General Development Archive

Scala looks like it is becoming the web 2.0 darling, popular with Twitter and LinkedIn developers but also heavily utilized in the corporate space. Martin Odersky speaks in detail about the language in this interview. He talks about why it could become the language of choice for social networking platforms, particularly after doing well in the acid test of being used by sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. "Twitter has been able to sustain phenomenal growth, and it seems with more stability than what they had before the switch, so I think that's a good testament to Scala," he said.

The F-Script project has announced the availability of F-Script 2.0, a set of open source tools for dynamic introspection and scripting of Cocoa objects on Mac OS X. The package provides Mac OS X developers and power users with graphical tools for exploration and interactive manipulation of objects. It also provides programmatic tools for scripting, in the form of a Smalltalk dialect directly hosted on top of the Objective-C runtime. This new version of F-Script introduces major new features including system-wide scripting, dynamic Cocoa class creation, 64-bit support and automatic garbage collection.

Windows might be a popular platform for running certain kinds of Web applications. But too many developers have been burnt by trying to deploy PHP applications on a Windows server. "If you banged on too hard on Windows, IIS would crash, and nobody could tell why it died," Microsoft's Garrett Serack says. Microsoft is aiming to change that. In fact, while you weren't looking, they already made some improvements.

Jeff Layton talks to Valerie Aurora, file system developer and open source evangelist, about a wide range of subjects including her background in file systems, ChunkFS, the Union file system and how the developer ecosystem can chip in.

The Android operating system provides a powerful, open platform for mobile development. It leverages the power of the Java programming language and the Eclipse tools platform. Now you can add the Scala programming language to that mix. In this article, see how you can use Scala as the primary development language on Android.

"Lately, the Falcon Programming Language has attracted growing interest and excited a deal of curiosity. In this article I'll document some unique features of Falcon that allow users to build easily what I define as a 'second order virtual machine'."

The video proceedings of the 2009 FastOS workshop are being made available as a video podcast rss feed (also available for subscription directly from the iTunes store). The first three talks are now available with new talks being posted every week. The complete schedule of talks along with the slides which were presented are available here. FastOS is a Department of Energy/Office of Science funded program focused on exploratory work in operating systems and runtimes for petascale and beyond supercomputers.

It's that time of year again-- the time for the latest and greatest Crossover release for both Mac and Linux platforms. Version 8.0 brings new and updated support for many applications, especially Quicken 2009, Microsoft Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 7 (why Linux or Mac users would want IE7 is beyond me, but to each his own). Also, the Wine project has, of course, benefited more from Crossover's advancements.

This series is aimed at programming language aficionados. There's a lot of very abstract writing about programming languages and a lot of simple minded "language X sux!" style blog posts by people who know next to nothing about programming. What I feel is sorely missing is a kind of article that deliberately sacrifices the last 10% of precision that make the theoretical articles dry and long winded but still makes a point and discusses the various trade offs involved. This series is meant to fill that void and hopefully start a lot of discussions that are more enlightening than the articles themselves. I will point out some parallels in different parts of computing that I haven't seen mentioned as well as analyze some well known rules of thumb and link to interesting blogs and articles.

I recently started using Git for my local revision control. Since I spend about 90% of my coding time inside the Vim editor, I went looking for a plugin that would make Vim play nice with Git. In this article I present two different vim plugins and explore their feature-set via screenshots.

Learn how to better integrate scripts with command-line tools. Examine using shell_exec(), exec(), passthru(), and system(); safely passing information to the command line; and safely retrieving information from it. See how to integrate closely with underlying shell commands and folding any return values into your interfaces and processes.

Microsoft has come one step closer to delivering a parallel programming language to developers. On May 8, Microsoft made Axum, the company's foray into parallel programming, available on its MSDN DevLabs portal. Axum is a .NET language for building parallel applications. According to a Microsoft description, Axum "is a language that builds upon the architecture of the Web and principles of isolation, actors and message-passing to increase application safety, responsiveness, scalability and developer productivity."

Vimscript is a mechanism for reshaping and extending the Vim editor. Scripting allows you to create new tools, simplify common tasks, and even redesign and replace existing editor features. This article introduces the fundamental components of the Vimscript programming language: values, variables, expressions, statements, functions, and commands. These features are demonstrated and explained through a series of simple examples.

GCC 4.4.0 has been released. There are many interesting changes, including the merge of the Graphite branch, which is "a new framework for loop optimizations based on a polyhedral intermediate representation", improved support of the upcoming C++0x standard, and a new register allocator.