InfoQ Homepage Architecture Content on InfoQ
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Interview on Wolfram|Alpha, a Computational Knowledge Engine
Wolfram|Alpha was launched two months ago. It is time to review a few frequently asked questions: What is the relationship between Wolfram|Alpha and Google? How would Wolfram|Alpha position itself in the market? To what extent is Wolfram|Alpha a Semantic Web search engine? And how could Wolfram| Alpha make profit in the market? An interview with Xiang Wang, Wolfram Research, China.
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HyperSpace, a Browsing Environment with a Small Footprint
Phoenix Technologies has created HyperSpace, a small OS that supports only browsing. HyperSpace precedes Google Chrome OS which is supposed to offer the same functionality with some differences.
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Scott Leberknight on Polyglot Persistence
The data persistence solutions in software development have come a long way in the recent years. At the recent Lone Star Software Symposium, Scott Leberknight talked about "Polyglot Persistence" trend where the developers have a choice of different database products like Amazon SimpleDB, Google Bigtable, and CouchDB to choose the data persistence solution.
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Microsoft Is Contributing 20,000 Lines of Code to the Linux Kernel
Microsoft is contributing 3 Linux device drivers, 20,000 lines of code, to the Linux kernel 2.6.32 under GPLv2 license.
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“Good” Lessons on How To Fail a RIA Project
In a presentation called "Ten Ways to Ensure RIA Failure", Anthony Franco, president of EffectiveUI, gives 10 pieces of advice to those who want their RIA project to fail. Gerd Waloszek, SAP AG, wrote "18 Golden Rules for Bad User Interfaces."
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Comparing Ajax Frameworks
This news item reframes the question of how and why to select an AJAX framework or toolkit to reflect contemporary applications and points to both a selection criterion matrix and a Web site that provides critical information useful for making this important decision.
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Call Native Code From Your Android Applications
Responding to a call from developers, the Android Native Developer Kit (NDK) now supports calling native code in the Dalvik virtual machine. CPU-intensive operations that don't allocate much memory may benefit from increased performance and the ability to reuse existing code. Some example applications are signal processing, intensive physics simulations, and some kinds of data processing.
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A Type System for Scala Actors to Enforce Race Safety Without Sacrificing Performance
Philipp Haller and Martin Odersky introduce a type system that enables safe massage transfer in Scala actors. Formalized as an extension of the EPFL Scala compiler, “Object Capability Types” system, based on capability checking and external uniqueness, enforces race safety without sacrificing performance and removes significant limitations on message shape imposed by existing approaches.
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Sun Shareholders Approve Oracle Acquisition
Sun Microsystems' shareholders voted on Thursday to approve the company's acquisition by Oracle, but not by a wide margin.
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Should We Rely on Language Constraints or Responsibility?
Bruce Eckel, Michael Feathers, Niclas Nilsson, Keith Braithwaite, and others on the question: should languages be fully flexible, allowing the developers to tweak them as they like, and trusting they will be responsible in their work, or should there be clear constraints set in the language from its design phase to avoid mistakes that create bad code, hard to maintain or to read?
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Cross-platform Development – Lessons Learned from Banshee/Mono
In a Scott Hanselman interview, Aaron Bockover of Novell talks about the challenges to create Banshee, a cross-platform application built in C# on Mono for Linux, Max OS X and Windows.
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Workflow Engine – To Build or Not to Build One?
A new post by Bernd Rücker discusses whether it makes sense to write your own workflow engine or time and money are best spent on learning and using a commercial or open source implementation.
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Parties Fail to Agree on the HTML 5 Video Codec
Ian Hickson, the editor of the HTML 5 Specification, has recently removed the required codecs from the video and audio tags of the respective draft standard citing difficulties in reaching consensus among major companies involved in distributing video and audio content on the web.
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Presentation: Three Years of Real-World Ruby
Martin Fowler talks about ThoughtWorks's experience with using Ruby on client projects for the past three years, and the creation of a Ruby-based product 'Mingle'.
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4 Office Applications Will Be on the Web: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote
Microsoft wants to take Office 2010 to the web offering some lightweight Office applications running inside the browser.