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Software Development

I have to admit I did a double-take at that chapter title, which leads off Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw’s Exploiting Software—How to Break Code (Addison-Wesley, 2004). The book explores how attackers break into our programs and why tools like firewalls, intrusion detection systems and antivirus programs so often fail to defeat these attacks. Hoglund and McGraw provide us with details of real attacks, to better inform our efforts to frustrate them.

In a related vein, security experts Ed Skoudis and Lenny Zeltser have given us Malware: Fighting Malicious Code (Prentice Hall PTR, 2003), a comprehensive compendium of sick and twisted evil code. The authors start with history and taxonomy, which is a good thing, since it provides a mental skeleton on which to hang the rest of the information in the book’s 636 pages. If you’re still fuzzy on the distinction between a worm and a root kit, Malware will give you the skinny.

Subsequent chapters explore worms, “malicious mobile code,” back doors, root kits and exotic new phyla, with examples from real-world exploits. My favorite? Skoudis’s description of his live Web seminar, during which an attendee used one of his cross-site scripting examples to crack the host site and announce his success to the audience. “Then, as you might expect,” Skoudis notes wryly, “I received hundreds more dialog boxes” as the other attendees tried the trick.

Exploiting Software’s list price is $49.99; Malware costs $44.99.

—Rick Wayne

SlickEdit Syzygy

No question, the Eclipse IDE is hot. A 2003 Jolt Award finalist, the highly extensible, open-source development platform is popular with developers right out of the box. Interestingly, though, it’s also popular with tool vendors, who want to leverage the Eclipse platform (and mindshare), and so build Eclipse-based versions of their own products.

The folks who make the Jolt Award-winning SlickEdit programmer’s editor/IDE haven’t been sleeping through the trend: Their Eclipse editor plug-in offers programmers the sweet features of SlickEdit in the Eclipse environment. Now, they’ve jumped on the platform bandwagon as well, with a purpose-built extended Eclipse called SlickEdit Studio.

[click for larger image] SlickEdit Studio’s context-sensitive code-completion outshines the out-of-the-box Eclipse.

As SlickEdit users know, the editor supports multiple languages, and I mean multiple. (Though I’m still waiting for that built-in Ruby support, folks.) Java and C++ are the stars, with context-sensitive code-completion help that really outshines out-of-the-box Eclipse. For example, when you enter an object’s name and a dot, the IDE pops up not just candidate method names, but complete signatures, including comments about the parameters. Similarly, the “vanilla” version of Eclipse offers a visual-differencing feature, but SlickEdit Studio’s is even slicker.

SlickEdit Studio is available now for Windows; a Linux version is planned by midyear. Pricing starts at $849, including one year of e-mail, telephone and update support.

SlickEdit Inc., 3000 Aerial Center Pkwy., Ste. 120, Morrisville, NC 27560, Tel: (919) 473-0070, Fax: (919) 473-0080.

—R.W.

Gimme a GUI

[click for larger image] Eclipse gets a WYSIWYG GUI builder.

Eclipse developers have really missed WYSIWYG GUI builder tools; after all, they’re old hat for users of Borland’s JBuilder, Microsoft’s Visual Studio or Sun’s NetBeans. Now Eclipse is getting one, too. The Visual Editor for Eclipse was at version 0.5 at press time; 1.0 should be available when you read this. Originally IBM’s Visual Editor for Java, the Visual Editor project is to support both the Simple Widget Toolkit (SWT) and Java Swing upon the 1.0 release. As for other languages, according to the project’s website, the IBM codebase was selected precisely because the team felt it was the best option for eventual multilingual support. But as the documentation delicately phrases it, “Nobody has stepped forward to contribute this support.”

The editor lets you do the standard stuff: select bean components from a palette, drop them onto a canvas, size and align them. Introspection supports a property editor, so you can pick things like layout managers and border styles. For existing GUI codebases, 0.5 recognizes VisualAge for Java code patterns and reflects them in the WYSIWYG presentation; work is in progress on JBuilder and NetBeans.

Find the Eclipse Visual Editor Project here.

—R.W.

Jump-Starting Pen Apps

Want to upgrade to a Tablet PC? Motion Computing is offering ISVs a $400 discount on its M1300 Tablet PC bundle, which includes Intel Centrino mobile technology running at 1GHz, a 20GB hard drive and 256MB of memory.

To qualify, developers need to e-mail TDK@motioncomputing.com—for more details, go to Motion Computing’s website—and describe what kind of software development they’re doing, their company and customers, and include their website address. Once Motion determines the developer’s legitimacy, it provides a $400 discount toward the purchase price and points her to the Microsoft tablet SDK and Microsoft support forums, sample code and necessary documentation. If a developer creates a product using these tools, Motion will help with co-marketing activities such as providing the application to Motion’s field sales group, showing it at trade shows and so on.

“Motion Computing wants to be a leader in encouraging the development of the next generation of Tablet PC productivity tools,” says CEO Scott Eckert, “especially in healthcare, field sales and service, government and education.” To date, Motion has sold about 300 kits and has devoted six employees to the program.

Motion Computing, 9433 Bee Caves Rd., Bldg. 1, Ste. 250, Austin, TX 78733, Tel: (866) 682-2538. —Rosalyn Lum

Way, Way Wireless

One by one, cables have been disappearing from that mare’s nest at the back of our computers. Powerline Ethernet eliminates the separate network cable (and its comcomitant Cat-5 wiring in the wall), XGA over Bluetooth obviates the monitor wire, but that big fat black 115 VAC cable still ties us to the wall—even laptop batteries give only a few hours’ respite. Now, though, a company called TeslaNet Power Technologies has taken the next logical step. “We’ve simply taken the Powerline Ethernet concept,” says chief scientist and CEO Nikola Tesla, “and extended it to the 802.11 market segment.” It’s the obvious answer, but human factors issues have kept products off the shelves—until TeslaNet and its patented technology. “With the latest research, visceral induction heating and mutagenesis are clearly issues of the past,” proclaims Tesla.

The advantages are obvious—now you can adopt a completely mobile working style, anywhere within reach of an access point, and you don’t have to settle for low-power processors! The next step? “Think Gigavolt Ethernet,” hints Tesla. “You wouldn’t believe how many homes and workplaces fall within the EMF field of high-voltage powerlines.” Contact TeslaNet Power Technologies for pricing.

—R.W.

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