General Development Archive

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.

Examine key parts of the Z shell (zsh) and how to use its features to ease your UNIX system administration tasks. Z shell is a popular alternative to the original Bourne and Korn shells. It provides an impressive range of additional functionality, including improvements for completing different commands, files, and paths automatically, and for binding keys to functions and operations.

The Cocotron is an open source project which implements an Objective-C API very similar to that described by Apple Computer's Foundation and AppKit framework documentation. "The Cocotron Development Tools are a gcc based cross-compiler toolchain which plug into Xcode, once installed they enable Xcode projects written in Objective-C to be compiled for platforms other than Mac OS X, such as Windows, Linux, and Solaris. The CDT is used to compile The Cocotron and non-OS X targets."

JavaScript is often ridiculed as the black sheep of programming languages. Nearly every Web developer has cursed JavaScript at one time or another. Until recently, many developers had all but written off JavaScript as a necessary evil at best or a toy at worst. But JavaScript is becoming increasingly important. See why it remains the most broadly available scripting language for Web development and a better choice for developing modern applications.

Quickly becoming a de facto standard C++ library, the Boost library includes a powerful graph data structure that's also easy to use. Jeff Cogswell discusses some interesting theory behind graphs, and explains the Boost library's graph structures.

The C++ standardization committee has set 2009 as the target date for the version of the language standard. And a lot will change. C++09 will include at least two major core features -- rvalue references and type concepts -- and plenty more relatively minor features.

Dabo 0.7 has been released. If you're not familiar with Dabo, it is a framework for building desktop applications in Python. Obviously, there have been a bunch of changes and bugfixes.

This article reviews how to modify an SQL query to group related rows together to provide summary statistics database information and introduces the concept of a view, which can be used to simplify database application development by creating a virtual table that represents the results of an SQL query. Also learn about database indexes, which you can use to locate specific table rows. After you've mastered these advanced database concepts, you'll be well positioned to begin developing Java database applications with Apache Derby.

XForms is an ideal open standards technology for collecting and submitting data from a wide variety of Web-capable platforms. Using JavaScript to edit the DOM with XForms allows a single form to accommodate multiple, site-unique submission requirements.

David Chisnall takes a look behind the scenes at Apple's upcoming revamp of the Objective-C language. As with any new language, some things are good, some are ugly, and some are both.

"Software sucks, 80% of projects fail, and most developers are unhappy individuals. Why is this? My answer; complexity. Complexity is the single factor I would attribute poor software to. The more you have to do, the harder you make it on yourself, the way requirements seem to change, the worse the final result is; right? Software needs to be simple", says Chris Stewart.