General Development Archive

F-Script 2.0, now in beta, provides a handy syntax for dynamically creating Cocoa classes on the fly. This is useful for quickly experimenting, prototyping and using Cocoa interactively, as well as for developing sophisticated programs. You can type a class definition in the F-script console, hit return and immediately start playing with your new class. This article provides a quick introduction to this feature.

POSIX file capabilities split root user powers into smaller privileges, such as the ability to read files or to trace processes owned by another user. By assigning capabilities to a file, you can enable an unprivileged user to execute the file with those specified privileges. In this article, learn how programs can make use of POSIX capabilities, how to investigate which capabilities are needed by a program, and how to assign those capabilities to the program.

Guile isn't just another extension language: it's the official extension language of the GNU project. Guile makes Scheme embeddable, which makes the interpreter ideal for embedded scripting and more. The days of building and delivering static software and products are over. Today, users expect their products to be dynamic and easily customizable. Learn how, with Guile, you can interpret Scheme scripts, dynamically bind scheme scripts into compiled C programs, and even integrate compiled C functions into Scheme scripts.

"Ars takes a close look at Seed, a new framework that allows software developers to build GTK+ applications with JavaScript. The popular web scripting language could soon become the dominant application extension language on the Linux desktop."

Part 1 of this three-part series laid the foundation for building an application targeted at the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, including choosing a target language (Python), selecting and configuring a development environment (Eclipse with Pluthon), and building a small sample application to make sure everything worked as advertised. Part 2 looks at different options for helper libraries, coding with unit testing in mind, and user interface choices.

In the age of dynamic languages and closures, most of you have probably heard of a mighty dragon called Lisp (which stands for LISt Processing), whose fans look almost with despise at other languages rediscovering it. Invented half a century ago, Lisp went on to become a de facto standard in the world of AI research, and has stood behind a handful of very neat inventions in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the long AI winter and the drift of technology towards other paradigms have almost lead to forgetting Lisp alltogether; IT has only recently started to rediscover parts of what made Lisp so cool back then.

"The Ruby web development community got a big surprise Tuesday when the programmers behind the Rails and Merb projects announced plans to join forces. Merb will be folded into Rails 3, the next major version of the open source web framework. This unexpected union will put an end to the rivalry between the two projects." If that doesn't make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside during Christmas, I don't know what will.

Microsoft researcher Don Syme talks about the development of the functional language F#. He says Haskell (and Python) has been a huge influence on the development of F#. The F# lightweight syntax was also inspired by Haskell and Python. He also says there have been some mistakes along the way. "Some experimental features have been removed as we're bringing F# up to product quality, and we've also made important cleanups to the language and library. These changes have been very welcomed by the F# community."

IBM delves into what's new in PHP 5.3: Part-1 shows you the changes to the object-orientated capabilities, and Part-2 shows you the exciting new possibilities with real closures and lambda functions.

With ever increasing amounts of Javascript on the client side, maintenance is increased by duplicating business logic on the client side;"In this series, learn how to run JavaScript files on the server side, call remote JavaScript functions with Ajax, and use the Java Scripting API with the JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology." Part 1 of IBM's "Javascript EE" series- "Combine JavaScript with Java code on the server to get the freedom to use the same JavaScript routines on both servers and clients, and allow you to maintain a single code base for both Ajax and non-Ajax clients."

Many sophisticated machine learning algorithms cannot process large amounts of data on a single node, but Parallel Machine Learning Toolbox (PML) can do so by distributing the computations. This distribution speeds up computations and expedites training by weeks, days, or even hours in an easy, reliable way. PML can run on a wide array of architectures including single-node, small clusters, grids, and BlueGene.

The Khronos Group has released the finalised, completed specification for OpenCL 1.0, "the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices." The specification was first proposed as a draft by Apple, with its new home being the Khronos Group, a consortium that develops and promotes royalty-free media APIs.

Version 6 of the popular Perl programming language will not be compatible with previous versions, but will open up a new world of custom "languages" and interpreters, according to its founder Larry Wall. Wall and his co-developers are doing with Perl 6 -- starting again. "It will break backward compatibility in order to simplify it we have to get rid of old cruft, particularly the regular expression cruft," Wall said. "A lot of the unreadability of Perl is related to the regular expression syntax – and we didn't do that, we got it from Unix. It needs to be end-of-lifed."

"Python 3.0 (a.k.a. 'Python 3000' or 'Py3k') is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed. Also, the standard library has been reorganized in a few prominent places." See what's new in Python 3.0 for differences between 2.x and 3.x.