Database tools vendor Embarcadero Technologies has snapped up Borland Software's unwanted tools subsidiary CodeGear for $23m - $127m less than initially sought.

Browser maker Opera has released an early version of a tool to help developers debug web pages. It hopes Opera Dragonfly will assist developers in making the experience of surfing the net consistent across web-enabled mobiles, desktops, and consoles while prompting the adoption of open standards.

Microsoft has pulled an apparently rogue internal marketing project that sat quietly, but not unnoticed, on the same servers as its main UK website for at least a fortnight.

JavaOne Sun today announced the yet-to-launch JavaFX programming language will gather data on end-users activities to help developers monetize software, by selling ads for instance.

CommunityOne The relationship between business, vendors and coders has been tested at a Sun Microsystems conference in San Francisco intended to express oneness with open source.

Book extract, part four Redundancy, testability and readability are key to building simple and maintainable code. In the fourth extract from his book, Emergent Design: The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development, published by Addison Wesley, Scott Bain tackles the problems and principles involved.

PHP is the latest language getting the NetBeans treatment, with a PHP version of Sun Microsystems' open-source environment hitting early access today.

The first supported first version of Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris, AKA Project Indiana, makes its debut today with additional backing from Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud.

Microhoo Microsoft and Yahoo! have pulled their chairs back up to the proverbial negotiating table.

In surreptitiously slipping Safari onto Windows by way of the Apple Updater, Steve Jobs and his minions have tripled the browser's market share.

Project Watch: Microsoft 2008 OK, so choosing and installing the hardware - that was easy. I wish I could say the same for the software.

On the face of it all I had to do was install the beta version of Windows Server 2008, the production version of Visual Studio 2008 and the beta SQL Server 2008. Sorry, by beta of course I mean community technology preview. It appears that Microsoft has learned that renaming can be used to shed bad associations.

Linux developer Hans Reiser's conviction for first-degree murder has re-ignited the debate about the future of Linux's various file systems.

In this post, Glen Stampoultzis posts a very interesting and clever sequence of steps by which he converts a piece of Java code into idiomatic Groovy code. I thought it was a nice article, so I'll do a very short spin on it: taking Glen's final Groovy code and converting it into idiomatic Ruby.

Adobe Systems is throwing open its Flash and AIR file formats to speed delivery of Rich Internet Applications to billions of mobile devices with its tools and players.

Qumranet, a rather small software company, wants to make a very large play in the virtualization market with a new product. It's looking for Solid ICE to go up against the desktop virtulization wares from VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and a host of start-ups.

Sony Ericsson is planning to offer developers the opportunity to embed Flash Lite applications inside J2ME midlets, in the hope that two mobile phone application platforms will prove better than one.

This bloke once walked into a meeting I was attending and introduced a new word to my vocabulary: "Hafta", as in: "We hafta do it this way because..."

I've been trying to shake it off ever since.

SpringSource has picked up on the trend for modular servers with the planned beta release today of the SpringSource Application Platform, its Java application server.

Interop 2008 A decidedly downbeat Bob Muglia took centre stage at Interop this afternoon to preach the gospel of interoperability according to Microsoft.

In the 50 plus acquisitions that IBM has completed over the past five years, none have taken longer to close than the long-awaited Telelogic deal. Nonetheless, the bottom line of the deal is that IBM’s Rational brand will break past the software development lifecycle ghetto into the realm of developing complex products that you can see, touch, and be transported in (think: consumer electronics, automobiles, aircraft).

Microsoft has poached a 17-year Adobe Systems veteran in a sign of where the company is placing its technology bets.

Hot on the heels of a successful 6.0 release, which we covered here and here, Sun Microsystems has delivered NetBeans 6.1, just in time for the company's annual JavaOne and CommunityOne events in San Francisco, California.

Microsoft has recruited database guru David DeWitt to head up a new database research lab. Based at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where DeWitt was until recently professor of computing sciences, the new lab will focus on advanced data-management techniques.

Review What is the point of JBuilder, when you can simply use Eclipse? That has been the marketing challenge for CodeGear ever since it decided to scrap its home-grown Java integrated development environment and replace it with a new product based on the open-source Eclipse tools platform.

Sun Microsystems is in talks with two more Linux projects to ensure its open source software and tools are delivered straight into the hands of developers.

Interview Well, here I am just a few miles from Yahoo!' headquarters and Microsoft's Silicon Valley residence. It's Sunday, and I've yet to hear screams from either camp. So, it seems that Microsoft's call to action deadline around the Yahoo! buy is passing with a lack of fanfare. Yahoo! may surprise us yet by leaking something to the New York Times or perhaps Steve Ballmer will call up his buds at the Wall Street Journal, but in lieu of such actual movements, I'm left wanting.

Sun Microsystems has released a fresh update for Solaris, but the 10 5/08 injection may appeal most to users running older generations of the operating system.

Ruby implementors, including Ruby creator Yukihiro Matusomoto, held their first design meeting this week to hash out niggles with the scripting language.

The relational database - a mainstay of enterprise computing for 25 years - has been under siege. New approaches to data storage are threatening the RDBMS and precipitating what database guru Mike Stonebraker and others described recently as a "group grope" to find a new database engine.

Prominent FreeBSD developer Kip Macy has been charged with waging a campaign of terror against people renting apartments in a six-unit building he owns. He stands accused of cutting out floor supports to retaliate against a tenant who went to court to keep from being evicted.

Yahoo! has rolled out a limited preview of its Search Monkey platform, a way for third-party web developers to "enhance the functionality, appearance and usefulness" of Yahoo! Search results.

The controversial Affero general public license could get an unexpected boost from Ubuntu developer Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's chief executive, has said AGPL is "a strong candidate" for the eventual open source release of Launchpad, Canonical's developer collaboration tool.

PHP is one of the most commonly used scripting languages on the web - about 35 per cent of websites use PHP. Databases, meanwhile, are undergoing something of a renaissance thanks to web development.

The guy leading Microsoft's port of Ruby to .NET has warned of a potential Balkanization of Ruby, which could impair the language's success.

Stripped-down operating systems made specifically for virtual machine appliances have tickled the fancy of the Linux collective, and these types of systems are keeping commercial distributors busy pushing out their versions of the concept.

Sun Microsystems is planning demonstrations but little by way of final code for its JavaFX rich-internet application challenge to Microsoft and Adobe Systems at next month’s JavaOne.