General Development Archive

POSIX Parallel Programming, Part 2: Message Passing

Eugenia Loli 2007-01-13 General Development 7 Comments

Following on from the tutorial in part 1 of this series, David Chisnall explores some more-flexible mechanisms for allowing processes to communicate on a POSIX-compliant system.

Submitted by ganges master 2007-01-12 General Development No Comments

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."

Guest post by alcibiades 2007-01-09 General Development 13 Comments

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.

The D Programming Language

Thom Holwerda 2007-01-02 General Development 75 Comments

"D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and reliability. D is statically typed, and compiles direct to native code. It's multiparadigm: supporting imperative, object oriented, and template metaprogramming styles. It's a member of the C syntax family, and its look and feel is very close to C++'s. See this comparison of D with C, C++, C#, and Java."

Get the Most Out of Z Shell

Submitted by bluevoodoo 2006-12-26 General Development 7 Comments

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: Open-source Cocoa for Windows

Submitted by anonymous 2006-12-24 General Development 18 Comments

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."

Lazy Programming and Evaluation

Submitted by IdaAshley 2006-12-20 General Development 25 Comments

Lazy programming is a general concept of delaying the processing of a function or request until the results are needed. This concept has numerous applications, from the obvious to the obscure. Thinking in terms of lazy programming can help you rid your code of unneeded computation and restructure programs to be more problem-oriented.

Should Javascript Get More Respect?

Submitted by anonymous 2006-12-19 General Development 31 Comments

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.

Manipulating C++ Graph Data Structures with the Boost Graph Library

Eugenia Loli 2006-12-03 General Development 31 Comments

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.

Submitted by Lambda 2006-11-27 General Development 39 Comments

"Haskell is a valuable language for a lot of different reasons, but the most important one is that it changes the way that you think about programming. Haskell does things in a very different way from the imperative languages that most of us are familiar with. And it's an extremely well-designed language, so there isn't a ton of crap standing between you and the concepts that you can learn from it."

What’s Coming in C++ ’09

Submitted by Esther Schindler 2006-11-19 General Development 77 Comments

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.

Submitted by bsnipes 2006-11-17 General Development 3 Comments

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.

D-Bus 1.0 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-11-14 General Development 35 Comments

"D-Bus 1.0 was officially released last week. Developed by FreeDesktop.org, D-Bus is an open source interprocess communication system created to promote interoperability between various Linux desktop environments by providing a cohesive common platform for internal system and application messaging. D-Bus, which has been under active development for four years, is already used extensively in the GNOME environment and will eventually replace DCOP in KDE."

Developing with Apache Derby – Hitting the Trifecta

Submitted by BlueVoodoo 2006-11-13 General Development 3 Comments

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.

Dynamic XForms with JavaScript, DOM

Submitted by IdaAshley 2006-11-11 General Development 2 Comments

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.

Submitted by raoulduke 2006-11-06 General Development 4 Comments

In this article there is an introductionary look into the vDSP and vecLib libraries which are part of the Accelerate framework on Mac OS X. By using properly aligned arrays and manually vectorized code you can increase the performance (5-10 times) of your hot loops by large amounts.

Behind the Scenes of Objective-C 2.0

Eugenia Loli 2006-11-05 General Development 33 Comments

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.

Why Software Sucks

Eugenia Loli 2006-11-03 General Development 53 Comments

"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.

Writing A Lisp Interpreter In Haskell

Eugenia Loli 2006-11-01 General Development 34 Comments

"The article is about my experience with Haskell and the process of working with it. I will describe which features of Haskell I used to implement particular aspects of my interpreter, how they're different from the object oriented world, why they helped me get things done faster, and how I had to change my program whenever my initial efforts took me to a dead end. While the jury's still out how well Haskell performs in other domains (I'm just starting my web application project) I hope this article sparks your interest in this beautiful language and explains some things programmers new to Haskell often find confusing." More here.

Submitted by gonzo 2006-10-29 General Development 13 Comments

NetBeans 5.5 has been released. "NetBeans IDE 5.5 builds on the success of NetBeans 5.0 and adds support for Java EE 5 and Sun Java System Application Server PE 9. Got Web 2.0? Of course! NetBeans 5.5 generates JAX-WS 2.0 artifacts for Java SE 6 and Java EE 5 projects. We included Java Persistence support and support for Enterprise Java Beans 3. Additionally, there is the new Subversion support module and an updated module for the GUI builder, both available on the 5.5 Update Center." A new preview build of NetBeans 6 has also been released.