|
By SD Times Editors
June 2, 2008
When the pages of history are rolled on top of one another, and the leaf marked “2007” is long buried beneath the folds, what ink will soak through to the pages beyond? The year that was may be remembered for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the final gasps of the housing bubble. Hardly a year of nobility.
However, for software developers, progress carried the day. Mobile developers finally understood the potential they held in their hands, thanks to the iPhone and Google's Android specification. BEA and Oracle agreed to make sweet love down by the San Francisco Bay. And GPL began to show its teeth, as the boys behind BusyBox defended their property rights.
As for project managers, they pushed forward, with forethought and purpose, into open-source projects, agile practices and distributed application life-cycle management. It was all about collaboration: social modeling, adaptive service-level agreements, dynamic service creation and everything—yes, everything—on the Web.
... Here then are the companies, tools and open-source projects that made December 2007 a far more productive and efficient time to code than January 2007:
Middleware
It's a services-based world; we're all just living in it. SOA has arrived. It's set up camp in your network and has begun to claim victims in the form of those terminal-based applications your users always hated. Now that those services are up and running, the promise of SOA is beginning to come true. But that doesn't mean you don't still need top-flight tools to help design, coordinate and deploy all those delicious consumables. Our finalists provide the best tools and systems for keeping track of all those services, and for pushing the obligation of design into the hands of the business people who can never communicate their needs properly. The best part of SOA is that those business folks get to do it themselves.
BEA
BPEL4People specifications
Interware
Lombardi
Mindreef
MuleSource
Nexaweb Technologies
TIBCO
WebMethods
WSO2
Test and QA
Every year, test and QA becomes just a little less people-centric and more automated. Our influencers know this well: They have made their names building batteries of bad inputs, malformed packets and fuzzy logic. This is the only place in software where making errors is the goal. With test software now capable of attacking code from almost any angle, software is becoming more reliable and easier to fix. And thanks to the burgeoning realm of in-IDE testing tools, your coders have no reason not to run their work through a gauntlet before checking it in.
Automated QA
CA
Coverity
HP
IBM
iTKO
Klocwork
Mindreef
Parasoft
Solstice Software
View Full Article and List of Winners
|
