General Development Archive

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.

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.

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.

What is the future of programming? I retain a romantic belief in the potential of scientific revolution. To recite one example, the invention of Calculus provided a revolutionary language for the development of Physics. I believe that there is a “Calculus of programming” waiting to be discovered, which will analogously revolutionize the way we program. Notation does matter." More here.

"Concurrent programming is difficult, yet many technologists predict the end of Moore's law will be answered with increasingly parallel computer architectures - multicore or chip multiprocessors. If we hope to achieve continued performance gains, programs must be able to exploit this parallelism. Automatic exploitation of parallelism in sequential programs, through either computer architecture techniques such as dynamic dispatch or automatic parallelization of sequential programs, offers one possible technical solution. However, many researchers agree that these automatic techniques have been pushed to their limits and can exploit only modest parallelism. Thus, programs themselves must become more concurrent."

Adam Dunkels, well-known author of the Contiki operating system and the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack, has written a really small BASIC interpreter called uBASIC in about 700 lines of C code. It is intended to be a very small scripting language for systems where memory really is at a premium such as deeply embedded systems which may have as little as a few hundreds of bytes of RAM. It provides an interesting look into how to write a very lightweight script interpreter.