General Development Archive

"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."

"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.

"The Interchange File Format (IFF) standard is widely regarded as long dead, and indeed, no one uses it anymore, except that nearly everyone uses it sometimes. Many believe the IFF standard is an Amiga graphics standard, and certainly, there have been a great many graphics files saved in the IFF format. However, IFF is not just a graphics format. It has been used for graphics, audio, text, saved games, and more. Electronic Arts actually developed the standard, back when it was a software company and not just a video game company."

In in Part 1 of this series, you'll learn how to use the LDAP Tools for Eclipse to configure Geronimo's built-in Apache Directory LDAP server. In Part 2 you'll query the LDAP server and update the Web page using Ajax. You'll also get familiar with some of the techniques to build LDAP-centric applications using the toolsets available in the Java platform and Ajax.

"There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we create software. Contrary to conventional wisdom, unreliability is not an essential characteristic of complex software programs. In this article, I will propose a silver bullet solution to the software reliability and productivity crisis. The solution will require a radical change in the way we program our computers. I will argue that the main reason that software is so unreliable and so hard to develop has to do with a custom that is as old as the computer: the practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software construction. I will argue further that moving to a signal-based, synchronous software model will not only result in an improvement of several orders of magnitude in productivity, but also in programs that are guaranteed free of defects, regardless of their complexity."