue," Payne said. "Software is
the lifeblood of a business. It must work."

To that end, Cigital is packaging and
branding a service incorporating its exper-
tise in risk assessment with proprietary
technologies. Called Cigital Advantage, it
is intended to identify risks and imple-
ment risk mitigation from the very begin-
ning of the development cycle, straddling
the gap between business managers and
the technical staff.

"We want to be involved from day
one," Payne said. As part of the design
team in the development cycle, Cigital
represents the business during software
architectural planning. It assesses and

"A.

Cigital Advantage identifies and mitigates
risks throughout the development lifecycle.

measures every artifact produced, pro-
viding code review, design review and
security assessment as well as configura-
tion management, bug tracking, QA and
coverage analysis, Payne said. "The key
is that all of that is done and based on
risks to the business," he said. "Some
businesses decide the risk is so large and
costly, and will exceed the deadline and
budget, that they roll the dice and take
the risk. But it is a business decision.
Businesses take risks all the time."

A key to Cigital Advantage is certifi-
cation, he said. "We believe it is time for
software producers to step up to the

plate and certify what their software can
or cannot do," Payne said. Cigital is
offering to certify, after inspections by
its auditors, that software products are
reliable, secure and safe, and will mark
the products as such, he said. The plan is
backed by insurance for Cigital and
business-loss insurance for the end
users, he explained.

"Software development is an imma-
ture science," Payne said. "When archi-
tecture was 50 years old, buildings were
collapsing, or propped up with large
poles. It's just that software has gotten to
that critical point much faster than the
other sciences, in that if it fails, it can cost
businesses everything."

Payne said Cigital (www.cigital.com) is
targeting large, global companies with the
most to lose if software fails. "A lot of big
companies, whose software isn't their core
business, can use our help. They need
someone on their side to help the busi-
ness person make sure what's being done
with the software is in the best interest of
their business." Pricing for the service
varies depending upon the size and scope
of the project, but starts at about
$150,000, according to Jen Norman,
director of marketing for Cigital. I

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www.sdtimes.com

Software Development Times , November 15, 2000

SPECIAL REPORT: TEST/QA

HOSTED APPS

< continued from page 25

months capitalizing on the outsourcing
trend. Zohar Gilad, Mercury's vice pres-
ident of product marketing, said that
"one of the key issues today is the short-
age of IT personnel, and I don't see this
trend going away." In January, the com-
pany (www.mercuryinteractive.com)
launched its first hosted load-testing ser-
vice. "The notion is
to permit customers
to choose not only to
implement the prod-
uct in-house, but also
to outsource it either
through our hosted
service or a third par-
ty." The company
Many companies also plans to offer its
don't have the bud- Test Director QA
get, time or people management tools as
for testing, says a hosted application.
Mercury's Gilad. "Many companies

don't have the bud-
get, time or personnel to go for product
deployment implementation," Gilad
continued. "And many companies
remember that they need to test at the
last minute. So even if they had the
money, machines, infrastructure and
personnel, it's not going to do you any
good because it takes time. If you go for
a hosted service, we can deliver it within
24 hours."

Even existing Mercury customers,
Gilad said, can benefit from hosted
services when they need to "comple-
ment what they already have for a par-
ticular event. And any of our customers
can switch between a product and a
hosted service at any time because they
own the scripts, and they can start with
a hosted service and continue to a user
product or vice versa."

Also joining the trend of hosting
applications is RSW Software Inc.
(www.rswsoftware.com), which recent-
ly released e-Load Expert, a hosted
load-testing service that the company
says can analyze a Web site's function-
ality and performance to determine its
production readiness and identify
application bottlenecks. Steve Caplow,
RSW's director of marketing and busi-
ness development, said that companies
"either lack the people or expertise,
lack the infrastructure — the hardware
or software — or they don't have the
time necessary to do load testing."

But Caplow's view on testing differed
from Gilad's. "We believe that testing is
a process, not an event. It is ultimately
something that people need to do on a
routine basis, because applications need
to be tuned for optimal performance. It's
not something you can just test at the
end, say it's OK and move on." Web site
applications do not have to be fully
developed in order to be load tested,
Caplow said, but instead, need only be
minimally functional and accessible
through a browser.

Caplow claims that the biggest dif-
ference between RSW's services and
Mercury's hosted load testing is ease of
use. "We've made it really easy and
quick for people to do their own auto-
mated testing, where the Mercury
tools tend to require significant
amounts of scripting and expertise.
Our product uses a mostly visual
approach and does not require writing

a program. And what we're finding is
that the people who are tasked with
doing QA are not necessarily computer
scientists, and the amount of time to do
the test is short. Also, changes to the
applications are frequent, and it's very
difficult for people using Mercury tools
to keep up," Caplow said.

"I am quite surprised that RSW
chose to slam the hosted load-testing

service with ease of use," countered
Gilad. "In a hosted-service context,
scripting ease of use is irrelevant to
customers, since the work is done
entirely by the hosted-service experts."
But like Mercury's services, scripts
developed by RSW through the service
belong to the customer and can later
be reused for conducting their own
internal tests, Caplow said. I

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SPECIAL REPORT: TEST/QA

■ Software Development Times . November 15, 2000

www.sdtimes.com

COVERAGE

< continued from page 25

tion tools, was divided on the issue of
testing priority. Brent Duncan, Clean-
scapes director of marketing, is an advo-
cate of keeping testers and developers
apart. "I firmly believe that if you have
the manpower, your testing has to be sep-
arated from your engineering depart-

ment," he said, "because engineers feel
like once they've created the code,
they're done. A software QA department
is needed to make sure that software is
adhering to requirements and is being
tested thoroughly."

But Ted Batha, Cleanscape's president
and CEO, took an opposing view. "I don't
agree with Brent. The implementation of
testing is a technical issue. Engineering

has always been the glamour child of any
software organization. Because of the
investment requirements, testing doesn't
always get the proper recognition in
organizations that it should; it just needs
to get more visibility."

But Duncan was adamant. "Buggy
software is really a management issue.
The CEO's job is to have a vision, to make
a plan and to create an environment and

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an infrastructure by
which that plan can
come about. And what
we try to do with our
software is to make sure
that management can
see the value of doing
the testing process ear-
ly" Cleanscape (www
.cleanscape.net) offers a
code coverage module
in its ATTOL software
test automation tool.

Testing should be
separated from
development,
says Cleanscape's
Duncan.

CLEARLY DEFINE QUALITY

A surprising fact that emerges from cases
in which TBI's Bender has testified is a
"stunning lack of or ambiguous mention"
of software quality issues in vendors' soft-
ware use contracts, Bender said. "Almost
invariably these contracts are either silent
on the quality issue or they have ambigu-
ous phrases like 'the vendor shall thor-
oughly test the software
before delivering the
software to the client.' "

Bender said that
what compounds the
problem in the private
sector is that the parties
don't agree up front on Still a techie
what the quality criteria issue, testing just
are, and he character- needs more visi-
ized government quality bility, says Clean-
standards for software scape's Batha.
that it buys, which in-
clude those for FAA-certification and oth-
er mission-critical applications, as weak.

One thing seems clear. Most will
agree that code coverage is the one vital
element in any testing strategy. Mike
Connor, director of solutions manage-
ment at Compuware Corp., character-
ized coverage tools as absolutely critical.
"Code coverage is the only set of tools
that can turn the 'black box' into a white
box,' " he said. "They let you see inside
and determine, from a quality perspec-
tive, if your testing is complete."

"It's all about managing the risk of
going to market with applications," said Jay
Holmstrom, director of product manage-
ment for QA Center, Compuware's quali-
ty-assurance suite that includes a code
coverage module. Holmstrom said that
testing definitely needs to be a CEO issue.

Holmstrom said that although Com-
puware (www.compuware.com) provides
tools to help its customers manage risks,
there is a limit to how much of the liabil-
ity Compuware is willing to take on. "It's
ultimately the customer's responsibility
as to how rigorously they use those tests
and how well they follow what we pro-
pose as a good testing process," he said.

If in the end due diligence in testing
will ultimately pay off, why are so many
companies hesitant to use coverage tools?
"Because they give you bad news," said
TBI's Bender. But in all the cases in which
he has served, he said it would have been
far cheaper for the software companies to
perform more extensive testing than to
defend themselves in court. I

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NEWS

Software Development Times . November 15, 2000

www.sdtimes.com

Brief;

MORE PRODUCTS,

■ FAr-CWlTi

< continued from page 7

implemented, NQL Java Edition is in the process of being readied for
the Macintosh and Sun operating systems as well. The beta version is
available at www.nqli.com . . . Attunity Ltd. (formerly ISG Internation-
al Software) has added major new features to its Attunity Connect
3.0 enterprise integration software, including front- and back-end XML
connectivity, Java support, thin-client architecture, virtual database
technology and extended support for AS/400 and S/390 mainframe
platforms. Starting price for Connect 3.0 on a Windows NT relational
database is $2,500, and for mainframes is $180,000 . . . Wind River
Systems Inc. has unveiled the OSEKWorks RTOS embedded product
line for the automotive industry that provides software for automotive
control systems for anti-locking brakes and engine and traction con-
trol. In addition, Wind River's Tornado integrated development envi-
ronment can be integrated with OSEKWorks to help programmers
reduce development times and speed production times . . . Reasoning
Inc. has released a book titled "Building Great Software" that out-
lines common mistakes and best practices in writing
business-critical applications in C and C++. The book
examines five primary causes of fatal errors in C and
C++, discusses the impact of each error and offers advice on how the
error can be repaired. Copies are free at www.reasoning.com . . .
GemStone Systems Inc., a Brokat company, has released the Gem-
Stone/J 4.1 J2EE application server, which the company is targeting
at mobile applications. The server supports Entrust Technology's
Entrust PKI 5.0 security software for encryption, digital signatures
and key and certifiable management; and can run multiple application
instances simultaneously. Prices start at $4,995 . . . CodeMesh Inc.

has begun beta testing its JunC++ion code
JynGt+fen translator on AIX, HP-UX, Linux and Solaris.

The beta release is expected to be available
late this year . . . WebGain Inc. has made available a plug-in that inte-
grates VisualCaf 4 Enterprise Edition and the WebGain Studio
development environment with the iPlanet Application Server run-
time environment, creating what the compa- ^^^
nies call a fully integrated development and t yjf 1 GAIN

deployment environment based on the J2EE ^-^
specification. The plug-in is available for free download from both com-
panies' Web sites . . . The latest version of KDE 2.0 desktop for Linux
is available for download from SuSE Inc. Visit ftp.suse.com/pub/suse to
download KDE 2.0 . . . AbriaSoft Co. has ported the Abria SQL Stan-
dard Suite open-source database to Windows NT/2000. The $99 suite
includes MySQL for Windows and can be downloaded from www.abria
soft.com . . . Lead Technologies Inc. has released a PDF Plug-In that
allows for loading, saving, viewing, rasterizing and encoding files in
PDF, PostScript and EPS formats. The plug-in is available as an add-on
to the LeadTools Document and Medical lines of imaging development
toolkits, and can be downloaded from www.leadtools.com/PDF.htm.

PEOPLE

Linux-based embedded systems vendor Lineo Inc. has named Richard
Larsen senior vice president of worldwide sales operations. Most
recently, Larsen was sales director at Sun Microsystems Inc. Also, John
Mezinko has been named vice president of Americas sales, and Paul
Ray has been named director of worldwide product sales . . . People-
Soft Inc., which recently announced record third-quarter revenues, has
promoted chief financial officer Steve Hill to senior vice president of
business development. Kevin T. Parker joins PeopleSoft as senior vice
president of finance and CFO, and Renee L. Lorton becomes vice pres-
ident and general manager of PeopleSoft's financial products . . .
Mortice Kern Systems Inc. has reappointed Alex White to the MKS
board of directors while accepting the resignation of Anthony Hull as
the board's director. White is chief architect at Vertical Sky Inc. Hull left
to spend more time as head of finance, accounting and tax for Dream-
Works SKG. . . David Wenk has been named chief marketing officer of
Zucotto Wireless Inc., where he will be responsible for creating and
directing the company's business strategies and managing the global
marketing organization. He reports to president and CEO Gary Wells. I

Wireless DevCon 2000 Takes Aim
At Shift to Wireless Applications

Vendors look to be among the early movers and shakers

BY DOUGLAS FINLAY

Killer applications of the future
certainly have wireless written
all over them, as companies
such as BE A Systems Inc. and
Tibco Software Inc. have signed
agreements with Nokia to
access its wireless server to
secure applications for hand-
held devices, and Microsoft
Corp.'s future .NET strategies
include wireless applications.

FIRST OF ITS KIND

So it seems fitting that the first-
of-its-kind Wireless DevCon
2000, scheduled for Dec. 3 to
Dec. 5 at the Doubletree Hotel
in San Jose, Calif., is taking
clear aim at up-and-coming
vendors and programmers
looking to be the movers
and shakers of the nascent
wireless industry now bur-
geoning on the scene.

"Wireless is the next big
wave," said Camelot Commu-
nications president Terry
DiGuili, whose company is a
co-sponsor of the conference,
along with SYS-CON Media
Inc. She said that because
wireless will affect and trans-
form how people communi-
cate and conduct business in
the future, "developers and
managers who are building
these emerging applications
need to be informed and
armed with tools and options
today so they can build what
will become commonplace in
the not-too-distance future."
She said a forum of this nature
had become essential "if we
are to deploy wireless in a real-
world environment."

At press time, 45 compa-
nies had planned to exhibit
products. Wireless handheld
devices for every business
need are expected to be on
display for presentation to
programmers, system engi-
neers, software architects,
Web developers, project man-
agers and leaders, consultants
and educators.

The vendor list includes, but
is not limited to, Air2Web Inc.,
AlterEgo Networks Inc., @hand
Corp., Broadvision Inc. /Inter-
leaf, Buzzeo Inc., Extended Sys-
tems Inc., FusionOne Inc.,
MobileWebSurf.com, Motient
Corp., PointBase Inc., Rogue

Wave Software Inc., RSA Secu-
rity Inc., Seagull Technology
Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and
the WAP Forum. "The dele-
gates and vendors who attend
are on the leading edge of
defining what the wireless pic-
ture will look like," DiGuili said.
She said 1,500 attendees were
expected to attend.

TECHNICAL PROGRAMS

Some nine hours of technical
instruction will be offered start-
ing Sunday, the opening day of
the conference. Sessions will
include "Introduction to WAP
Development Using WML and
WML Script," "Java Technolo-
gies for Mobile Devices and
Services," "Wireless Develop-
ment Using the Microsoft

.NET Framework," and "Wire-
less Streaming: Real Time Con-
tent Goes Mobile." A night ses-
sion will be offered from 6:00
p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Technical instruction will
increase to 15 hours on both
Monday and Tuesday, adding
tracks such as Technical, Portal
and User Interface, and Gener-
al and Managerial on Monday;
and Technical, Wireless and the
Enterprise, and General and
Managerial on Tuesday.

Among Mondays 15 sessions
are "Real-Time WAP-Enabled
Device Customization," "Hand-
held Devices: User Interface
Issues Conquered," "Enabling
the Wireless Enterprise
With SOAP," "Adaptive
Frameworks for the Inte-
gration of Wireless Clients
■ with Enterprise JavaBeans-
MA Based Back Ends," "Ad-
vanced Techniques for WML
Programmers" and a panel fea-
turing Mark Sears and Timothy
A. Reilly on "Bluetooth and
Wireless Networking." A night
session will be offered from 6:30
p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Tuesday's 15 sessions will
include "Architecting a Con-
tent Delivery System Using
Java, XML and WAP," "Wire-
less Application Development
With Open Source," "J2ME
Profiles and Configurations,"
"Mobile Commerce: Emerg-
ing Business Models," and
"Scalable and Global Wireless
Applications."

Three keynote sessions will
be given Monday, and two
keynote sessions will be given
Tuesday. I

WIRELESS DEVCON 2000

www.wirelessdevcon2000.com

CONFERENCE:

Monday: Registration,

EXHIBIT HOURS:

Dec. 3-5, 2000

7:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m.

Monday, Noon-6:30 p.m.

Doubletree Hotel,
San Jose, Calif.

Sessions, 9:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m.;
1:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m.

Tuesday, Noon-6:00 p.m.
KEYNOTE SESSIONS:

CONFERENCE HOURS:
Sunday: Registration,
9:00 a.m.-6:30 p.m.

Welcome Reception,
5:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m.

Night School,

Monday: Keynote I,
8:15 a.m.-9:00 a.m.
Keynote II, 11:15 a.m. -Noon

Preconference Tutorials,

6:30 p.m.-8:00 p.m.

Keynote III, 4:45 p.m.-5:30 p.m.

10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m.;

Tuesday: Registration,

Tuesday: Keynote IV,

2:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.

8:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.

11:15 a.m. -Noon, Wireless

Night School:

Sessions, 9:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m.;

Editorial Panel

6:00 p.m.-7:30 p.m.

1:00 p.m.-5:30 p.m.

Keynote V, 3:15 p.m. -4:15 p.m.

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Software Development Times . November 15, 2000

COLUMNS

EXCHANGE SERVER 2000: PROMISE VS. REALITY

Once again, the Microsoft product roll-
out litany begins, this time with
Exchange Server 2000 — and bear with
me because this does affect your develop-
ers. First we have an enticing new fea-
tures brochure: Microsoft has added
advanced server clustering, no database
size limitations as well as the ability to run
multiple databases on a single server, tight
user and server management integration
via Active Directory and Microsoft Man-
agement Console (MMC), internal sup-
port for things like instant messaging,
and videoconferencing. Most important
to developers, especially internal intranet
developers and those looking to build
team-oriented development environ-
ments, is the new Web Storage System.

Sounds great, right? But after years of
experience in dealing with this pattern,
I've learned to put the brochure down,
check out the physical product and wait
for the other shoe to drop. Sure enough,
we hear a resounding "thump."

After all the hassle and agony of actu-
ally getting Exchange Server 5.5 working
semi-reliably, many network managers
were hoping that Exchange 2000 would
be easier and more stable. We couldn't be
more wrong. Microsoft's main focus here
seems to be to bind both network admins
and internal corporate developers that
much closer to its Windows 2000 Server

platform, primarily by implementing
Exchange 2000 Server so that it's pretty
much useless without Active Directory —
which is found only in Windows 2000
Server. On paper, this feature set reads
fine, but since neither Exchange 2000 nor
(more vexingly!) Active Directory is cur-
rently working properly, this combination
just hogs up massive amounts of
server disk and CPU resources
without doing a whole lot. I can
get better basic e-mail perfor-
mance by using Eudora.

But let's fast forward four
months from now and pretend
Redmond has finally released
Exchange Server 2000 Service
Pack 1 along with the Windows
2000 Service Pack 2 for Active Directory.
And let's optimistically assume that these
fixes make the platform usable. What's
interesting to software developers here?
The Web Storage System, that's what.

This is Microsoft's latest sniper bullet
aimed especially at those pesky group-
ware competitors that just refuse to go
away, notably Lotus Notes and less
notably Novell Group Wise. The Web
Storage System (WSS) is an event-driven
development tool that allows intranet
developers to build applications based on
the Exchange 2000 document repository.
In a nutshell, WSS allows Exchange to

WINDOWS
WATCH

employ fairly sophisticated rules-based
work-flow processing in combination with
messaging, data validation, versioning
indexing and search capabilities. If this
sounds like it's oriented to document
management and knowledge-base appli-
cations, that's because it is.

Frankly, I was looking for something
exactly like this recently for one of my
own projects, and couldn't find it. The fact
that Redmond has "released" it and I still
can't use it does little to alleviate
my mood. I was looking for a
knowledge-base application that
was easily built, easily customized
and didn't require a separate
internal expert to administer.
This basically boils down to a
directory-based document re-
pository, the ability to secure
this directory, control document
check-out/check-in, and a simple intra-
net-based front-end searching, submis-
sion and indexing tool. Try finding some-
thing like this from third-party vendors.
Not easy. Most knowledge -base tools
today seek to deliver everything up to
and including the kitchen sink, which
makes them highly complex to configure
and administer as well as requiring pro-
prietary database-driven repositories and
other access tools.

Exchange 2000's WSS has the poten-
tial to do away with this complexity —
mainly because it tries to leverage soft-
ware engines you should already have

running as an Exchange and Windows
2000 user. That means that access and
versioning run off of Active Directory,
while the document message store is
controlled by the same engine that han-
dles the e-mail database for Exchange.
WSS really just boils down to new rules
and GUIs you can assign to these
engines bolstered by support for new
protocols and development standards,
especially HTTP and XML.

By combining these technologies,
WSS lets intranet developers leverage
the Windows 2000 file system as the
document repository, Active Directory
as the control mechanism, Exchange
Server 2000 as the collaboration server
and the Web as the collaboration medi-
um. Unfortunately, because it's Micro-
soft, you'll also wind up getting steered
toward COM and ASP via the Exchange
2000 SDK as well as OLE DB and
ActiveX Data Objects. But then again, if
you've taken the Windows 2000 commit-
ment cliff dive, that probably won't mat-
ter much internally. Serving up such ap-
plications to clients outside the intranet,
however, could well become tedious.

But one migraine at a time. Hey,
Microsoft: Get the underlying server
technologies working first, and I'll be hap-
py for the short term. I

Oliver Rist is vice president of product
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You can reach him at orist@therealm.com.

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www.sdtimes.com

Software Development Times . November 15, 2000

COLUMNS

HIRING CRISIS! FILM AT 11!

When I saw the headlines about con-
gressional testimony that blamed the
IT personnel shortage on bad manage-
ment, I thought I had an easy story to
write. You know, some kind of "Technolo-
gy management is poor In other news,
Congress expects the sun to rise in the
East tomorrow" sarcasm about career
politicians pontificating about an industry
they know nothing about. Unfortunately,
the more I investigated, the more I found
myself nodding in agreement.

Lets clarify a couple of things: First,
Congress's interest in the subject is solely
because of a then-pending measure, now
approved and signed into law, to increase
the number of active H-1B visas.

The H-1B provision allowed approxi-
mately 20,000 guest workers per year in
the 1970s, but there has been a huge
increase in the past few years — 65,000
visas were issued in 1998, 115,000 this year
and last, and 195,000 additional ones are
to be issued each year for the next three
years. The H-1B visa is good for three
years with a three-year possible extension,
so it's difficult to know what the population
of guest workers will be, but in any case,
well over half a million. Forty-seven per-
cent of those who receive H-1B visas are
programmers or systems analysts.

Second, hiring is frustrating. The aver-

age time to fill a tech position in Silicon
Valley is 3 l h months. If you've been hiring
lately, you know that screening resumes is
ineffective, bozos with laughable talent
can bluff their way through a phone inter-
view with a nontechnical recruiter, and
anyone with solid talent and communica-
tion skills who gets interviewed is likely to
be offered multiple jobs within two weeks
of job searching. On the face of it, there is
an undeniable need for all the
qualified candidates we can get.

But let's review some other,
less obvious, truths.

First, H-1B visa holders are
underpaid relative to the market.
The use of H-1B workers as
cheap labor is so fundamental to
hiring practices, at least in the Bay
Area, I was surprised to learn that
the law requires them to be paid a "pre-
vailing wage." That's laughable, at least in
relation to their resumes: Last year I man-
aged a Chinese Ph.D programmer who
was paid less than $40,000 per year. There
are several reasons for the pay disparity —
not all sinister. For one thing, either colle-
giate standards in Asia aren't what they
are in the U.S. or people are coming in
with grossly padded resumes. I fired that
Chinese Ph.D when she proved incapable
of anything beyond entry-level QA work.

LARRY
O'BRIEN

I think it's also fair to say that many tal-
ented and accredited guest workers don't
have the English communication skills and
cultural insight to successfully move into
higher-paying leadership positions. Most
important, though, guest workers aren't
fluid in the marketplace — its difficult for
them to "jump ship" for the company that
most highly values their talents. Whatever
the market forces at play, the result is that
there is an increasing number of "body
shops" that provide cheaper programming
talent based on H-1B guest workers, while
analysis and design are left to
much-higher-paid permanent
employees or consultants.

Also relevant to the hiring
debate are two other uncomfort-
able facts: ageism and attrition.
These are entwined — I doubt
that a 50-year-old programmer
who's been coding Java for three
years is going to go begging, but
the industry is tremendously unforgiving
to those who are not current on the latest
technology. Once your software knowl-
edge is out of date, you have almost no
chance of getting through the naive
Boolean check-offs of the resume and
phone screens to prove your actual talent.
Norman Matloff's "Debunking the
Myth of a Desperate Software Labor
Shortage" (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu
/itaa. real.html) lays out these arguments
in detail and concludes that a more effi-

j .

cient hiring process would radically alter
the economics of technical hiring. In the
end, I found myself agreeing. There is no
standard resume interchange format, job
site search tools are geared toward simple
Boolean queries, there is no standard
body of software engineering knowledge,
there are few screening tools for general
programming aptitude, and there is no
standard, de facto or otherwise, that com-
municates one's technical talent. For years
I've advocated that the software engineer-
ing community promote the expectation
that candidates provide portfolios, as is
expected from other creative types.

In my last column, I argued that eco-
nomics dictates that talented engineers
will increasingly become free-lance con-
sultants as the carrying costs of in-house
engineering staff grow untenable. That
argument holds even if, miraculously, the
technical community develops efficient
hiring practices; anything that improves
accuracy in evaluating external resources
such as job candidates will benefit inde-
pendent consultants even more. Talent-
ed software engineers will remain a
scarce commodity. In other news, the
sun will rise in the East tomorrow. I

Larry O'Brien, the founding editor of
Software Development Magazine, is a
software engineering consultant based in
San Francisco. He can be reached at
lobrien @ email, com.

CLEAN DATA IS HAPPY DATA

resources are
among its most

Your enterprise's data
considered to be
important assets. But if the data isn't
clean, if schemas are confused, if defini-
tions aren't consistent, if data structures
aren't oriented toward your line
of business, and if the resources
aren't available to the right peo-
ple at the right time, then you're
in trouble. Reports and query
results will be inaccurate, as will
be decisions based on unreliable
information. Employees will
avoid using data resources that
their employers have spent hun-
dreds of thousands or even millions of
dollars constructing — and might choose
to develop alternative resources, which
will only exacerbate the problem.

So, if the information's going to be
useful, the data needs to be clean and
properly organized. But what does
"clean" mean? According to Michael H.
Brackett in "Data Resource Quality:
Turning Bad Habits into Good Practices,"
clean data means more than double-
checking to ensure that a social security
number has nine digits, or that the ZIP
code a customer provides actually match-
es the customer's city and state. It's also
imperative to ensure data resource quali-
ty at many levels, from creating strict
naming conventions used for database
tables, to documenting data integrity

BOOK
WATCH

that data resources are designed with a
business perspective foremost.

Brackett has turned his four decades
of experience in data processing into a set
of blueprints for recognizing problems
with data. This book doesn't have
all the answers; it's not a guide to
creating an ideal enterprise data
resource, or for re-engineering a
dysfunctional data center. But it
will help managers ask the right
questions when they evaluate
their current data resources.

The book is organized in
three main sections. The first is
a chapter describing what Brackett sees
as the state of the enterprise data
resource. His contention, which I accept,
is that most enterprise data isn't well
organized, structured or validated. It's
not made widely available to those who
need it, in the form that they need it. Not
only that, but data quality degrades over
time. Considering that data resources are
expensive, and essential to the business
or other organization that created them,
data managers face real challenges.

The second section of the book com-
prises 10 chapters, one dedicated to each
of Brackett's 10 bad habits. More about
those shortly.

The third section of the book provides
advice as to what can be done to over-
come those bad habits — not the technical

rules and dependencies, to making sure fixes, but the broader organizational, cul-

tural and financial steps that must be tak-
en. He stresses, over and over again, that
there's no silver bullet. Creating and
maintaining data resources is hard work,
and must be pursued relentlessly.

BAD HABITS, BEST PRACTICES

The meat of "Data Resource Quality" lies
in chapters 2 through 11, where Brackett
describes each of his 10 bad habits. Each
chapter describes a list of unacceptable or
unreasonable items. It discusses the busi-
ness impact of those habits. It then sug-
gests corresponding good habits to
replace the bad habits, and the business
impact of those good habits. It concludes
with a collection of best practices for turn-
ing those bad habits into good ones.

The problem is that the prose in those
five parts of each chapter is
repetitive, formulaic and
downright tiresome to read.

Each of the chapters con-
tains dozens of items, each of
which describes a different
attribute of the bad habit.
Unfortunately, those items
overlap, refer both forward
and backward to other mate-
rial in the book (without page
numbers), and most annoying of all, have
one-sentence summaries stuck in the mid-
dle of each item, surrounded by a thick-
bordered box. This swiftly became tire-
some and distracting. The author really
seems to think in PowerPoint bullets, from
which I'd wager this book was written.

Patient digging, however, reveals pure

gold. The first five bad habits that Brack-
ett describes involve the structure of the
data resources themselves, and cover for-
mal data names, formal data definitions,
proper data structure, precise data
integrity rules and robust data documen-
tation. Those are the relatively easy habits
to spot and overcome.

The next five are the hard ones,
because they're often deeply entrenched
throughout a data center: having a reason-
able data orientation, providing accept-
able levels of data availability, assigning
adequate responsibility for the data, hav-
ing an expanded data vision that fits the
business, and ensuring that the value of
the data is recognized appropriately.

Like I said, pure gold. Many organiza-
tions claim that their data is a strategic
asset. It's time to treat it
as such. If your responsibility
encompasses the creation or
maintenance of such data
resources, or if your teams
are building new systems
that will interface with enter-
prise data, this book will help
you evaluate the strengths
and weaknesses of those data
It's hard to read,

Data

Resource

Quality

Mk^|I flr*tm

resources.

but it's worth the effort. I

"Data Resource Quality: Turning Bad
Habits into Good Practices." Michael H.
Brackett. Addison-Wesley, 2000. Trade
paper, 354 pages, $39.95.

Alan Zeichick is editor-in-chief of SD Times.

NEWS

Software Development Times . November 15, 2000

www.sdtimes.com

INFORMIX

< continued from page 1

tial revenue and profitability
growth throughout 2001."

The two parts of Informix,
the database company and e-
business services company, will
be completely separate legal
and financial entities by the end
of 2000, said Brian Staff, vice
president of marketing for

Informix Software, the database
half of Informix.

GETTING THE POINT

Informix Software has also start-
ed discussing "Project Arrow-
head," designed to be an all-
encompassing family of database
products growing out of its exist-
ing Extended Parallel Server
(XPS), but with features taken
from the company's other core

databases, namely Founda-
tion.2000, Informix Dynamic
Server and Red Brick Decision
Server, with a goal to manage
complex sets of data across mul-
tiple transactional environments.
The Arrowhead product fam-
ily will include not only the
enhanced XPS, which Staff
referred to as the Arrowhead
Database Server, but also an
application server, a Web server

HP/BLUESTONE

< continued from page 1

and Praesidium, a security soft-
ware package.

Meanwhile, Blues tone s Total-
e-Business product, offering
J2EE and XML application
server capabilities, along with
Bluestones Java Transaction
Service, will form the core of
HP's middleware line to enable
its customer base to develop,
integrate, deploy and manage
J2EE and XML applications
across the enterprise, the Inter-
net and mobile devices.

"We don't have middleware
operations to date," said Bill Rus-
sell, HP's vice president and gen-
eral manager of software and ser-
vices, "and the technology they

have, in our view, is way ahead."
Bluestone anticipates bene-
fits from the acquisition to its
customer base as well. P. Kevin
Kilroy, president and CEO, said
the company's greatest enemy
had been the perception among
its users that it could not
remain viable as a smaller com-
pany because of its inability to
win high-end clients.

Prior to the HP announce-
ment, Bluestone was moving
forward with separate deals. It
recently launched Bluestone
Developer Zone, an online
peer-to-peer support resource
created in conjunction with
HotDispatch Inc.

In addition, Bluestone had
reached a joint marketing agree-
ment with Percussion Software

Inc. to combine Percussion's
Rhythmyx Content Manager
and Bluestones Total-e-Busi-
ness platform to help program-
mers implement e-business
applications with the flexibility
to evolve with changing require-
ments and technologies.

Bluestone had also begun
shipping its Total-e- Server
Release 7.2, featuring support
for the Enterprise JavaBeans
2.0 specification. It also embeds
the Bluestone Java Transaction
Server, includes the Universal
Session Manager and bundles
Progressive Software's Sonic-
MQ Java Message Service for a
starting price of $30,000.

With the purchase, Bluestone
will become a wholly owned sub-
sidiary of Hewlett-Packard. I

and a set of development tools.
But that doesn't mean that any of
the other databases will be going
away soon, he said. "Yes, we own
a lot of databases — 11 of them,"
he laughed, "but seven are 'clas-
sic' products. They make us a lot
of money and have loyal cus-
tomers, but we do little with
them." Foundation. 2000, In-
formix Dynamic Server and Red
Brick will also continue to be
offered, Staff said, as long as cus-
tomers still want them. "[Arrow-
head] will be a replacement
database for some customers.
For others it will be irrelevant,"
he said, adding that the primary
goal for Informix Software is to
attract new customers, to help
the former No.l database com-
pany recapture market share lost
to Oracle Corp., IBM Corp. and
Microsoft Corp.

The migration to the Arrow-
head vision will be stretched
out over the next couple of
years, said Staff. The first tangi-
ble component, the Arrowhead
Application Server, will be
unveiled in the first quarter of
2001, he said, adding that the
product will either be an exist-
ing app server acquired or
licensed by Informix, or a

rebranded product from a busi-
ness partner. The second quar-
ter will see the release of
enhanced online transaction
processing features for the XPS
database server. The final move
to the Arrowhead product fam-
ily will occur in 2002, he said,
with the addition of a Web serv-
er and development tools.

Also at the Informix confer-
ence, the company announced
version 8.31 of Extended Paral-
lel Server for Linux, distribut-
ing a developers' edition at the
conference. Previously, XPS
had supported only the Unix
operating system on a variety of
uniprocessor, multiprocessor
and massively parallel hard-
ware platforms.

Informix also updated its Red
Brick Decision Server to version
6.1. The update, according to
the company, adds support for
Linux, JDBC 2.0 and ODBC
3.5. It also automatically main-
tains aggregate tables to speed
up query response, and has
improved data parallelization
algorithms. A new feature is ran-
dom data sampling for providing
rapid data analysis during data
mining operations. Red Brick
6.1 is currently available. I

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www.sdtimes.com

Software Development Times . November 15, 2000

COLUMNS

GETTING THE MESSAGE WITH JMS

The Java Message Service (JMS) is
emerging as an important develop-
ment in the world of message-oriented
middleware (MOM) products. Todays
MOM market is dominated by IBM's
MQSeries; although numerous smaller
players, such as Tibco and Talarian,
occupy important niches in which
MQSeries is not the tool of choice.
These companies provide a means by
which applications on different plat-
forms can share data in a reliable man-
ner. The key concepts are that the
messaging works across different appli-
cations and platforms (while maintaining
a single API) and that it is reliable. And
today, as distributed enterprise comput-
ing infrastructure becomes the norm,
MOM software is enjoying a renaissance
of sorts — a long overdue renaissance, in
my view, since its delay is attributable to
the common misperception that middle-
ware was a dinosaur product associated
with mainframes.

Today, those who suffered under this
misperception have been disabused by
the recognition that apps must pass data
along asynchronously. That is, they must
be able to send data to other applica-
tions, trust that the data got there, and

not be obliged to wait for a confirming
reply. JavaSoft, the promulgator of Java
technology, recognized enterprises were
indeed becoming aware of their need for
asynchronous messaging; and so it
developed JMS. As it stands today, JMS
is an API. It specifies the syntax of func-
tion calls to a service that will deliver
messages across the enterprise. (The
current version of JMS is 1.02,
and the specification can be
downloaded from www .Javasoft
.com/jms.)

Currently, JMS supports two
styles of destination definition:
point-to-point and publish-and-
subscribe (commonly called
pub/sub). In point-to-point, a
message is sent to a specific _
application on a specific platform. In
pub/sub, a message is sent to a server
that keeps a list of all clients interested
in this particular data (the subscribers).
That server then sends copies of the
message to the subscribers. The pub/sub
model is often used in the delivery of
real-time data. For example, all stock-
brokers on a trading floor would
subscribe to price quotes, but would
not subscribe to quotes on pork-belly

MIDDLEWARE
WATCH

ANDREW
BINSTOCK

futures. JMS does not define more than
the API. For example, it does not speci-
fy how the pub/sub delivery mechanism
should work. In fact, it does not even
define what the messaging transport
should be. All it defines is the grammar
by which Java apps should interact with
the enterprise messaging middleware.

But even this limited mission state-
ment will come as a huge relief to many
IT shops. Middleware vendors all use
different and proprietary APIs for their
messaging service. This means
that migration from one service
to another is effectively impos-
sible, since it would require
every application that interfaces
with the middleware to be
rewritten. By standardizing on a
single API, apps can now be
ported with ease, and middle-
ware vendors will no longer
enjoy proprietary-code lock-in. Rather,
they will have to compete on quality of
implementation and, of course, on cost.
This is all to the good. And predictably,
middleware vendors are quickly moving
to support JMS. Soon, I expect, JMS
compatibility will be a checklist item for
all middleware purchases. The bigger
benefit, though, comes in hiring devel-
opers — no longer will candidates have
to know Tibco s specific interfaces or

IBM's; rather they will just need to
know JMS.

Unfortunately, the API set is rather
limited and it will probably undergo
some revisions. For example, JMS speci-
fies only the APIs necessary for delivery
and receipt of messages. Key functions
such as error notification, security and
encryption, and administration have
been neglected. In "Javanese" terms,
these have been left as implementation
details to the JMS providers — the ven-
dors who provide the technology that
implements the JMS API. This limitation
is likely to be removed in future versions.

Meanwhile, IT managers should
begin the process of integrating the JMS
interfaces into their code bases. Once
your current middleware vendor sup-
ports JMS, have your developers use this
API rather than the proprietary ones
they have learned. This will confer two
advantages. You will find it easier to hire
developers who can code to your mid-
dleware. Plus, porting to other middle-
ware will be easier. Of these two, the
first is the most practical and the most
compelling. But you never know when
the second benefit will be important. I

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst
at Pacific Data Works LLC. Reach him
at abinstock@pacificdataworks. com.

WHO SAID IT?

ow carefully have you been read-
ing the news? High-tech execs
and open-source opinion leaders have
been uncharacteristically vocal in
recent weeks, using colorful language
to describe their goals and deride
competitors. See how many of these
quotes you can identify.

1. "Do people have any concept of
what it means to live on less than a
dollar a day? There's no electricity. Do
they have PCs that don't use
electricity?"

2. "I think we'll be the No. 1 Linux
company... by a long shot. I'll challenge
our Linux experience against Red Hat's
any day."

3. "We did start the open-source
revolution."

4. "I'm
should be.

stern... as I
up accepting

not always as
and I end
changes even after the point where I
know I shouldn't."

5. "When was the last time you
bought left-blinker software for your
car?"

6. "You want to steer clear of Sun.
Sun just doesn't get it. That's a crazy
thing to say."

7. "If we're so far behind, why is Scott
spending so much energy attacking [us]?"

8. "It is up to the game developer to
use smells wisely. . .just as they learned
to use sound to improve games. Scent-
ography is a new art form."

9. "We didn't recommend any man-

datory practices. We did consider them,
but not even the most conservative
members of the commission felt that was
the road to go down."

10. "There was a project started by the
IT industry where somebody set up a
Web site, and literally in the announce-
ment, they said, This Web site will
eliminate poverty' And I wasn't sure that
that was really going to happen."

11. "It was a cheap tactic to
bring Palm users into the fold
with freebies. And I think they
did that because the device
doesn't stand well on its own."

12. "This is just another step in
the stealth Linuxization of Sun."

13. "I don't think there's any
marketing person at Microsoft
who would ship a product with-
out the word 'open' on the box."

THE ANSWERS

1. Criticizing others' understanding of
the meaning of poverty was none other
than the world's richest man, Bill Gates.
The comments came as Gates mocked a
Hewlett-Packard Co. initiative to deliver
computer technology to the globe's
poorest people at GartnerGroup's ITxpo
conference.

2. That was Sun Microsystems Inc.
chairman and Solaris champion Scott
McNealy claiming the high ground in
the Linux market after Sun's acquisition
of Cobalt Networks for $2 billion.

3. Red Hat Inc. chief technology

OPEN
SOURCE

officer Michael Tiemann clumsily
claimed credit for sparking the open-
source revolution at a WR Hambrecht
conference. Later, Tiemann explained
that he meant Red Hat subsidiary
Cygnus, which was founded in 1987
and which Red Hat acquired in
January 2000.

4. Linux creator Linus Torvalds
uttered this mea culpa as explanation
for delays in the release of version 2.4 of
the Linux kernel. "I allowed too much
new code too late," he admits.

5. Sun's McNealy uses the
"left blinker" analogy to support
his contention that "software is
a feature, not an industry."

6. In response to McNealy 's
characterization of software as
a feature, Microsoft president
Steve Ballmer advised ITxpo
attendees to steer clear of
Sun. "It's software that lets you

build scalable Web sites," Ballmer said.
"When people benefit from PowerPoint
or e-mail, it's software that enables it.
EMC — a hardware company — boasts
that 75 percent of its engineering is
in software."

7. Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly
Fiorina responded to an HP-directed
barb in McNealy's ITxpo keynote with
this rhetorical question.

8. DigiScents Inc. co-founder and
CEO Joel Bellenson offered this sage
advice as he described his company's
technology, including its ScentWare
Web Development Kit, in a "Good
Morning, Silicon Valley" interview.

9. This explanation comes from

Donald Telage, chairman of a con-
gressional commission charged with
making a recommendation regarding
the use of Web filters for publicly
funded schools and libraries. The
commission surprised Congress by
failing to recommend mandatory use of
Web filters.

10. Poverty expert Bill Gates
explains how IT companies can best aid
the Third World. "Yes, there are
fantastic things that IT companies can
and should be doing," Gates said in
response to an ITxpo question. "I think
they do have to be tempered with a
little bit of reality."

11. That was Rick Broida, author of
"How to Do Everything with your
Palm Handheld," commenting on a
Microsoft event that brought leaders
of the Palm Computing community
to Redmond for presentations on
Microsoft's Pocket PC platform — and
gifts worth more than $1,400 per
person, including handhelds from
Compaq and HP.

12. That's Open Source Initiative
president Eric Raymond, commenting
on Sun's purchase of Cobalt Networks
Inc. for $2 billion.

13. Bill Gates again, commenting on
the amazing marketing power of the
word "open."

How did you do? I

J.D. Hildebrand is the former editor of
such publications as Computer Lan -
guage, Unix Review and Windows Tech
Journal. Reach him atjdh@sdtimes.com.

INDUSTRY

Software Development Times . November 15, 2000

www.sdtimes.com

A LONG, HARD RIDE

You've got to hand it to the baby
boomers. They've taken a long-
term view of the stock market and stuck
with it, despite this year's roller-coaster
ride. It's understandable. With banks
paying less than 3 percent on savings
accounts, bond yields not much higher,
and the knowledge that money stuck in
a coffee can pays no return at all,
they've taken their life savings and
retirement money and forged
headlong into the market — for
better or for worse.

It was no surprise, then, to
read recently that investor opti-
mism has remained steady even
after the precipitous drop in
the markets on Oct. 12. Long-
term investors realize that the
stock market is their best
choice for larger rates of return, and
they've decided they'll ride out the ups
and downs for a chance to earn more on
their money.

This is not some display of blind
faith, as there are plenty of places to
find reason for optimism in today's
market. One sector that stands out is
software. Company after company
exceeded analysts' expectations: A full
57 percent reported that quarterly
earnings in October showed a "positive
surprise," according to Tracy Eichler,
an analyst at Paine Webber who helps
track investor optimism. Eichler said
small market declines are short-lived in
people's minds, and the next time posi-
tive news hits the market, the declines
are forgotten. In fact, she indicated
that the largest drop in optimism in
Paine Webber's October report was in
investors with 15 or more years in the
market, who have experienced long
periods of "dead money," when
rebounds took months to occur. The
newer investors, Eichler said, see that

MONEY
WATCH

DAVID
RUBINSTEIN

it can be only a matter of days for mar-
kets to correct themselves.

It is widely understood that two key
factors drive the stock market: interest
rates and earnings. And with the Fed-
eral Reserve holding fast on rates after
a series of increases effectively slowed
down a runaway economy, all eyes
turned to earnings. Interestingly, while
beating the estimates has helped com-
panies' stock prices only mar-
ginally in most cases, failing to
meet them, even by a few cents
per share, has been near cata-
strophic to share prices.

Major corporations still hold
tremendous sway. Analysts cite
the solid earnings report from
Microsoft Corp. in mid-
month — profits up 30 percent
from a year ago; operating earnings of
38 cents per share (4 cents higher than
consensus estimates); net income of
$2.19 billion, up from $1.68 billion a
year ago — as helping to fuel the turn-
around. But there are other recent
examples as well:

Inprise Corp. reported third-quar-
ter revenues of $47.6 million, up from
$45.7 million a year ago, and earnings
of 12 cents per share compared with a
loss of 3 cents per share a year ago.
Among the highlights cited in its
announcement were the release of the
AppCenter 4 management platform for
Web-based applications, release of
JBuilder 4 and some management
shifts. Curiously, there was no mention
of progress on its Kylix tool suite for
Linux, which was reported to have
gone into beta in June and has been in
the works since August 1999. Also,
Inprise was to spin off Interbase as a
separate company providing database
software to the open-source communi-
ty. This deal reportedly hit legal snags

back in August when the company said
it was near finalization.

Iona Technologies Inc. reported
record third-quarter revenues of $39.9
million, a 51 percent increase over 1999,
and earnings of 24 cents per share,
which beat the Street by 2 cents. The
quarter marked the first in which all
parts of the iPortal suite, which helps
companies develop their own Web por-
tals, were available.

Rational Software Corp. reported
second-fiscal-quarter pro forma earn-
ings of $187.5 million, up from $128.2
million a year ago, with pro forma earn-
ings per share of 17 cents as compared
with 10 cents a year earlier. Rational's
executives believe the company will
grow exponentially with the increased
reliance of businesses on software.

Sybase Inc. posted third-quarter earn-
ings of 30 cents per share, beating Wall
Street estimates by a nickel. Revenues
were up 11 percent from the year prior,
to $239.1 million from $216.1 million.
Analysts believe that for this momentum
to continue, Sybase must show growth in
the mobile application hosting market
through its iAnywhere subsidiary, an
expansion of its portal technology divi-
sion, and a clear vision for its database
and application server businesses.

There are, however, reasons for cau-
tion. According to First Call Corp., a
company that tracks corporate earnings
reports, 146 companies already have
reported negative preannouncements of
fourth-quarter earnings. And the tech-
nology sector has seen an 11-point slash
in fourth-quarter earnings growth esti-
mates. But even First Call admits it is
difficult to predict what will happen in
the tech sector over the next few
months, as the reasons for drop in earn-
ings growth remain unclear.

And so, the baby boomers "let it ride." I

David Rubinstein is executive editor of
SD Times.

Are Developers Satisfied With
Wireless Development Tools?

EVANS DATA WATCH

Satisfaction Leve!rtl* Took

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[IX.

50%

fercett of Programmers

An integrated development environment is a set of tools usually available with a
single, unified user interface. As many as 35 percent of wireless-application
developers are satisfied with the tools available, while almost 50 percent said
they were merely adequate or needed improvement.

A wireless emulator allows a developer to see what an application might look
like on a wireless device without having to load the application and test it on an
actual mobile device. One-third of developers consider them to be satisfactory.
Out of the 68 percent of developers who use image tools for wireless, only
20 percent believe they are adequate.

Over 30 percent of wireless developers felt that testing and debugging tools are
satisfactory, while almost half thought they were adequate or needed improvement.
WAP gateway scaffolds are emulator gateways that allow developers to test
their applications to see how they might function via a WAP gateway (software
that processes communications between the microbrowser on mobile devices
and the Internet). Only 20 percent believe WAP gateway scaffolds are satisfacto-
ry, but almost 40 percent claimed never to have used them.

Syntax checkers verify the commands in a computer pro-
gram and allow the developer to see the errors in syntax with-
out actually having to run the application. While 42 percent are
currently satisfied with such tools, about the same number said
they were merely adequate or needed work.

Results indicate that less than half of wireless developers
are satisfied with the available tools. CttpqtlJHn. l\Miffi*tt±qpL

hrnrlfcrd

:•::•::•::•::•::•::•::•::•::•::•::•::•::•:

:•: :•: :•: :•: :•::•: :•: :•::•::•::•::•::•::•::•::•: :•: :•: :•: :•: :•: :•:

In its October issue, Forbes magazine listed
Serena Software Inc. sixth on its list of the
200 Best Small Companies in America. Its exec-
utives already had the cash to prove it. Presi-
dent Mark Woodward sold 50,000 shares at an
average of $42 per share on Sept. 21. Also on
that date, VPs Anthony G. Stayner and Vita Stri-
maitis sold 30,000 shares at $43 per share, VP
Igor Yasno sold 15,000 shares at $43, and CF0
Robert Pender sold 34,000 shares at an aver-
age of $42 per share.

At SilverStream Software Inc., VP Diane
Gordon bought 4,000 option-related shares at
$4 per share and sold 4,000 shares at $32.50
per share in a transaction recorded in mid-
October. Meanwhile, BEA Systems Inc. pres-
ident Sam Cece bought 12,000 option-related
shares at $5.69 per share and sold them at
$69.83 in a deal recorded in late October.

CALENDAR OF EVENTS

Testing & QA Techniques
Seminars Nov. 20-21

Toronto Colony Hotel, Toronto

$995 including courseware. Group discounts. Visit
Web site for additional dates and cities.
www.newinstruction.com

WebTek Nov. 27-29

The Toronto Board of Trade, Toronto

Seminar, conference and tutorials, $1,395; confer-
ence and tutorials, $1,295; conference only, $895;
tutorials only, $595.
www.interdoc.ca/conference
/webtek0TT2000

Future of Application
Development Summit Nov. 27-30
Renaissance Waverly, Atlanta

Four-day conference, $1,795.
www.dci.com/brochure/fadatl

Wireless DevCon 2000 Dec. 3-5
Doubletree Hotel, San Jose, CA

Two-day conference, $1,295; any one day $675;
night classes available.
www.wirelessdevcon2000.com

Future of Application
Development Summit Dec. 4-7
Marriott Hotel & Marina, San Diego

Four-day conference, $1,795.
www.dci.com/brochure/fadsd

LinuxWorld Jan. 30-Feb. 2, 2001

Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, New York

Full four-day conference passes, $875; one day,
$225; half-day tutorials, $275.
www.linuxworldexpo.com

Embedded Executive

Summit Feb. 4-7, 2001

La Costa Resort, Carlsbad, CA

Summit registration only, $2,195; all-inclusive pack-
ages available.
www.embedded.com/exec

Windows Embedded Developers
Conference Feb. 6-8, 2001

Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, Las Vegas

Pricing has not been announced.
www.WindowsEmbeddedDevCon.com

Internet Appliance

Workshop Feb. 20-21, 2001

San Jose Wyndham Hotel, San Jose, CA

Two-day conference including all events, $995; tuto-
rials only, $595; workshops only, $495; single tutor-
ial, $345; early bird discounts before Feb. 2.
www.netapplianceconf.com

Send news about upcoming events to
events@bzmedia.com.

KL Group is now Sitraka Software

A signat oi our new and strengthened commitment to the Javwwketplace.
KL Group has changed its name to Sitraka Software. What can you expect from
Sitraka? Innovative, highly reliable solutions, Best-of- breed products. Outstanding
professional services. And the ex per fence and Knowledge to ensure you reap the
tuJI advantage of Java technology in the enterprise environment.

Makers ol: JPiobe' JCTass™ Deploy Director""

sitraka

software

the Java' advantage

www.sitraka.com

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MERELY THAT IT DOESNT KNOW WHO B D0IHG n -

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You are in charge of a team. And the work your team does.
Staying on budget is critical. Staying on schedule is critical. So,

how do you make certain both of these things occur in every
business process? Manage your workflow effectively with tTrack™

workflow solutions on the Web. With tTrack, everyone on your
team shares the same information. So nothing is overlooked,

and nothing falls through the cracks. Visit our Web site
for in-depth details we wouldn't feel right squeezing in here.

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