iTunes is far more than a desktop music player and organizer: it is also a path through which over 300 million users have already installed Apple's open-source dynamic networking software, Bonjour. Has the time for spontaneous networking finally arrived?

A billion Java-enabled devices in use, and the many more non-PC devices through which billions of people will experience the Internet, represent a potentially big opportunity for developers. Yet, relatively few developers work on Java ME applications today. What makes it hard to develop for mobile Java devices?

Robert McIntosh wrote a thought-provoking piece on designing a scalable Web application without a database. I share three reasons why such a notion deserves some merit.

The alpha release of Apollo generated both excitement and healthy skepticism about Adobe's new client-side runtime. I decided to take a first-hand look at Apollo and summarize some of my findings in this blog post.

In addition to being a rich-client development toolkit that targets the Flash virtual machine, an interesting aspect of Flex is that it relies on code-generation to reduce the amount of code a developer has to write by hand.

Since we have limited time each day to learn new languages, language features, and APIs, we must decide where to focus our learning efforts.

Almost every program we write today will execute in a concurrent computing environment. But to what degree do developers really have to be aware that their programs run on concurrent hardware?

Dr. Jim Gray, a father of the relational database, transaction processing, data mining, and a long list of other inventions we use every day, went on a short solo boat trip last Sunday and have not yet returned. With just a few minutes of your time, you can help find him.

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of many high-quality tools that help enforce a consistent coding style. But how effective are these tools in practice, and how do they fit into your process of enforcing consistency in your source code?

Software is become an increasingly important consumer of Web content. When software and humans are both intended targets of a Web-accessible resource, should you provide separate URLs for that resource based on a client's preferred content type, or a single URL and rely on server-based content negotiation to serve up the appropriate content?

At SD Forum 2006, two eBay architects presented an overview how eBay's architecture handles a billion page requests a day, and how that architecture evolved from a few Perl scripts to 15,000 application instances running in eight data centers. One conclusion from the presentation is that scaling is only in part a question of architecture.

In a recent series of conversations, Dan North, Martin Fowler, and Marc McNeill explore what is possibly the fifth Agile principle: valuing outcomes over features. They also discuss the differences between use-cases, user journeys, and features.

Most of us wish for more time, bigger budgets, and more help in completing projects. Could that be wishing for the very things that push us further away from success? Should we, instead, wish for shorter deadlines, less people to work with, and even for smaller budgets?

While various Web frameworks devote lots of attention to making complex systems easier to build, most frameworks default to using a flavor of XML to specify how those complex systems are configured. A few projects started to innovate in the configuration space, but the requirements for an ideal configuration solution are still to be defined.

Code can be perfect, and also perfectly useless at the same time. Getting requirements right is as important as making sure that requirements are implemented correctly. How do you verify that users' requirements are addressed in the code you're working on?