Month: April 2006

IBM Rational recently had a booth at the Games Developers Conference, and Grady Booch also was on hand to present at the conference.

With ever increasing complexity of new games being developed, and increasing popularity of massively-multiplayer online games, games developers are starting to find they are running into the same issues that are encountered elsewhere in the software industry. In particular, designing and building software for supporting tens of thousands of concurrent users, and becoming more common, software developement with distributed teams across different geographic locations.

IBM see this as an opportunity to get involved in the games development industry, to introduce processes already found effective in enterprise software development.

News.com has an interesting article this morning about the fact that since development on the Palm OS for Palm devices has slowed over the last couple of years, new multimedia-rich applications are being developed for Windows Mobile, Symbian and Java-supporting phones instead of Palm OS, which has not yet been developed with features to support multimedia hungry applications which are appearing elsewhere on other devices (such as streaming TV and movies, and music files with embedded DRM).

The last new version of the Palm OS was released 2 years ago. Access, the company that bought PalmSource, plans to shift it’s OS development to a Linux-kernel based version of the OS by next year.

Since Oracle bought the companies behind two of the major storage engines used by MySQL (BerkeleyDB from Sleepycat, and InnoDB from Innobase), people have been wondering what this meant long term for the survival of MySQL itself.

At the MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara that started this week, MySQL have put to rest any fears with annoucements that they are providing the pluggable database engine API to allow any company and open-source community efforts to develop new engines for the database.

New engines have already been announced – Solid Information was the first company to announce the release of it’s OLTP storage engine, and others are expected to make announcements at the conference this week.

MySQL have also announced their own engine, code-names ‘Falcon’, which is based on technology by Jim Starkey.

Panasonic have released the first Blu-Ray DVD burner drive for PCs – more info on the fosfor gadgets site here.