TechWatch: Software

OPEN UP YOUR OFFICE SOFTWARE

Open-source advocates are rightly proud of OpenOffice.org, their no-cost alternative to Microsoft's widely deployed Office suite. Named after the eponymous organization that is shepherding its development and deployment, OpenOffice.org is equipped with the "Writer" word processor, "Calc" spreadsheet, "Impress" presentation program, "Draw" for special effects and a database user tool. And it doesn't just run under Linux; versions of OpenOffice.org 1.1 are available for Windows (XP, ME, 2000, NT and 98), Linux, Sun Solaris and Mac OS. Equally important, OpenOffice.org is 99.44 percent compatible with Microsoft file formats, such as .doc and .xls. The OpenOffice.org group says more than 16 million users have been happily served so far. While open-source zealots uniformly love the package, the broader consensus gives some darts to its installation process, particularly on standalone Windows machines with multiple logons. But you sure can't beat that price.

OPENOFFICE.org 1.1, www.openoffice.org Price: Free download; CD-ROMs available from third parties for around $10

MIDPRICED JAVA OR FREE JOE?

Take your pick. Sun Microsystems' Java Studio Standard 5 Update 1 is a full-fledged integrated development environment aimed at supporting enterprise-class applications and Web services. According to Sun, it'll help you create code that conforms to the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), as well as the Java 2 standard edition (J2SE). A nice touch is the inclusion of a preconfigured copy of Sun's Java System Application Server 7 (formerly Sun ONE Application Server 7)"a platform upon which Java-based apps and Web services can be deployed. Versions are available under Solaris, Red Hat Linux 7.2 and Windows XP or 2000. If you didn't succumb to the first round of Java hype when the language initially came to market in the 1990s, Studio Standard 5 may offer an easy means of taking another look. It's a big and fairly bulletproof tools suite, with bells and whistles and the highly touted "model-view-controller" framework paradigm. But if you prefer not to shell out the big bucks, Sun points out that developers who only need J2SE and Web-application development capabilities can download the NetBeans open-source IDE for free from www.netbeans.org.

SUN JAVA STUDIO STANDARD 5 UPDATE 1, www.sun.com/software/sundev/jde/index.html Price: $695; free evaluation copy

LINUX, HEAL THYSELF

Nitix, a new package from Net Integration Technologies, is billed as a self-healing Linux distribution. And it is! Indeed, it could very well set a record for the fastest time to set up a Linux server"about 10 minutes. Nitix includes the standard stuff: Web, e-mail, FTP and file servers for both Windows and Mac clients. You set it up pretty much from a Web browser with one exception: I had trouble getting the disk formatted on an aging Compaq server due to the special boot-sector placed on its hard disks. But once that was conquered, I had a file, Web, FTP and e-mail server that did its own updates and worked with Outlook clients just like real Windows. Nitix's documentation is a bit sparse, but otherwise its self-updating feature and additional bundled tools make for a solid server alternative.

Nitix, www.nitix.com Price: $600 and up, depending on user licenses