General Development Archive

This tutorial shows how to develop sockets-based networking applications (free reg. req.) using the Ruby language. You learn Ruby basics as well as the most important classes for sockets programming, and then look at a working chat application that illustrates these fundamentals. The tutorial finishes by exploring the higher-level classes that make it easy to build dynamic Web servers, mail servers and clients, and other application-layer protocols.

Slimline Open Firmware provides a largely machine-independent BIOS, illustrating what is needed to initialize and boot Linux. Three of the original SLOF developers discuss the development and usage of SLOF, initialization/boot source code for the PowerPC based on the Open Firmware standard.

Shlomi Fish has written a new essay titled "When C is the Best? (Tool for the Job)". Its theme is giving several reasons (besides high speed and low memory consumption) why some code should still be written in C.

A key part of the software architect's job is producing an architectural description of the system that defines the architecture's key functions, features, and characteristics for its stakeholders. Where do you start? What do you need to know? Nick Rozanski and Eóin Woods provide detailed answers to these questions, with useful suggestions on how to attack this fundamental document that underpins any development project.

For those of you interested in interesting hard-core C programming tricks: Adam Dunkels' protothreads library implements an unusually lightweight type of threads.

The new Visualizer feature in Visual Studio 2005 lets you see the data as the user sees it, or as the application uses it. And that will save you time and frustration. This article shows how it's done.

A small article introducing the a techniques involved in making C code extensible with the addition of the LUA scripting language.

The Scrum methodology can pose a challenge for software testers who are used to more traditional waterfall-inspired development processes. Jonathan Kohl relates his experiences working on Scrum teams who found some clear advantages in changing their methods.

Mark Mitchell announced the availability of GCC 4.0.2. He explains, "this release is a minor release, containing primarily fixes for regressions in GCC 4.0.1 relative to previous releases."

Strong error handling translates into more reliable applications. When you load an XML document, it is best to catch errors early, before they have a chance to damage other data. I have noticed that many companies and developers make the same mistakes when they adopt XML technology. Learn how to avoid common XML coding errors when you design and implement error handling in XML applications.

Amanith Framework is a cross-platform (Linux, Win32, Mac OX X, FreeBSD, Linux and IRIX) open source C++ framework for 2D and 3D vector graphics. The new 0.1.1 release adds support for 64bit. New supported environments are Linux x86_64 (with gcc) and Windows XP 64 (with Visual Studio .Net 2005).

Shed Skin is an experimental Python-to-C++ compiler. It can convert many Python programs into optimized C++ code, without any user intervention such as adding type declarations. Its main purpose is to optimize algorithmic-like Python code, by applying advanced global type inference techniques.

This tutorial, first in a series, will walk through installation of a bundled Apache Tomcat and Jakarta Slide that will result in a working content management system. In Part 2 of this series, learn how to download the sources, set up Eclipse, and build the Jakarta Slide open source CMS. Part 3 will walk through the customization of Jakarta Slide with Eclipse to create a new store back-end adapter that will allow documents stored to Slide to also be stored in a database. Other options for creating stores will also be explained. Note that a free registration is required to view these articles.

Most software is rigid in nature, making it difficult to reconfigure and modify without costly upgrades. Can software be made more plastic or malleable? Stephen Morris demonstrates how aspect-oriented programming provides an important tool in the race to achieve plastic software. If IBM's on-demand computing spreads across the industry, this requirement will become the rule rather than the exception. Will you be ready?