This third installment describes other subtilities, dark corners, and bugs of Python's super.

Block-based storage is well-known to most developers, since many disks and network-attached storage devices appear as block devices to software or to the operating system. Amazon.com this week launched a virtualized block-based storage service for its Elastic Compute Cloud.

The committee to oversee the next version of the JavaScript language decided to abandon a multi-year effort at standardizing ECMAScript 4, slated to be the next generation of JavaScript, and to revert to a more modest update to the language. Packages and Java-like classes won't be part of the next standard, for instance.

In his latest blog post, Steve Yegge says that requirements gathering is almost a sure-fire guarantee of eventual software product failure: If you don't know your product's requirements at the outset, your outcome will almost certainly not meet users' approval. Is requirements gathering an important, or even practical, step in the software process?

The series about the dark corners of the Python built-in super continues. In this installment, I discuss an ugly design wart: unbound super objects.

With a set of metrics, Coverity's new product aims to provide managers a true measure of risk in a code base. In an interview with Artima, Coverity CTO Ben Chelf explains why traditional code metrics alone don't provide sufficient insight into the riskiness of code.

super is perhaps the trickiest Python construct: this series aims to unveil its secrets

A non-Web-2.0 way of looking at it.

In the first part I have discussed the new features of metaclasses in Python 3.0, in particular the usage of the __prepare__ classmethod to intercept the class attributes before class creation. In this second part, I will show an example of the things you can do with metaclasses, by implementing a clever record system.

In the first installment of a two-part series, Michele Simionato discusses what's new for metaclasses in the upcoming version of Python.

Many discussions about caching focus on specific caching tools and APIs. In a recent blog post, Dhananjay Nene offers a tool-agnostic overview of designing an enterprise application for good cache performance.

Agile methodologies seemed like a good idea to this software development team. But when the company doesn't sincerely accept the change in work style, the result is just a buzzword for "project hell."

IBM recently released a new version of its WebSphere Community Edition Java EE server. Based on Apache Geronimo, the latest WebSphere supports the ability to create a custom server assembly based on a Web application's profile, as well as the Geronimo command shell, and improved performance monitoring features.

In his popular blog, Jeff Atwood suggests that becoming a great developer has more to do with the quantity of code you produce than with an explicit desire to produce high-quality code from the start.

JetBrains posted a beta version of its next-generation multi-language IDE, IDEA 8. The result of a major internal refactoring, IDEA 8 supports Flex, Groovy, Ruby, JavaScript, and is designed as a platform for working with additional languages as well. IDEA 8 also provides tighter integration with major Web frameworks, such as Seam.

In an interview with Artima, Sun's Jacob Lehrbaum and Param Singh explain what the new JavaFX Preview SDK contains, and how it can help enterprise developers create more engaging user experiences.