General Development Archive

"With December upon us, rife with rumors of labor disputes (again!) at the North Pole, it seems about time to talk about the ELF standard. ELF (ELF is an acronym for Executable and Linking Format) is a standard for object modules, libraries, executables, and core files. Many UNIX and UNIX-like systems use ELF, and the ELF standard has contributed substantially to the development of compiler toolchains and debugging tools for a variety of systems."

"Ruby on Rails is just one facet of what makes Ruby great, just like EJB is only part of the Java enterprise platform. Andrew Glover digs beneath the hype for a look at what Java developers can do with Ruby, all by itself. Ruby's syntax is quite different from that of the Java language, but it's amazingly easy to pick up. Moreover, some things are just plain easier to do in Ruby than they are in the Java language."

The Amanith Framework is a cross-platform (Linux, Win32, MacOS X, FreeBSD and IRIX) open source C++ framework for vector graphics. The new 0.2 release adds support for MacOS X Tiger (XCode 2.2) and implements a new drawboard in OpenVG/SVG style, built on top of OpenGL. Version 0.2 has been released today.

"HTML isn't a very good language for making Web pages. However, it has been a very good language for making the Web. This article examines the future of HTML and what it will mean to Web authors, browser and developers. It covers the incremental approach embodied by the WHATWG specifications and the radical cleanup of XHTML proposed by the W3C. Additionally, the author gives an overview of the W3C's new Rich Client Activity."

This article describes how to use Subversion with the Eclipse IDE. In particular, it examines the installation and use of the Subclipse plug-in. Along the way, I also show you how to use the resulting configuration to modify or extend the Subclipse plug-in itself.

Strings - such as command-line arguments, environment variables, and console input - are of special concern in secure programming because they comprise most of the data exchanged between an end user and a software system. This chapter covers the security issues with strings and how you can sidestep them.

Scala is a modern multi-paradigm programming language running on top of a Java VM or .NET runtime. Recently version 1.4.0.3 has been released. Scala smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages. In Scala, every value is an object and the language supports OOP for instance via subclassing , traits, and mixins. Scala is also a functional language in the sense that every function is a value. The language supports anonymous, higher-order and nested functions as well as currying. There is also integrated support for pattern matching, parametric polymorphism, etc.

"Watch the 2005 Borland Developer Conference Tuesday presentation and demonstration of the new Borland Developer Studio 2006. Michael Swindell presents an overview of BDS 2006, Allen Bauer demonstrates the new IDE enhancements, David I demonstrates the new C++ language support and the ALM integrations into StarTeam and CaliberRM, and Michael Swindell demonstrates ECO III."

The ICT-Business is known for strategic terms. One of those terms, which was used quite a lot over this year, is services. The term is interpretable; however, the focus was on technical concepts implemented to serve for a sharply rendered use case, like managing user data and authentication. Services in that sense are served over a type of network. Despite the first impression, they are not served to a user but to a calling application. This client utilizes one or more services for internal purposes. Though, the user may be expected to provide data (the password, for example) or to wait and receive a gathered result.

This article shows how to build an object-oriented graphics layer in PHP. Using object-oriented systems can make building complex graphics much easier than building the graphics using the primitives in the standard PHP library. Plus, you have the option of rendering to any size or type of image you like and the longer-term ability to use the same code to render to different types of media, such as SVG, PDF, Flash, and others.

The Eclipse platform allows pluggable components -- plug-ins -- to help create a rich graphical user interface (GUI) application. With Eclipse you can enhance a user's app experience by adding views to the GUI. This article will teach you how Eclipse makes it easy to link views and provides ways to adapt view linking to non-UI scenarios.

In an email to the GCC development mailing list, one of the main developers of LLVM revealed that his recent employment at Apple has been focused on integrating LLVM with GCC, and is now proposing a long-term merge of the two projects.

Unsustainable development is an all-too common situation today in the software industry. Unsustainable development is a development pace that is typified by stress, frustration, and a sense of not being in control. It is most evidenced by a continually increasing cost of change and defect rate and a corresponding decreasing ability to respond to changing conditions. This chapter explains how unsustainable development begins, and how to head it off before it spirals out of control.

As part of a larger article about C++'s evolution, DevSource reports on a minor war in the C++ standards community. Don't get excited: the fighting is already over. At issue is whether Microsoft's compiler can say that std::copy is "deprecated" (which usually means "this feature will not be in the next version of the language") when they really mean "our compiler suggests you do not use it." Is this a silly semantic dispute or another sign that Microsoft is trying to hijaack the language?