General Development Archive

Professor Roberto Ierusalimschy offers an in-depth examination of what he believes to be the most successful programming language not born in a developed country.

jQuery is emerging as the JavaScript library of choice for developers looking to ease their creation of dynamic Rich Internet Applications. As browser-based applications continue to replace desktop applications, the use of these libraries will only continue to grow. See jQuery in action, its easy syntax, how to use jQuery correctly in your own JavaScript code in your browser app, and how to avoid any pitfalls when using it with other libraries.

XML is a communication format for exchanging structured documents and data. Too often, an XML format is chosen arbitrarily during development, without much planning or design. Learn how to design a format less likely to require change and agile enough to incorporate new requirements with the simple addition of new extensions instead of full changes.

DevX interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup about C++0x, the new C++ standard that is due in 2009. Bjarne Stroustrup has classified the new features into three categories Concurrency, Libraries and Language. The changes introduced in the Concurrency makes C++ more standardized and easy to use on multi-core processors. It is good to see that some of the commonly used libraries are becoming standard (eg: unordered_maps and regex).

You thought Tcl/Tk stands for 'obsolete GUI'? You define the looks of Tk as 'prehistoric'? Or do you visualize ugly interfaces when reading this? I certainly do. Mats Bengtsson writes: "Tcl's windowing toolkit, Tk, has been 'known' to be ugly and outdated. With the 8.5 release last December the tile package, now named ttk (Themed Tk), is included in the core which brings true native widgets on Windows (yes, Vista too) and Mac." But what about Linux? Mats points at tileqt and the new tilegtk and notes: "Imagine that you can switch theme, and toolkits, on the fly without any program restart." Finally, he mentions progresses in both tkpath and support for WebKit. He concludes: "When all this comes together it will make Tk a very competitive toolkit."

For a technology that has been in stable release since May 22, 2000, PHP 4 has finally reached the end of its official life. With the release of PHP 4.4.9, official support has ended and the final security patch for the platform issued. With PHP 5 offering a viable upgrade path for the last few years, the recommendation is for addministrators and developers is to move to the PHP 5 platform (if they haven't already done so), which is currently at 5.2.6. For those who are not able to migrate their systems to the new version of PHP noted PHP security expert, Stefan Esser, will continue to provide third party security patching for the PHP 4 line through his Suhosin product.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. This time we chat with Guido van Rossum, best known as the author of Python, and currently working for Google, CA where he gets to spend at least half his time developing the language.

JavaScript creator and current CTO of Mozilla Corporation Brendan Eich provides a detailed history of JavaScript, including some of the more interesting programs written with JavaScript, right up to how JavaScript has been essential to the Ajax or Web 2.0 revolution.Eich started work on JS in 1995 and says he's been surprised by how popular it has been: "I was resigned for a long time to JS being unpopular due to those annoying popups, but more: due to its unconventional combination of functional and prototype-based object programming traditions."And with multicore/massively-parallel computers upon us, Eich talks about the future of JavaScript: "JS has its role to play in addressing the multicore world, starting with relatively simple extensions such as Google Gears' worker pools -- "shared nothing" background threads with which browser JS communicates by sending and receiving messages."

Create a plain old Java object (POJO)-style Web service easily using Apache CXF, an open source Web service framework. This article, Part 1 of a series, shows you how to expose POJOs as Web services using Spring and CXF. It also illustrates CXF integration with the Spring Framework.

Walter Bright talks about D and his desire to improve on systems programming languages. Many successful concepts from other languages like JavaScript, PERL, Ruby, Lisp, Ada, Erlang, Python, etc., have had a significant influence on D, he says. He adds: "D 1.0 was pretty straightforward stuff, being features that were adapted from well-trod experience in other languages. D 2.0 has ventured into unexplored territory that doesn't have a track record in other languages. Since these capabilities are unproven, they generate some healthy skepticism. Only time will tell."

Awk is a very nice language with a very strange name. In this first article of a three-part series, start playing around with awk to see how it works and quickly get your awk programming skills up to speed. As the series progresses, more advanced topics will be covered, culminating with an advanced real-world awk application demo.

Bart Trojanowski has given an in-depth 2-hour Git tutorial titled "Git the basics" for the Ottawa Group of Ruby Enthusiasts and this is the screencast of that presentation.

Computerworld interviews Stephen C. Johnson, the brains behind YACC Yet Another Compiler Compiler: The compiler was developed some 35 years ago and is still going strong today through various incarnations. Asked what he is proudest of in terms of YACC's development and use, Johnson said: "I think computing is a service profession. I am happiest when the programs that I have written (YACC, Lint, the Portable C Compiler) are useful to others. In this regard, the contribution YACC made to the spread of Unix and C is what I'm proudest of." And would he do anything differently? "I'd try harder to find a notation other than $1, $2, $$, etc. While simple and intuitive, the notation is a source of errors as grammars evolve."

This article introduces the Google Calendar Data API, demonstrates how you can use it to browse user-generated calendars; add and update calendar events; and perform keyword searches. Also, it illustrates how to integrate data from the Google Calendar service into a PHP application using both SimpleXML and the Zend client library.