Stories by Andrew Binstock

The best hardware and software of the year

Each year, the editors and reviewers of the InfoWorld Test Center gather to look over the list of products that earned the highest marks in stand-alone reviews or came in first in multiproduct shoot-outs. We then determine which ones were particularl...

Dell Precision M6500 notebook

The Dell Precision M6500 notebook has a true, full-size keyboard and superior LED technology in its 17in screen. However, it is heavy, somewhat cumbersome, and pricey.

Dell primes servers for virtualization

With virtualization's popularity soaring, it was predictable that hardware vendors would eventually bring to market specialized servers that cater to the needs of virtual machines. The market leader in this category is Dell, which currently offers th...

Is unit testing doomed?

The agile revolution that began in software development in the 1990s has been inexorably making its way into mainstream IT organizations. Today, one of the most adopted agile practices is unit testing, where developers write hundreds of small tests f...

Trolltech pours on the Java dev goodness

The world of Java depends on two established GUI toolkits: Swing and SWT (standard widget toolkit). Both software packages provide the widgets, controls, menus, and user interface components in most Java applications today. Swing, which Sun bundles w...

Qt 4 raises the bar for cross-platform app dev tools

Cross-platform toolkits have always been a market unto themselves. In the heyday of Unix, products such as Galaxy, XVT, and Zinc provided a solution for IT and for ISVs that could not afford to rewrite code for all flavors of OSes. When Java took ove...

Client-facing Java perks up

Although Java has earned a reputation for solid back-end performance, its history as a client-facing platform has been troubled. When Java first shipped in 1995, programmers could create GUI components with the AWT (Abstract Windowing Toolkit). This ...