General Development Archive

The recent emergence of industrial-strength Python testing frameworks means that Python tests are being written more succinctly, more uniformly, and with better reporting of results than ever before. Adopting one of the new generation of Python testing frameworks will provide concise idioms and uniform testing techniques that, in the past, every Python project had to supply for itself.

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.

Ulrich Dreeper, the glibc maintainer, details on his blog the main features of version 2.10 of the library: POSIX 2008, C++ compliance, C++ 201x support, DNS NSS improvement, use NSS in libcrypt, printf hooks and, perhaps more interesting, better malloc scalability.

The rsync utility is a mandatory tool for your command-line work, and you need to learn how to use it for easy, safe, quick laptop-desktop synchronization. This article introduces rsync and mentions several related tools, all of which provide easy synchronization procedures.

RPyC is a seamless library for integrating Python processes on many machines/processes. This article looks at the advantages or drawbacks RPyC has over other distributed Python frameworks such as XML-RPC and Pyro. A few simple examples of using RPyC are included to give you a feel for the library.

Recently, a new browser war has erupted all over the internet, with various browsers making massive improvements in each release to trumpet those made by others. While Firefox certainly ignited this new browser war, Chrome is the one who started the JavaScript war. The first release of Google's web browser came with a brand new JavaScript engine that was a lot faster than those of its competitors, forcing them to improve their JavaScript performance as well. This whole JS thing has gotten to the heads of the folks at Google, and they've created a site for experiments which show off the power of JS.

These 5 articles on PHP frameworks will get you quickly familiar with Zend, symfony, and CakePHP. This series is designed for PHP developers who want to start using a PHP framework, but have not examined the available frameworks in detail. You will examine their similarities and differences while building and extending a sample application using Ajax and by integrating external tasks.

Jeremy White posted the CodeWeavers' Outlook for 2009, explaining what the group has been working fervently on the past eight months as well as plans for the coming months of 2009. CodeWeavers develops and sells CrossOver, an application based upon Wine that can run Windows applications on Mac OS X and Linux, specifically certain games and office applications. They're also the leading corporate backer of the Wine Project. In the road map, White explains that the past eight months have been spent on unattractive, under-the-hood improvements to Wine, particularly "things like .NET support, work on a DIB Engine, Gdiplus, and a lot of Direct X work. We've also spent a lot of energy focusing on issues with Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007, in an effort to bring those applications fully up to 'Gold' level." He goes on to say that DirectX 9 support is coming along nicely for the CrossOver Games project, and DirectX 10 is around the corner. The plans for the upcoming months include shipping CrossOver 8.0 for both Linux and Mac, which will include many improvements, the juiciest of which are centered around Photoshop CS3, Microsoft Office, and Quicken 2009. Aside from adding more and better application support in Wine, the GUI of CrossOver is supposed to get a hefty overhaul by the CodeWeavers team.

Thales, an aerospace, defense and security company (68000 employees), releases MyCCM High Integrity, a software component framework targeting mission- and safety-critical distributed real time embedded software. It integrates components written in C, and generates code for handling inter-component communication, threads (priorities, periods), locks, and mode-based reconfiguration. In addition to the software components, MyCCM-HI takes as input a model of the application in a so-called Component-Oriented Architecture Language. Open licensing policy is seen as a mean to improve industry standards.

The Falcon Programming Language is a typeless language born for rapid development, prototyping, and ready-made integration. We may also describe Falcon as a "scripting" language with features that enable the programmer to create even complex multi-threaded applications. It mixes several different programming paradigms into an unique blend of constructs, overcoming the limitations and partialities of other languages. The objective of this brief article is to be very practical with code examples as well as step by step simple instructions. Read the full tutorial at Freesoftware Magazine.

There's a new essay called "Optimizing Code for Speed" available on Shlomi Fish's site. It covers the motivation, methods and terminology of optimizing code, and provides many links and examples to illustrate this important subject.

"The first public demonstration of OpenCL functionality was given by AMD at Siggraph Asia 2008. OpenCL is the new vendor-independent standard designed to extract high performance parallel computing out of GPUs, DSPs and multicore CPUs. Basically the idea is that you can write your core computational code in OpenCL and voila! - your code scales to whatever processors are available. OpenCL will greatly improve speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications from entertainment to scientific and 3D visualization."

"Whilst an increasing number of recent converts are avoiding it (and I don't blame them really), the shell is still a key tool for the majority of GNU/Linux users. Shell scripts are knocked-up, shared and deployed in all sorts of circumstances - some simply time-saving, others life-saving. But even if the shell script has been written by somebody else, running it can be a cumbersome and frightening exercise for users of lesser experience or confidence. How do we bring the flexibility of the shell script to the GUI-only user? Recently faced with just such a quandary, http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/saving_my_sanity_zenity_shell_script_interaction_gui">I discovered Zenity: a tool which just might have saved my sanity."

The Lua programming language is a small scripting language specifically designed to be embedded in other programs. Lua's C API allows exceptionally clean and simple code both to call Lua from C, and to call C from Lua. This allows developers who want a convenient runtime scripting language to easily implement the basic API elements needed by the scripting language, then use Lua code from their applications. This article introduces the Lua language as a possible tool for simplifying common development tasks, and discusses some of the reasons to embed a scripting language in the first place.