QCon 2008 Age mellows us all and the co-inventor of extreme programming (XP) and an early Smalltalk advocate, Kent Beck, is apparently no exception.

As the celebrated 2.0 incarnation of the web lures an increasing number of organizations into the cloud, enterprise IT managers are warming to the quick-and-dirty capabilities of PHP, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and Ruby for developing database-driven web apps. And a new generation of tools is elevating scripters to the status of go-to guys for trimming development backlogs.

SD West 2008 Neil Ford's Software Development West presentation, 10 Ways to Improve Your Code, was aimed at Java programmers, but Ford's "advanced code hygiene" discussion had wisdom for coders of many stripes.

Ever since the dawning of structured software development, arguments have been put forth that, if we only architected (fill in the blank) entity relationships, objects, components, processes, or services, software development organizations would magically grow more productive because they could now systematically reuse their work. The fact that reuse has been such a Holy Grail for so many years reveals how elusive it has always been.

Mix 08 Microsoft Silverlight team member Eugene Osovetsky has explained to a packed Mix 08 session how Silverlight 2.0, released as beta on Wednesday, interacts with external data and web services.

There's an audible rhythm to development tools. Modern integrated development environments (IDEs) go like this: tap, tap, bam! Diagramming tools go like this: point, click, pause, point, click, pause...

The recent Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, California, is a surreal experience.

Everyone agrees that green computing is a great idea. Well, everyone but software makers.

Review Windows Server 2008, due for its official launch today, is a major upgrade for Microsoft's server platform, the first for around five years. Requiring a graphical user interface (GUI) on a server operating system always seemed odd, even back in 1993 when Microsoft released Windows NT 3.1.

VMware continues to barrage customers with more and more management products.

The software maker has used its European user conference this week to start early discussions around VMware Lifecycle Manager and Site Recovery Manager. These packages will join the Manager family that already includes Lab Manager and Stage Manager. All we need next is Manager Manager.

The WS-* stack was conceived and driven forward by IBM and Microsoft, with other vendors cooperating on specifications where they had relevant expertise (Verisign on Security, BEA Systems on transactions and so on). The design philosophy was for a relatively simple and efficient basic mode of operation, with optional features added independently of each other.

More recently, though, something else has taken root among developers building distributed applications: Representational State Transfer (REST). As ever with technology, the debate over WS-* and REST has settled on the death of one technology and the rise of the other. The truth, though, lies somewhere in between.

Hands on The Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture provides a useful three-tier pattern for building software, as MVC patterns decouple the graphical user interface (GUI) from the application logic.

If you're just thinking about software-as-a-service, then you're a slack-jawed rube. You can have an entire platform-as-a-service with a little effort.

Bungee Labs this week opened up access to its PaaS, which the company calls Bungee Connect. Customers can turn to Bungee Connect for software development and then host their applications on Bungee's hardware. End-to-end software flowgasm? You betcha.

Contrary to popular opinion, programmers are not a dry and humourless bunch. What old mainframer can fail to chortle at seeing the graffiti legend "Data error rules, OC7"?

Myths and legends It seems there is a disquieting trend in IT: concepts are getting steadily vaguer, and claims harder to verify.

Take web services, for instance. The very name is disingenuous. They are services of a kind, but they don't have much to do with the web. Their key protocol is SOAP, which stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. Well, it is a protocol, all right. But it isn't simple, and it doesn't access objects.

Having worked in the data-management field for more than ten years, the most common complaint I've heard voiced by data architects is: "Why don't we get more visibility, respect, and funding?" Data managers and architects often feel like second-class citizens compared to their counterparts programming new applications, using new tools and techniques.

10th birthday interview In an industry characterized by cold logic and technology, the contributions of real people often get lost.

Publicly, great things are seen to be achieved by impersonal corporations and institutions - rarely individuals. In an effort to put this right as far as XML is concerned, Tim Bray, Sun Microsystems' director of web technologies and one of the original architects of XML, has published a detailed - and often moving - blog to celebrate the tenth birthday of XML and the people who made it happen.

People sometimes do a double take when I talk about analysis, design and agility in the same sentence. And if I mention UML and agility, they spin round several times and fall over. At the expense of inviting a flurry of email replies for posing a rhetorical question, I have to ask: why?

Simplicity in software is, I believe, more than just a noble aim; it is essential for successful software projects. However, simplicity should not be assumed just because one particular technology or methodology is being used.

Reg Dev is looking for article submissions on the theory and practice of building and managing software, and of running application development projects.

What you really get on those Microsoft, Novell and Cisco courses...

Microsoft has published an article on speeding up Vista, aimed at general users.

It's not too bad. Here's the summary:

With speculation building that Microsoft will bring Windows 7 forward by a year, ostensibly to staunch the loss of the Vista weary and Vistaphobes to alternative operating systems, now is a good time to look at the state of development tools for Linux.

When I was young I built up a collection of system error messages. Ok, look, it's not as sad as collecting stamps! It is? Really? Oh well, never mind. Anyway, my recent piece about Borland putting rude words in Quattro Pro got me thinking it was time to revisit that collection.

Hewlett-Packard isn't known for software governance, but after years of sifting and sorting through its own systems for non-compliant code, the hardware vendor wants to share its experience with developers and foster construction of tools for tracking free and open source software (FOSS) permeating corporate systems.

VMware this week let loose yet another management product, which pushes the virtualization specialist deeper into the data center. Say 'hello' to the beta of VMware Stage Manager.

I have lived through re-orgs, outsourcing and off-the-shelf applications being shoehorned into niche markets by over-zealous management. The latest trend in software, though, is for user-generated mashups.

Recently Serena Software announced its user-friendly mashup tool. According to Serena, its tools will "let non-IT staff take care of tedious, line-of-business Office applications". I screamed. Serena is not the only IT vendor to make such noises.

It's always a good time for a new paradigm in software development and one of the latest is concept programming. Originated as a private project by Hewlett Packard (HP) software engineer Christophe de Dinechin in 2000, interest in concept programming is on the rise following publication of an updated description late last year.

Teams can get stuck wallowing in trivial details when modeling in UML. Sweating such details can lead to frustration and premature, and rash, decisions on using UML later in a project. But how do you know when a particular nuance is inconsequential and when it's an important item to specify?

In the age of Web 2.0, data is a strategic differentiator. Tim O’Reilly, considered the father of Web 2.0, has claimed “data is the Intel inside” of this revolution. Companies that control a particularly unique or desirable set of information drive more customers to their sites.

Book extract, part 4 In this, the final part of our series of experts from Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML: Theory and Practice Matt Stephens and Doug Rosenberg show you how to draw lean, purposeful sequence diagrams that are driven from the use cases and preliminary design.

One of the goals behind UML is to help stamp out ambiguity in specifications and designs. This is a good and noble goal, but UML is nobbled by its own nobility.

I was talking with a fellow IT professional recently who was saying that you should "program simply" but "design with complexity". I do understand the point that he was trying to make - that is, during the design stage take into account the problems in your domain so that these have been worked out as much as possible before the coding starts.

Book extract, part 3 To get from use cases to detailed design (and then to code), you need to link your use cases to objects. The technique we describe in this chapter, robustness analysis, helps you to bridge the gap from analysis to design by doing exactly that.

IBM Rational has released an Eclipse-based tools package taking the unit back to its roots serving embedded software in an area it's calling “complex” systems – otherwise known as weapons systems.

It shouldn't be a surprise as to why IT's automation needs often fall to the bottom of the stack: because most companies are not in the technology business, investments in people, processes, or technologies that are designed to improve IT only show up as expenses on the bottom line. And so while IT is the organization that is responsible for helping the rest of the business adopt various automated solutions, IT often goes begging when it comes to investing in its own operational improvements.