General Development Archive

"Exercise good memory-related coding practices by creating a comprehensive program to keep memory errors under control. Memory errors are the bane of C and C++ programming: they're common, awareness of their importance for over two decades hasn't eradicated them, they can impact applications severely, and few development teams have a definite plan for their management. The good news, though, is that they needn't be so mysterious."

After helping develop the Xerox Alto's Bravo word processor and leading Microsoft Office development for years, Charles Simonyi left Microsoft in 2002 to found his own company, Intentional Software. His company's novel goal: to ease software-development headaches by abstracting the software's requirements away from the code itself, similar to the way that WYSIWYG word processors abstract the document from the formatting tags that underlie it. "Software as we know it is the bottleneck on the digital horn of plenty," he says. "It takes up tremendous resources in talent and time. It's disappointing and hard to change. It blocks innovation in many organizations." Code should be abstracted into models that are easier for end customers to visualize and to modify, he argues. This article, written by Dreaming in Code author Scott Rosenberg, provides an overview of Simonyi's life, ideas, and current initiatives.

"This series is a guide to those who need a quick XML-and-Perl solution. In a surprisingly large number of cases, you only need one tool to integrate XML into a Perl application, XML::Simple. Part 1 tells you where to get it, how to use it, and where to go next. Once you whet your appetite for working with XML in Perl, the other two articles in this series will help you sharpen your new skills further."

Salon's Scott Rosenberg explains why even small-scale programming projects can take years to complete, one programmer is often better than two, and the meaning of "Rosenberg's Law."

The Yarra engine was designed to be a cross platform C++ gaming engine, using OpenGL for 3D graphics and OpenAL for positional sound. Unlike existing engines, Yarra was primarily designed to allow dynamic adding of programmable objects to a scene graph with handlers to control game flow. This design doesn't suite a majority of software out there, but works great for games. But the article isn't about Yarra, it's about the developers personal experiences working with Windows, MacOSX and BeOS. The article discusses the pro's and con's of each environment, and give sa very subjective opinion about the merits of each.

Discover how to use shell programming to modify the AIX System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) to develop, test, and install extensions safely.

In the conclusion of his parallel programming series, David Chisnall looks at using threads. Threads are not a traditional way of achieving parallelism on UNIX platforms, but the newer POSIX standards come with a comprehensive set of functions to support them.

The Alloy Analyzer is a tool developed by MIT for analyzing models written in Alloy, a simple structural modeling language based on first-order logic. Alloy can be used to detect conceptual mistakes in the model before the coding starts. Scientific American has published an article about it.

"Rails 1.2 is finally available in all it's glory. We got the RESTful flavor with new encouragement for resource-oriented architectures. We're taking mime types, HTTP status codes, and multiple representations of the same resource serious. And of course there's the international pizzazz of multibyte-safe UTF-8 wrangling."

Get a demonstration on how to use resource indexing with the Apache Derby database to develop Eclipse plug-ins. The Derby DB embedded in Eclipse allows you to create an SQL database on the client side with no security issues or network problems, such as an unstable connection or high latency.

In the Free and Open Source communities we are proud of our 'bazaar' model, where anyone can join in by setting up a project and publishing their programs. Users are free to pick and choose whatever software they want... provided they're happy to compile from source, resolve dependencies manually and give up automatic security and feature updates. In this essay, I introduce 'decentralised' installation systems, such as Autopackage and Zero Install, which aim to provide these missing features.

"MIT's Technology Review recently interviewed Bjarne Stroustrup in a two-part article (part one, part two). You may know Bjarne as the inventor of the C++ programming language. Indeed, he even maintains a comprehensive C++ FAQ that answers every imaginable C++ question. Here are a few select quotes from the interview that I found notable."

Construct 2.00 has been released. "Construct is a Python library for declaratively defined data structures, called 'constructs'. These constructs can both parse data into an object and build an object into data. Constructs handle fields of either byte or bit granularity, structs, unions, sequences, repeaters, adapters, validators, switching, pointers, on-demand (lazy) parsing, and many more. The library defines a large number of primitive constructs, as well a large inventory of file formats and network protocols."

Revolution is descended in spirit from Hypercard (HC). When Apple's support for HC withered, Scott Raney developed Metacard (MC), a near clone. Metacard was then bought by Revolution (RR), based in Scotland. Metacard was two quite distinct things: an engine, and an IDE. When Metacard was sold, the MC IDE became public domain. It still exists, is volunteer maintained, and it can be used with the latest RR engine. Some on the RR user mailing list prefer the much simpler MC IDE to the RR IDE, at least for initial project development. Other IDEs are possible, and there is a third party (non-free) IDE called Galaxy.