General Development Archive

"This website will provide you with lessons and quality material to learn basics of C language programming in just a few days. All you have to do read trough my lessons. You will notice I'm putting new lessons up every day or two. It would be practical if you had Visual Studio installed on your computer and used it parallel to these lessons, but it isn't neccessary."

"OpenLaszlo is a rich client application architecture that uses Macromedia to build Flash widgets with XML and JavaScript logic. This article details the basic concepts of OpenLaszlo, and gives examples of situations in which an OpenLaszlo solution might be beneficial and it also details how it compensates for the shortcomings of Ajax dynamic web development."

"Valgrind is a CPU simulator which is used by KDE and many other projects to profile and debug our programmes. In the interview below Valgrind author Julian Seward talks to KDE Dot News about why he developed Valgrind, how you can use it and, most importantly, where the name comes from."

"The introduction of new object-oriented programming features in PHP V5 has significantly raised the level of functionality in this programming language. Not only can you have private, protected, and public member variables and functions - just as you would in the Java, C++, or C# programming languages - but you can also create objects that bend at runtime, creating new methods and member variables on the fly. You can't do that with the Java, C++, or C# languages. This kind of functionality makes super-rapid application development systems, such as Ruby on Rails, possible."

Should you make your C++ classes more intelligent or centralize the intelligence and use dumbed-down surrounding classes? The natural world tends to prefer a pass-the-parcel style of distributed intelligence, which reduces single points of failure and potentially leads to more stable systems. In this article, Stephen Morris shows you how to raise the IQ of your classes while simultaneously allowing other (possibly) more-qualified classes to handle specific problems. The chain of responsibility pattern provides an elegant model for facilitating this behavior.

Remote Python Call is a transparent infrastructure for RPC and distributed computing with the python language. It gives you complete and seamless control over a remote python interpreter and lets you execute code either synchronously or asynchronously (which means remote operations do not block and return AsyncResults). It is ideal for managing distributed tests on several platforms.

"I've always assumed that ifup and ifdown were conditional commands that performed their assigned duties only if the interface device in question was up or down, as the command might be. I was dead wrong. I blame my mistake on being a programmer, rather than being stupid, but it's simply too close to call. The if in ifup, ifdown, and ifstatus is not a programmer's if - it's an abbreviation for interface. On the off chance that I'm not the only one who has misunderstood these commands because of their rather iffy names, here's what they really do and how they are used."

Agile development sounds great; what could go wrong? Matt Heusser examines some of the myths, mysteries, and classic mistakes in Agile development, including some things to consider before jumping into Agile with both feet.

"R is a rich statistical environment, released as free software, which includes a programming language, an interactive shell, and extensive graphing capabilities. This installment discusses creating reusable and modular components for R development. This article follows up two prior installments and looks at the object-orientation in R along with some additional general programming concepts in R."

One of the most under-used programming techniques -- Metaprogramming -- programming with code generators or writing programs that themselves write code, has many uses in large-scale computer programming. This article shows you some tools needed to do Metaprogramming in Scheme, as well as provide several metaprogramming examples. To determine which problems are best solved with a code-generating programs, take a look at this introduction to Metaprogramming article, which teaches you why metaprogramming is necessary.

For years computer interfaces have been held back by two dimensions. The power and flexibility of three dimensional interfaces have remained the stuff of science fiction movies, video games and very custom high-end applications. Aoren Software now brings that power to everyday applications and operating systems through a window server and framework technology called Vision. Vision was designed from the ground up to break away from old paradigms and provide the interface needs of the next generation. Application developers can get their hands on the technology with the developer preview release and start creating programs that have previously resided only in the imagination.

"It's cool to say you have a dual-core machine, but in the grand scheme of things, having it doesn't make much difference in performance. If, however, your software can share the computational burden across your collection of processor cores, it's a different kettle of fish. Then you actually get more work done in a given amount of time. The technique is called thread-level parallelism, more commonly known as threading, and it requires some mental adjustment on the part of the developer."

Very little software is written once, installed, and then never changed over the course of its lifetime. And yet, the most prevalent development practices used in the industry treat change as an afterthought. This chapter will teach you to not only anticipate change in your software but develop specifically with change in mind. Also, this chapter provides a set of guidelines and formulas to think about when preparing large product teams for the large meetings that move their work forward.

"The GRand Unified Boot loader, or GRUB, has all but replaced the default boot loader on many GNU/Linux distributions. It includes some conveniences over LILO, the LInux LOader. One advantage is not having to remember to run /sbin/lilo every time you make a configuration change. It also can function as a boot loader for removable media such as floppies, CD-R/W and USB flash memory keys. It is short-sided to view GRUB only as a boot loader to be installed on a hard drive of a GNU/Linux system. Combined with a few other utilities, GRUB can be a powerful and good-looking tool for your home, organization or workplace."