General Development Archive

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.

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.

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.

"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."

"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."

"Alky is a tool that allows you to convert a Windows executable to a Mac OS X or Linux binary. We are focused on high-end gaming at the moment, though we will support other applications in the future. Our binary translation layer is already working fully for OS X and Linux support is in progress. Of course, Windows applications use a very different set of libraries from Linux or OS X applications so we are also working on a library called LibAlky that will provide those Windows libraries to the application." One of the project's members is Cody Brocious, one of the developers behind PyMusique.