General Development Archive

Many of us use the terms "programmer" and "developer" interchangeably. When someone asks me what I do for a living I tend to describe my vocation as "computer programmer" rather than "software developer", because the former seems to be understood more readily by those unfamiliar with IT. Even when writing pieces for this site, I tend to swap back and forth between the two terms, to try and avoid sounding repetitive. But in truth, there is a world of difference between a computer programmer and a software developer (editor's note: aka engineer and there is also a difference with a software architect).

Learn about the GNU Project Debugger macro capability that allows you to personalize and customize GDB to have just the tools you need. The previous article, 'Fun with strace and GDB', covered the basics of using these tools to explore your system and attach to programs that are already running to see what they were doing.

There's an interesting challenge in writing a good book about programming. At a certain point, you'll lose the newbies and alienate the technical. Below the line is a safe introductory book, above it is aimed at a smaller crowd. We had an opportunity review No Starch Press' Object-Oriented PHP, and found it fits nicely into the gap.

These easy to understand XForms tips show you how to get the most out of your XForms. In this XForms and Perl tip, you'll learn how to submit an XForms form using POST to a Perl script, and capture the data for later use. This tip shows you how to access the submitted XForms data using a Java servlet. This tip looks at both the XForms and Ajax versions and how to combine the two techniques and in this XForms and PHP tip, you will see how to create a PHP script that can receive and work with XML data submitted by an XForms form.

"This article introduces text presentation in the Eclipse C/C++ Development Tooling. Text presentation is an important advantage of the CDT. The clear, multicolored display makes it easy to read and navigate through code. Understanding how this works is crucial, whether you want to understand the CDT code or build a full-featured source editor of your own. Further, the mechanisms that make CDT text presentation possible are also needed for a more important capability: automatic parsing."

You've decided to expand your horizons. You've been programming exclusively in Java (or C++, or Perl, or Ruby) for a while now. You're happy and productive, but you have this nagging feeling that you're solving problems by rote rather than thinking as creatively as you once did. Learning a new language, especially one that forces you to re-examine some of your notions about software development, may be just the ticket.

"The wxWidgets toolkit contains powerful, cross-platform tools for graphical user interface development. In addition to its native C++, several languages offer wrappers for use with the toolkit. Learn how to use the wxWidgets toolkit to create elegant and highly useful GUIs in your language of choice."

With the Ruby on Rails popularity soaring higher, the desire of many developers for an integrated development environment that makes Rails even more accessible is increasing fast. RadRails, an eclipse-based IDE for Ruby on Rails, fulfills that need for most developers. Learn about installing RadRails, the structure and use of the application window, and the steps in developing an application.

The NetBeans project recently released the second beta of version 5.5 of its IDE. At the same time, NetBeans 6.0 is at its second milestone release. Artima spoke with NetBeans evangelist Tim Boudreau about new NetBeans features and about the NetBeans community. In Part I, he discusses upcoming features of NetBeans 6.0, and compares the NetBeans and Eclipse approaches to open-source IDE development. In Part II, Boudreau talks about the NetBeans rich-client platform, how the NetBeans Matisse UI builder and GroupLayout layout manager address the challenges of cross-platform and internationalized UI design, and about support for languages other than Java in NetBeans.

The open source wxWidgets library makes programming GUIs incredibly easy, far easier than with most platform APIs. Jeff Cogswell shows how this handy C++ library can shorten your programming time with powerful classes that are simple to use.

By picking the brains of Web developers and IT recruiters, eWEEK selected 10 programming languages that are a bonus for developers to add to their resumes. Even better, they're great jumping-off points, with loads of job opportunities for younger recruits.

Mike Hall caught up with Don Syme recently and recorded a few interviews covering Don's favorite programming language: F#. Don has done many great things over there in MSR Cambridge including creating everybody's favorite C# feature, Generics. Well, he also developed (with his team) the research programming language, F#. "F# is a programming language that provides the much sought-after combination of type safety, performance and scripting, with all the advantages of running on a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system."

This is a feature release of Subversion, featuring BDB 4.4 and repository auto-recovery support, a new tool for synchronizing repositories (svnsync), major speed enhancements in the versioned filesystem and the working copy, and of course the usual host of bugfixes and minor enhancements. Additionally, check this article on how to Set up Subversion and websvn on Debian.

Jim Hugunin is interviewed and presents a screencast of Iron Python. Among the demos are an XAML application with speech synthesis, seamless debugging of C# and Python within the same solution, and scripting of PowerShell.