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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"IronPython is about bringing together two worlds. The key value in IronPython is that it is both a true implementation of Python and is seamlessly integrated with the .NET platform. Most features were easy and natural choices where the language and the platform fit together with almost no work. However, there were challenges from the obvious cases like exception type hierarchies to the somewhat esoteric challenges concerning different methods on strings." More here.

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.

"Twilight is an imperative, object oriented, general purpose programming language. The guiding principles of Twilight are simplicity, practicality, and orthogonality. It is a language which is easy to learn and to be productive in. An experienced programmer in Python, Java, C# or C++ will be able to pick up Twilight in a short period of time."

"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."

This article addresses the most commonly encountered scenarios and errors while porting Fortran or any UNIX or Linux-based applications on different systems. Discover how to port Fortran-based High Performance Computing applications, such as computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling, weather modeling, and linear algebra packages, using IBM XL compilers and gnu compilers on large clusters.

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.

Learn the method for automating updates to a library of XML files so that they all conform to an updated XML schema in this two part tutorial series. In Part 1, you learn the steps in the entire process, and then create an XSLT stylesheet to update the XML files. In Part 2, you learn to install, configure, and run Ant and Java to iteratively transform your XML files based on the updates specified in your XSLT stylesheet.

"The GNU Linear Programming Kit is a powerful, proven tool for solving numeric problems with multiple constraints. Get an introduction to GLPK, the glpsol client utility, and the GNU MathProg language to help find the best solutions to complex numeric problems. Then, learn to solve the problem of optimizing the operations for Giapetto's Woodcarving, Inc., a fictional toy manufacturer."

With highly expressive syntax that is easy to read, write, and maintain, dynamic programming languages like Python and Ruby are extremely conducive to rapid development. Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have observed growing interest in dynamic programming, and plan to integrate more extensive support for dynamic language features in their respective managed language platforms. Elsewhere, check PHP for .NET.