General Development Archive

This was a mixed Thanksgiving weekend for open source communities. We had a renewed PR onslaught from proprietary software vendors ("Linux is anti-commercial") and even hardball politics. But there were lot of interesting announcements made: Firefox 1.5, codenamed "Deer Park" will finally be unwrapped on November 29th (I have been using the beta, and I love it). Among all this activity and with little fan-fare, the Amanda project launched its new Wiki and Forums.

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.

Ultimate++ 511 was released. U++ is a C++ cross-platform rapid application development suite, where "rapid" is achieved by the 'smart and aggresive' use of C++ features. The main improvement of the new version is the Assist++ (code completion, browsing and transformation tool) in TheIDE. See an overview of the library.

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.

This article looks at the impact of schema evolution on the application and walks the reader through a usage scenario to illustrate the ease of setting up a PHP environment; the ease of integrating DB2 native XML functionality with PHP applications, including Web services written in PHP and XQuery.

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.

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.