General Development Archive

Six months ago, Linux vendor Red Hat acquired the closed source Exadel Studio Pro IDE and pledged to turn it into a fully open source Red Hat product. On Monday, Red Hat officially released JBoss Developer Studio, based on the Exadel product as a 100 percent open source IDE. The new Eclipse based IDE offering from Red Hat's JBoss division will provide a development environment that will work on both Windows and Linux for Java middleware solutions from JBoss.

Ruby on Rails 2.0 has been released. "Rails 2.0 is finally finished after about a year in the making. This is a fantastic release that’s absolutely stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes, and an incredible amount of polish. We’ve even taken a fair bit of cruft out to make the whole package more coherent and lean." On Zenbits, they give tips on how to install 2.0.

IBM's latest developerWorks article is about creating a very rapid development process using open source tools for grid applications, taking advantage of scripting languages like Perl or Python and deployment environments like Apache. It also covers using Project Zero and PHP to build a simple web application.

ES is a fairly interesting looking open source research OS created by Nintendo. Runs natively on x86 (and qemu of course), kernel is written in C++, uses an ECMAScript interpreter for all of the userland, uses Cairo for graphics, and even has a port of Squeak.

The LLVM Compiler System is being used for all sorts of interesting things these days. It basically provides an extremely modular and easy to use set of open source (BSD-licensed) compiler libraries that can be used to build various applications from. Despite this, many people don't really understand it, and are scared away by the breadth of the project or by compilers in general. The Kaleidoscope tutorial starts out from scratch and slowly builds up a simple language to show how LLVM can help out with this. We end up with a JIT compiler for a fairly interesting little language with less than 700 lines of code. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, once you start with LLVM, there are all sorts of things you can do.

Lisp is an excellent programming language that allows you to expand your knowledge of programming languages due to its largely typeless nature. Find out how to develop Lisp applications using the Cusp Eclipse plug-in. It can also help those seasoned in the Java language, PHP, or C/C++ think in new ways when developing applications.

F-Script is an open-source scripting and interactive environment for Cocoa, the Mac OS X object system. It lets you easily play with the rich set of object-oriented frameworks provided by Apple and the Cocoa community. This new article, Learn F-Script in 20 Minutes, will teach you the basics of F-Script and show you how to use it to experiment with the advanced graphics capabilities of the Mac OS X Core Image framework. If you aren't using F-Script yet, this is your chance to learn how it can improve your productivity as well as those of the users of your own applications.

"Ulrich Drepper recently approached us asking if we would be interested in publishing a lengthy document he had written on how memory and software interact. Memory usage is often the determining factor in how software performs, but good information on how to avoid memory bottlenecks is hard to find. This article is the first in a serie of articles (the original has over 100 pages) that will get published on LWN weekly. Once the entire series is out, Ulrich will be releasing the full text."

As a system administrator, you run across numerous challenges and problems. Managing users, disk space, processes, devices, and backups can cause many system administrators to lose their hair, good humor, or sanity. Shell scripts can help, but they often have frustrating limitations. This is where a full-featured scripting language, such as Python, can turn a tedious task into an easy one. Python is a scripting language that looks like it was made for system administrators.

Recently, Free Pascal (FPC) version 2.2.0 was released. This open source Pascal compiler has - since its initial release in 1993 - grown to be one of the most sophisticated open source compilers available today. Daily, more programmers discover FPC and develop their applications in Object Pascal. Specifically, the development of Lazarus has contributed to this phenomenon: Lazarus is a graphical open source IDE for FPC, with an extensive tool kit to design graphical (GUI) applications.

Python 3.0, 'Python 3000', has reached its first public release. This version will be followed by beta releases throughout 2008, and the final release is scheduled for August 2008. "Python 3000 ('Py3k', and released as Python 3.0) 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."

Bruno Souza, the NetBeans Community Manager for Sun, wrote: "As you all know, we are working hard for the release of NetBeans 6.0. The new release will bring exciting technical features and this is a great time to consider what else can we do to empower the NetBeans Community. As a result of requests from the comunity, we are considering the potential adoption of a new license model. We are considering releasing a future early access version of NetBeans 6.0 under a dual licensing scheme of CDDL and GPL v2 with Classpath exception. A move like this would be well received by many of the NetBeans contributors, and will benefit the community at large."

"This article describes how to easily create a user interface using Python bindings, Edje, Embryo, and Animations. The application will be a small application launcher and the actual interface will be written using edje and animations. The python part doesn't have any knowledge of the interface, where the icons are placed, how they should move, nor if they are using some kind of effect, like for instance pulsing. All it does is listen for 'selected' signals."

Oracle's TechCast crew interviewed Chris Mason on Btrfs. A kind-of transcript is available here. Btrfs is a new filesystem for Linux developed by Oracle. It features: "extent based file storage (264 max file size); space efficient packing of small files; space efficient indexed directories; dynamic inode allocation; writable snapshots; subvolumes (separate internal filesystem roots); object level mirroring and striping; checksums on data and metadata (multiple algorithms available); strong integration with device mapper for multiple device support; online filesystem check; very fast offline filesystem check; efficient incremental backup and FS mirroring."