(Doug Tillman) Databases are everywhere. In IT, you can’t build a substantial application without providing tables to store the data that the application will rely on (properties, configuration settings, etc.) and process. Maintaining a clear understanding of the role the columns play in your tables

(Sean Hull) In a previous article on this topic, “PHP and ASP.NET Go Head to Head,” I discussed PHP and ASP.NET, compared and contrasted the two technologies, and provided some food for thought about choosing the best technology for a development project. That discussion sparked quite a debate.

(Paul Meagher) Information theory (IT) is a foundational subject for computer scientists, engineers, statisticians, data miners, biologists, and cognitive scientists. Unfortunately, PHP currently lacks software tools that would make it easy to explore and/or use IT concepts and methods to solve data

(Jeff Hanson) The ‘impedance mismatch’ between relational databases’ tabular orientation and object-oriented Java’s hierarchical one is a perennial problem for which the Java world has several good solution offerings. The third in a three-part series, this article examines the ways that JDO atte

(Ruben Heetebrij) Applications of XML have been integrated into .NET to such an extent that XML is hardly a buzzword anymore. Microsoft, as you probably know, has taken XML into the core of its .NET framework. Not only is XML a generally accepted format for the exchange of data, it’s also used to st

(Keith Brown) As I write this column, version 2.0 of the Microsoft .NET Framework is at Beta 1. When I got my bits, I hacked together a little program to dump all of the public members of all public types in the entire Framework and ran it on version 1.1 as well as 2.0. I then used WINDIFF.EXE to co

(Laurence Moroney) In recent months it’s become apparent that every computer system, regardless of operating system or programming language, bears a security risk. All computer software exposes attack surfaces to viruses and worms, and it is only a matter of time before they get attacked. Most r

(George Shepherd) Web applications are different from applications that run in homogenous environments because they send their output to all kinds of platforms and Web browsers. Some browsers support client-side scripting, some support XHTML, and still others have limited screen real estate. So

(Daniele Pagano) Eiffel is a purely object-oriented language that is lean, original, consistent, and scalable. And now it’s been ported to .NET. (R)

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo!