General Development Archive

This chapter provides an overview of object-oriented concepts and how they are implemented in REAL Basic, and gives some insight into strategies for executing your object-oriented programming effectively.

Robert Love posted in his blog some interesting screenshots: Thanks to beaglefs, a FUSE-based filesystem written by him that creates a real filesystem subtree from the results obtained from a beagle query) he was able to get a "people" subdirectory, with subdirectories named as your contacts, icons, and inside every directory links to all the documents related with that contact.

"Tracker is a powerful desktop-neutral first class object database, tag/metadata database, search tool and indexer. Tracker is also extremely fast and super efficient with your systems memory when compared with some other competing frameworks. It consists of a common object database that allows entities to have an almost infinte number of properties, metadata, a comprehensive database of keywords/tags and links to other entities. It has the ability to index, store, harvest metadata. retrieve and search all types of files and other first class objects."

The Open Source IDE Sharpdevelop 2.0 has been released. This IDE not only allows you to code in c#, VB.NET, and boo, but also offers features you won't find elsewhere: conversion between the supported programming languages, support for .Net and Mono, Winforms, and GTK#. View the full feature tour or download Sharpdevelop and start into open source development for both Windows and Linux in one IDE.

In this second article of a two-part series, we demonstrate TurboGears, another open source MVC-style Web application framework based on Python. This article shows how to use TurboGears to create a Web-based shopping application and concludes with a comparison between Turbogears and Django.

The GNU Compiler Collection contains frontends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada as well as libraries for these languages. In this version: important security improvements on the generated code. Various optimizer improvements. Many Java (GJC) fixes and improvements. Support has been added for the IBM System z9 109, the MorphoSys architecture. Many other changes.

When developping in a large team, you have to make convention about the use of tab in source code. This article suggests a better solution: rather than saying that a tab character (a 'hard tab') will move the cursor until the cursor's position is a multiple of N characters, we should say that a tab character is a delimiter between table cells. This has a nice side effect, since proportional fonts can now be used.

InformIT features four interesting programming articles this week: "Design Patterns in Java: Adapter", "C# Basic Concepts", "An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming for C++ Game Developers" and "A Taste of Erlang, a Dynamic, Asynchronous Message-Passing Language".

The fate of Borland's developer tools group will finally be sealed in the next couple of months, as the software vendor works to finalize deal with a buyer. Nick Jackson, managing director of Borland DTG in the Asia-Pacific region, told ZDNet that the company, which announced its intention to divest its developer product lines on Feb. 8, has attracted about 16 qualified bidders so far.

A series of patches has been proposed on the Linux kernel mailing list earlier by a team of engineers from Red Hat, ClusterFS, IBM, and Bull to extend the Ext3 filesystem, adding support for very large filesystems. After a long discussion, the developers came forward with a plan to roll these changes into a new version: Ext4. LWN covered the changes as well as the arguments put forward for a new filesystem a few weeks back.

"Ruby on Rails is an open source Web framework causing a lot of excitement among Web developers. By supporting agile development techniques and a philosophy of "convention over configuration," it has enabled many developers to radically reduce the time and pain involved in creating Web applications. Because Rails emerged from the open source world, until recently you had to use MySQL or PostgreSQL to work with it. Now that IBM has released a DB2 adapter for Rails, it's possible to write efficient Web applications on top of your existing DB2 database investment. This article highlights some of the things that makes Rails exceptional, explains how to get going with Rails and DB2, and leads you through your first Web application in Rails."

Sometimes a quick throwaway script is all you need to analyze and test a program. Mike Kelly presents examples showing when ad hoc testing can do the trick, and when you really need to go the framework route.

"Today the growing popularity of the Internet and its inherent advantages have motivated developers and IT departments to migrate complex C/C++ business and scientific applications to a Web-based environment. XML-RPC is a perfect mechanism to integrate existing C/C++ programs with other client-side technologies. This article is a step-by-step guide to exposing C++ methods as services. It includes sample code snippets for C++ integration using an open source XML-RPC Library."

"Learn how IBM DB2 9 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows exploits multiple page sizes. With the introduction of the POWER5+ processor architecture, the IBM AIX 5L operating system added support for a new 64-kilobyte page with properties that are similar to the current default 4-kilobyte pages. In addition, AIX 5L Version 5.3 TL04 also introduced a new 16-gigabyte huge-page feature for this hardware architecture. DB2 9 automatically exploits the 64-kilobyte pages to deliver high performance for database applications on this platform. In addition, DB2 also supports the enablement of 16-gigabyte huge pages."