General Development Archive

"Sometimes GCC emits something that can be described as Haiku poems - and you have no clue as to what it really is complaining about. This page is a collection of such gems, their meaning in English and how to solve the problem."

This first article of a three-part series introduces PHP5's XML implementation and help those relatively new to using XML with PHP to read, parse, and manipulate, and write a short and uncomplicated XML file using the DOM and SimpleXML in a PHP environment.

"Are you confused by the plethora of testing and comparison options in the Bash shell? This tip helps you demystify the various types of file, arithmetic, and string tests so you will always know when to use test, , ], (( )), or if-then-else constructs."

The open source, freely available, stable read/write NTFS driver, NTFS-3G 1.0 has just been released. The driver, released half year ago for beta testing, made progress, thanks to ten or even hundreds of thousands testers, early adopters, and developers. In consequence of the open communications and positive experiences, NTFS-3G is available for over 60 Linux distributions today, including most major ones. Moreover it was ported to new operating systems like FreeBSD, BeOS, Haiku, and Mac OS X.

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.

14 months ago, the Autopackage project was small and active, and members sounded optimistic about its success. Now, although the alternative installer project continues, progress has almost come to a halt. The #autopackage channel on irc.oftc.net sits vacant most days, the developer blogs cover almost anything except the project, and commits to the source code repository have become rare. Formally, the project is still alive, but the major contributors all agree that it is faltering. So what happened?

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."

"While defensive programming effectively guarantees the condition of a method's input, it becomes repetitive if it is pervasive across a series of methods. Andrew Glover shows you an easier way to add reusable validation constraints to your code using the power of AOP, design by contract, and a handy library called OVal."

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

"What if you were able to discover potential problems in your code prior to building it? Interestingly enough, there are Eclipse plugins for tools such as JDepend and CheckStyle that can help you discover problems before they are manifested in software. In this installment of Automation for the people, automation expert Paul Duvall provides examples of installing, configuring, and using these static analysis plugins in Eclipse so that you can prevent problems early in the development life cycle."

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.

"Bitrock's InstallBuilder and Macrovision's Install Anywhere Enterprise edition are tools for building third-party software installers. InstallBuilder uses Qt widgets, while Install Anywhere requires a Java Virtual Machine, but both are cross-platform, multi-lingual, proprietary tools that are available in downloadable demos. Both, too require minimal expertise to use. When run in wizard mode, Install Anywhere is more basic than InstallBuilder and suffers in comparison, but, when run in Advanced Designer mode, it eclipses its rival with a huge set of options."

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.

The Java community has resisted closures so far, even as competing languages such as C# add them. Closures are anonymous functions with closed scope. It's best to think of a closure as a code block that you can use as an argument, with special scoping rules. This article dives deep into Closures and uses Ruby to show how closures work.