General Development Archive

"Generally, file systems are not considered 'sexy'. When a young programmer wants to do something really cool, his or her first thought is generally not 'dude, two words... File system'. However, I am what is politely termed 'different'. I find file systems very interesting and they have seldom been more so than they are right now. Hans Reiser is working on getting Reiser4 integrated into the Linux kernel, the BSDs are working on getting a journaled file system together, and Sun Microsystems just recently released a beta of ZFS into OpenSolaris. This is an excellent time to be me. This article will be on file system design and specifically the new file systems that are just appearing. We will start with the basics, UFS/FFS, and then proceed to our first modern file system, XFS.

"Eclipse is quickly becoming the de facto environment for developers and its popularity is increasing rapidly. Here are three excellent tutorials to expand your Eclipse skills: Help your customers use your Eclipse-based product or plug-in, by developing interactive cheat sheets. Learn the ins and outs of BIRT, a plug-in suite that allows you to extract information, analyze it, then generate report summaries and charts. Make your Perl application development run smoothly with the Eclipse EPIC plug-in, which teaches you how to develop Perl applications quickly, create a perldoc, and more."

"FreeNAS is a free NAS server, supporting: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS protocols, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 16MB once installed on Ccompact flash, hard drive or USB key. The minimal FreeBSD distribution, Web interface, PHP scripts and documentation are based on M0n0wall."

"Most Web applications use a request/response model that gets an entire HTML page from the server. The result is a back-and-forth that usually involves clicking a button, waiting for the server, clicking another button, and then waiting some more. With AJAX and the XMLHttpRequest object, you can use a request/response model that never leaves users waiting for a server to respond. In this article, Brett McLaughlin shows you how to create XMLHttpRequest instances in a cross-browser way, construct and send requests, and respond to the server."

"Perl 6 is the long-awaited redesign and reimplementation of the popular and venerable Perl programming language. It's not out yet - nor is there an official release date - but the design and implementations make continual progress. Innumerable programmers, hackers, system administrators, hobbyists, and dabblers write Perl 5 quite successfully. The language doesn't have the marketing budget of large consulting companies, hardware manufacturers, or tool vendors pushing it, yet people still use it to get their jobs done. Why argue with that success? Why redesign a language that's working for so many people and in so many domains? Sure, Perl 5 has some warts, but it does a lot of things very well."

"When that high-profile project just ain't gonna happen, how can you ensure that your head isn't on the chopping block? Matt Heusser provides some practical suggestions for passing on the bad news without just passing the blame."

REAL Software announced today that REALbasic 2006 Release 1 is shipping. This new product features enhanced compatibility with Visual Basic, simplified localization and improved reliability and stability.

"This time of year, even the most hard-core geek thinks thoughts of festive cheer. And there's nothing like, oh, say, a beer, to enhance the mood of seasonal glee. And after a few beers comes the song. '99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer'... Oh - sorry - where was I? What, you ask, does such a scurrilous ditty have to do with serious developers? Well, nothing - except that it was the vector for an entertaining and informative experiment in programming."

"This is a guide to create or restore images of your partitions using the great open source tool Partimage. It provides information on how to do this locally or across the network, by setting up a Partimaged Server. I guess this info is non distribution specific, since we will work from a Rescue environment. Partimage is a command line tool with a basic ncurses user interface. For information about the supported filesystems, you can check its homepage."

"From when to choose mobile Web services to the overall design guidelines to the value types to use in mobile Web services, this article addresses many of the design considerations you need to ponder when developing Web services for mobile devices. Learn how to decide when to use Web services, what things to consider when you design Web services, and what to keep in mind when planning mobile Web services."

In this article, Bjarne Stroustrup (the father of C++) talks about the next version of the widely used general-purpose programming language. This next version, called C++0x for now, will most likely be finished by 2009. The article discusses new language features, for example concepts - which specify the properties required of a type and can be used with templates. Stroupstrup also talks about new standard C++ libraries.

Iron Python 1.0 Beta 1 has been released, this build includes many bug fixes for issues reported to the team by the community, and also has many changes which give it better compatibility with CPython 2.4. From the site: "With this build we've addressed the majority of major design issues for a 1.0 final. We're not sure that you'll agree with all of our answers, so pick it up and let us know what you think".