Partial Eclipse: Yesterday Sun announced that they would not be joining the Eclipse project. At least not now. » Read more

Tripped up by Apache XML-RPC not encoding the string type: Caught out by an innocent looking xml tag! — Alan WIlliamson

IBM and BEA: Are they thumbing their noses at the JCP?: IBM and BEA are working within the JCP process - they need the JCP. — Richard Monson-Haefel

Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History
Martin Fowler points to a recent IEEE article by Craig Larman and Victor R Basili on Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History . The article is available as a Dowloadable pdf and traces the history of IID to the 1930s and 1940s. The more modern examples include the primary avionics software built by NASA in the late 1970s and the writings of Fred Brooks and the duo of David Parnas and Paul Clements in the 1980s. The article concludes that "even though the value of IID is well known among literate, experienced software engineers, some commercial organizations, consulting companies, and standards bodies still promote a document-driven single-pass sequential life cycle as the ideal."

Java vs. .Net security
Denis Piliptchouk is writing a four part article comparing Java vs. .Net security. In the first part he looks at configurability and three aspects of code containment: verification, application isolation, and language features. Denis concludes that "Java offers a lot of advantages with its configurability. When it comes to code containment, both platforms have pretty strong offerings, with .NET having slightly more choices and being more straightforward to use."