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As you can imagine, good developers are a diverse bunch, but the ones I know all share one trait: the urge to understand how things work. To help Windows programmers scratch that itch, Heaventools offers PE Explorer. The product lets you look inside Windows “portable executable” files (EXEs, DLLs, SYSes, OCXs and more) and figure out what’s going on.

[click for larger image] PE Explorer lets you examine portable executables.

PE Explorer 1.91 includes viewers for the header and exported or imported API functions, a syntax lookup tool for API functions, a resource editor, a dependency scanner and a disassembler. There’s also a wizard for inserting a Windows XP visual-style manifest into a legacy app, which allows it to take advantage of the new “XP look” for user-interface widgets. And, for Borland fans, the new version can edit DFM (form) files produced by Delphi and C++ Builder. Finally, C++ programmers have access to the original, human-readable version of mangled identifiers (hurray!).

PE Explorer runs on Windows 95 through XP, and is available for personal or business use; the price is $129 or $199, respectively.

Heaventools Software, Pacific Business Centre, 101-1001 West Broadway, Dept. 381, Vancouver, BC, V6H4E4, Canada, Tel: (604) 221-2650, www.heaventools.com.

—Rick Wayne

Buy, Don’t Build
Experienced engineers know that it’s cheaper to buy than to build. But until technology matures, the “buy” route is generally unavailable. Usually low-level items are the first to be commoditized; then subassemblies; finally, plug-and-customize systems are introduced.

E-business software seems to be reaching that level. A case in point is Browsersoft’s eQ! Foundation: a software foundation on which Java applications can be rapidly built. Browsersoft’s idea is that the developer works primarily by configuring rather than inventing new code. Three primary services are available: Core, Persistence and Script Engine. Core lets you derive business objects and express relationships between them: These can be simple links, one-to-many relationships or compositions as complex as your most diabolical modeler’s fevered imaginings. Persistence does what you would expect—and more: You can persist and restore even complex collections with a single action. The Script Engine, according to the company’s website, is “an XML-based scripting language designed to provide a declarative approach to invoking business processes.”

Interestingly, Browsersoft doesn’t force you to swallow an implementation whole—through the use of adapters, you can mix and match implementation alternatives. For example, when it comes time to lock down to a user interface, Browsersoft provides adapters for both Swing and Struts. Persistence can be handled in relational tables, but doesn’t have to be—the company specifically anticipated that legacy datastores must be accommodated.

EQ! Foundation is available as a free download for evaluation; Browsersoft Vice President Joe Panther says they’re offering an “early adopter’s incentive for less than the annual support price.” The early adopter’s program includes a choice of two development and two CPU deployment licenses with five hours of off-site support for $1,500; or five development and five CPU deployment licenses with 10 hours of support for $2,500. Enterprise licenses are available and priced on a per-case basis.

Browsersoft Inc., 450 Navajo Ln., Shawnee Mission, KS, 66217, Tel: (913) 851-2453 Fax: (913) 631-4055, www.browsersoft.com.

—Rick Wayne

OK, It Runs ... Now What?
In a way, it was easier when .NET was in its infancy—you could win respect just by getting an application to run. Now, the bar is higher. In the immortal words of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, “We shall do it … FASTER!”

[click for larger image] Red Gate’s ANTS profiler is a commonsense .NET profiling tool.

Red Gate’s ANTS Profiler is a commonsense, simple-to-use profiling tool aimed squarely at .NET. It helps remind programmers of a couple of time-honored optimization principles. First, if you’re like many of us, you’d confidently lay money on your prediction of where your program rips and where it loiters—and you’d probably lose that bet. Guess-and-try-it optimizing is a black hole of wasted time. ANTS Profiler will quickly show you the hard data: not only what routines are called most often, but which turn out to be the pokiest. The other gotcha is subtler: We tend to assume that when an application is slow, our code is the problem. If you’re working with .NET, however, your application spends much of its time rooting around in the class library—if one of those methods is a hog, your program will be a dog, even if your algorithms are cheetahs. By identifying the laggard library calls, you can plan a strategy: select an alternative, queue up calls, banish them to a separate execution thread, whatever. With a tool like this, you can start performing .NET optimization surgery with a laser instead of a shotgun.

Red Gate Software, St. Andrews House, 59 St. Andrews St., Cambridge, CB2 3DD, United Kingdom, Tel: (866) 498-9946, Fax: (877) 735-4871, www.red-gate.com.

—Rick Wayne

Hi, MOM
With Voyager Messaging, its message-oriented middleware (MOM) product for J2EE, Recursion Software has joined the select ranks of companies like BEA, HP, IBM and Sonic Software. An implementation of the Java Messaging Service, Voyager Messaging provides J2EE components with asynchronous publish-subscribe communication semantics. They offer “staged persistence” to gain the advantages of JDBC persistence (database-agnostic, mature technology), but insert their own caching/logging scheme so that every message sent doesn’t incur the overhead of a database transaction. Administrators can also optimize quality-of-service for a particular communication with the option of sending messages immediately or batched together. Knowing that service interruptions are the rule in distributed architectures, Recursion also thoughtfully provided a client-persistence feature that lets a client continue publishing even if the provider becomes temporarily unavailable. According to Rescursion, pricing is dependent on deployment configuration and volume.

Recursion Software, 2591 N. Dallas Pkwy., Ste. 200, Frisco, TX 75034, Tel: (972) 731-8800, Fax: (972) 731-8881, www.recursionsw.com.

—Rick Wayne

Where No Java Has Gone Before
At Software Development, it’s our duty to alert you to the latest platforms. Last month, Editor in Chief Alexandra Weber Morales brought you breaking news of “Java for Marmots” (Comment, April 2003). Now, AJile Systems has brought Java to the Nintendo GameBoy Advance—but it’s no joke.

The JAMiD game development kit is based on a plug-in card containing AJile’s aJ-100 Java microprocessor, which implements Sun’s Mobile Information Device Profile. The aJ-100 executes Java bytecodes directly, obviating the need for interpreters and elaborate native-code optimization strategies: Java is the native code, and it screams!

The company points out that there are a lot of Java games already built for other platforms (for example, cell phones); the AJile card allows you to run them on the GameBoy. But who says we can’t develop business applications for the platform? OK, so input is a little problematic—but it’s got a great display and stereo sound, you can connect four of them together in a LAN … and the JAMiD development kit is only $199.

AJile Systems, 920 Saratoga Ave., Ste. 209, San Jose, CA 95129, Tel: (408) 557-0829, Fax: (408) 557-8279, www.ajile.com.

—Rick Wayne

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