ZeroMQ (or ØMQ) is an open source messaging library supported by the iMatix Corporation.  It has been described as messaging middleware, TCP on steroids, and now is just "a new layer on the networking stack."  Basically it allows you to design a complex communication system simply and programmatically by giving you a special socket interface.  Nicholas Piël recently introduced this...

Since the last beta, Ruby on Rails 3.0 has had over 842 commits by 125 developers.  That's the level of polish you can expect when you download the first release candidate for RoR 3, which is now available.  The fixes have focused on bringing Rails 3 performance up to the levels of version 2.3.  Other changes in the first RC include support for shallow routes (for shorter URLs), support for...

The Transform View pattern involves a view mechanism that processes data structures one element at the time, and transforms them into an end-user representation like HTML.The Transform View usually takes the shape of a view class (or function) with these characterizing traits:

Yet another great developer has left Oracle this week.  Bryan Cantrill, the co-inventor of DTrace, gave a heartfelt farewell to the company he joined in 1996.  In his praise of the pre-Oracle Sun Microsystems, Cantrill also has a few well-veiled criticisms likely aimed at the new culture under Oracle.  Statements like: "[Sun] fostered an environment where the OS [Open Source] was viewed...

Firebug is one of the most famous extensions for the Firefox web browser. In the past years, the functionalities offered by this plugin alone sold Firefox as the platform for web development over Internet Explorer (besides the respect of W3C standards that characterized Firefox). At that time, Chrome had not been invented yet and when it was released, it incorporated some of the innovations of...

Source hosting site, GitHub, reached more than one million projects over the weekend, according to their VP of R&D.  Around 60% of projects are full repositories while 40% are "gists" - short code snippets.  GitHub launched in February of 2008.SEC Says Dell Stayed Profitable Through Intel Kickbacks

The next version of PHP 5 has been released with over 100 bugfixes, some of which are security related.  PHP 5.3.3 may owe some of these bugfixes to the PHP Month of Security in May, which has been run by Stefan Esser for three years.  In PHP 5.3.3, methods with the same name as the last element of a namespaced class name will no longer be treated as constructor. This change doesn't affect...

JBoss delivered the final version of its Hibernate 3.5.4 maintenance release this week along with the first beta of 3.6, which adds some new features.  First of all, 3.6 will drop support for JDK 1.4.  It will also merge some modules into the core (specifically hibernate-jmx and hibernate-annotations).  Several limitations will also be fixed in Hibernate 3.6.KDevelop Releases 1st Patch for 4.0

JetBrains pulled out a hat-trick this week with a triple release of its flagship IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, its CI server, TeamCity, and its lightweight Python IDE, PyCharm.  TeamCity and IntelliJ got small version updates, while PyCharm had a bigger milestone with its first 1.0 Beta release.  Lets look at the highlights for each release:IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.3

The newly released Lightspark 0.4.2 is another alternative implementation of the Flash Player (others include Smokescreen and Gordon) that is designed to be efficient on current hardware.  Changes in this release include plugin support for Chrome, and support for Firefox's OOPP mode.  Just remember that the proliferation of these SWF players wouldn't be possible if Adobe hadn't made the...

There's reason to celebrate today as SQLite 3.7 is released in GA.  The lightweight, ubiquitous database includes some game-changing new features, which have arrived about two years after the 3.6 beta came out.  Today's release will feature nested transactions, constrained foreign keys, write-ahead logs, and more.

In the last week I've seen two surveys of the IT industry posted that indicate two things:  1. Java ain't dead.  2.  Developers continue to be the most sought-after IT staff - Java/J2EE developers in particular.

In this series we have seen two Web presentation patterns so far:

The first of JBoss RichFaces 4.0's monthly milestones was released this week.  RichFaces 4.0 is going to provide full support for the Java EE 6 JSF 2.0 specification, while the current version, 3.3.3, has partial JSF 2.0 support and partial backwards support.  The first milestone includes an improved CDK, New components (jQuery, togglePanel, etc.), and named queue support for the queue...

Adobe Flex 4 provides a lot of new features including a component architecture, CSS improvements, MX backward compatibility, new state mechanisms, and a new graphic markup language called FXG. Along with the Flex 4 SDK, Adobe Flash Builder 4 has improvements to help with developing with Flex 4. Migrating Flex 3 applications to Flex 4 can seem like a large task.

At today's annual ASF members meeting, the attendees voted for the next board of directors.  Returning board members include Doug Cutting, Roy T. Fielding, Shane Curcuru, Greg Stein, and Jim Jagielski the chairman.  New members include Bertrand Delacretaz (served from '08 to '09), IBM's Sam Ruby, Google's Noirin Shirley, and Amazon's Henri Yandell.Project Northstar Takes IBM's Portal Sofware in...

We have seen that Page Controllers (or, with their alternate intent and name, Action Controllers), are the basic units that get to respond to HTTP requests. But since we have many Page Controllers, how can we distinguish between them and make everyone answer a different type of HTTP request?

Spring Roo 1.1 M2 and STS 2.3.3 M2 were simultaneously released this week with hundreds of bugfixes and enhancements since milestone one.  Spring Roo 1.1 M2 has increased its performance by a factor of three and gained better GWT support by eliminating the GWT 2.1 "bikeshed" JAR.  There is also integration test support for GAE and improved shell usability.  One of the biggest new...

In this week's edition of 'Media Frenzy Over Basically Nothing,' Apple finally called a press conference to end all the crazy talk about possible recalls and "Antennagate".  Apple CEO Steve Jobs threw up some stats during their presentation showing that 0.55% of iPhone 4 customers had called about the antenna issues and 1.7% had been returned (compared to the 6% of 3GS phones returned...

The Motorola Droid X phone was released this week, but a lot of reports said that hacking the phone would break the hardware as a secuity measure in the eFuse tampering-countermeasure system.  In fact, Engadget found that the phone just shuts down until you re-install the proper software, which makes it difficult but not impossible to jailbreak.