General Development Archive

Subversion is versatile, feature-rich and works well with Xcode. Read this article to learn how to install and set it up on Mac OS X Server.

Microsoft is offering Visual Studio Express Editions free of charge until 7th November 2006. Here's the faq.

The T2 Project released the final release for the 2.1 series. T2 is a system development environment that allows the automated build for all sorts of architectures including utilization of alternative C libraries such as DietlibC or uClibC for really tiny embedded systems - including support for cross compiling, ccache and distcc. Normal deskop and servers builds are supported as well. The future aganda includes expanding to allow builds for non-Linux kernels such as BSD, Darwin and Solaris.

E4X is an extension of JavaScript that adds direct support for XML to the language. So what is direct support and why is it valuable? Get an introduction to ECMAScript for XML (E4X), a simple extension to JavaScript that makes XML scripting very simple.

GNU Classpath now features more efficient painting for large Free Swing GUIs. Improved accessibility support. HttpURLConnection rewrite. Official CORBA VMCID assigned. Start of RMI over IIOP support. Qt4 support for OS-X. Much improved Free Swing Metal theme. Free Swing Demo includes theme switcher example (Metal, Ocean, GNU). JBoss now starts up and Jonas testsuite passes for 95%. Support for the javax.sound.midi framework and experimental DSSI and ALSA service providers. Early version of the popular StAX API. Now has 96% coverage of 1.4 API.

The upcoming 1.3.0 version of the XINS technology will allow requests from browsers, SOAP clients and XML-RPC. All at the same time and without the need to reconfigure or redeploy the server. The trick is an HTTP parameter "_convention" to be supplied in the request URL. When this parameter is set to "_xins-soap", then the request is interpreted as a SOAP request. If it's "_xins-xmlrpc" then XML-RPC is assumed.

"A file system is something which computer users hear about all the time, but many do not know very much about. This article is going to be a short guide, which goes over the basics of file systems so you will at least know enough to get by. This is a subject which can get as complicated as you want to make it, but a little knowledge can go a long way."

Writing programs that generate other programs may seem esoteric, but once you learn why metaprogramming is so powerful, it's a skill you'll want to cultivate. This article explains why you might consider metaprogramming and looks at some of the components of this art.

For years, the goal of creating a truly responsive Web application was hampered by one simple fact of Web development: To change the information on part of a page, a user must reload the entire page. Not anymore. Thanks to asynchronous JavaScript and XML, we can now request new content from the server and change just part of a page. This tutorial explains how to use Ajax with PHP and introduces Sajax (Simple Ajax Toolkit), a tool written in PHP that lets you integrate PHP with JavaScript.

This month's magazine focuses on what goes on behind the scenes. Whether you're developing for Fedora Core, writing scripts to make your life easier, integrating Java applications, or simply trying to get better performance out of your systems, the Red Hat Magazine has advice to offer.

For a conventional software tester, an Extreme Programming project may be an intimidating challenge. Testers often find that they're not welcome on XP projects, but Jonathan Kohl shares how skilled testing can overcome such difficulties. Jonathan discusses lessons he learned from working on two different XP project teams, only one of which initially welcomed his testing and feedback.

Ruby is a single inheritance language, but it offers some advanced features that Java technology does not, such as closures (think anonymous inner classes on steroids) and mix-ins. This article introduces using the Ruby Development Tools plug-in for Eclipse, which allows Eclipse to become a first-rate Ruby development environment. Ruby developers who want to learn how to use the rich infrastructure of the Eclipse community to support their language will benefit, as will Java developers who are interested in using Ruby.

Popularized through its use in a number of well-known Web application services like GMail, Google Maps, Flickr, and Odeo.com, AJAX provides Web developers with a way of expanding the value and function of their Web applications by using asynchronous XML messaging. This article shows you how to implement a Web browser-based SOAP Web services client using the Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) design pattern.

Throughout the software industry, there are a lot of great ideas on how to effectively develop software, and a lot of knowledge around technologies, such as J2EE, and .NET, various tool environments. This article introduces the need for an open source process framework and the benefits of such a process to different audiences. It elaborates on the proposal to create an Eclipse technology project.