Gamers need to play with others
The games industry needs to train people who can work in teams, collaborate with marketing staff and generally have people skills, noted speakers on a keynote panel at the recent Game Developers Conference, Europe. The days of the bedroom programmer are over, said Jez San, founder of Argonaut Games PLC in Edgware, England. Smaller development companies working in their basements aren’t likely to survive and the industry is likely to consolidate from today’s 400 to 500 companies to around 50 over the next two years, he said.
Multi-platform dev tool gets updated
Revolution recently announced the availability of Revolution 2.1, the latest update to the multi-platform development tool for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Unix. Revolution says its built-in support for databases, XML, Internet protocols and report-generation multimedia makes developing faster. Revolution 2.1 includes dozens of new features, such as support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, ODBC and Valentina.
AppScan focused on security
Sanctum Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., last month unveiled new versions of its vulnerability testing tool that are targeted at quality assurance engineers and those who perform software security audits of Web services deployments, the company said. AppScan 4.0 QA Edition and AppScan 4.0 Audit Edition will fill out Sanctum’s suite of application vulnerability testing tools, joining AppScan DE (developer edition). The new products are targeted at companies that are investing in Web services technology.
BEA inks deal with XML specialist
BEA Systems Inc. and Altova Inc., producer of the XMLSpy 5 development environment, inked a partnership recently to integrate XMLSpy 5 with BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1. The combination of Altova’s XML development tool and BEA’s J2EE development environment is designes to give developers a solution for building XML applications and Web services.