General Development Archive

GNU Project Debugger: More Fun with GDB

Submitted by anonymous 2006-10-09 General Development No Comments

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.

The Streamlined Metamodel Takes Ruby on Rails Higher

Submitted by anonymous 2006-10-06 General Development 3 Comments

It was just a matter of time before someone built a more effective scaffolding system for Ruby on Rails. Streamlined is a framework with a rich metamodel that enables application generation that improves scaffolding productivity. Part 1 of this two-part series, demonstrates Ruby on Rails scaffolding, illustrating its limitations, and how Streamlined can improve it. Part 2 explores how the impressive metamodel behind Streamlined enables customizations.

Review: Object-Oriented PHP

Adam Scheinberg 2006-10-06 General Development 11 Comments

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.

Using XForms with Ajax, Java, Perl, and PHP

Submitted by anonymous 2006-10-05 General Development 8 Comments

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.

Hello, ATL Server: a Modern C++ Web Platform

Eugenia Loli 2006-10-01 General Development 10 Comments

ATL Server is an extension of ATL that enables you to write ISAPI applications and bring your C++ skills to the World Wide Web. Learn how ATL Server works in this sample chapter.

Presenting Source Code Text in the Eclipse CDT

Thom Holwerda 2006-09-25 General Development No Comments

"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."

Smalltalk for Everyone Else

Eugenia Loli 2006-09-25 General Development 15 Comments

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.

POSIX Asynchronous I/O

Eugenia Loli 2006-09-24 General Development 11 Comments

Used judiciously, asynchronous I/O (AIO) can provide a significant speed benefit, says David Chisnall. Perhaps enough to help your program overcome the fact that modern processors can really zoom, while hard drives still drag.

Build Cross-Platform GUIs Using wxWidgets

Submitted by IdaAshley 2006-09-22 General Development 15 Comments

"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."

Make Ruby on Rails Easy with RadRails Eclipse IDE

Submitted by anonymous 2006-09-19 General Development No Comments

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.

Submitted by TheMonoTone 2006-09-19 General Development 9 Comments

"It's been nearly 20 months since the last major release of the Python programming language, and version 2.5 is probably the most significant new release of Python since 2.2. The latest release includes a variety of additions to the standard library, language extensions, and performance optimizations." More links here.

Submitted by Moochman 2006-09-18 General Development 8 Comments

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.

Programming C++ GUIs with the wxWidgets Library

Eugenia Loli 2006-09-17 General Development 18 Comments

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.

How to Use Eclipse for C and C++ Development

Eugenia Loli 2006-09-16 General Development 22 Comments

Mike McCullough reviews briefly on the history of the Eclipse framework and provides details and perspective on new additions to the Web-based IDE, such as Eclipse Plugin Central (EPIC), Callisto, BIRT, and CDT. Also, learn Eclipse Callisto release GMF in 15 minutes.

10 Programming Languages You Should Learn Right Now

Eugenia Loli 2006-09-15 General Development 88 Comments

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.

Don Syme: Introduction to F#

Thom Holwerda 2006-09-13 General Development 21 Comments

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."

Improve Mashup Data Cache Performance with pureXML

Submitted by anonymous 2006-09-12 General Development No Comments

Part 1 of this series discussed a mashup application, which begins to draw data from several services and combines it. Now we will discuss how to save mashup request results to a DB2 9 database, plus take some of the load off of those external services and improve performance dramatically with pureXML.

Subversion 1.4.0 Released

Eugenia Loli 2006-09-12 General Development 12 Comments

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.

Submitted by Lambda 2006-09-09 General Development 8 Comments

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.

UNIX Error Reporting in the Standard C Library

Eugenia Loli 2006-09-08 General Development 12 Comments

Proper error detection and recovery is often ignored by UNIX developers. The lack of exceptions from the C language and the rudimentary error mechanisms from the standard C library certainly contribute to this. This article familiarizes you with the UNIX standard error reporting mechanism, the errno global variable. You'll also learn about a couple of associated global variables ( sys_nerr and sys_errlist) and the standard functions that help you report errors to the user and (hopefully) encourages you to report and handle errors in a user-friendly way.