General Development Archive

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.

This tutorial describes how to do automated server backups with the tool rdiff-backup. rdiff-backup lets you make backups over a network using SSH so that the data transfer is encrypted. The use of SSH makes rdiff-backup very secure because noone can read the data that is being transferred. rdiff-backup makes incremental backups, thus saving bandwidth.

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.

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.

"Boo is a new object oriented statically typed programming language for the Common Language Infrastructure with a python inspired syntax and a special focus on language and compiler extensibility." Version 0.7 was released on Sunday.

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.

This tutorial shows how to develop sockets-based networking applications using Python. Python's high-level networking classes simplify the development of applications requiring application-layer networking protocols. The tutorial covers the basic sockets features of Python (free reg. req.), using a sample chat application as a guide.

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

Embeddable Ch is a C/C++ interpreter for cross-platform scripting, 2D/3D plotting, numerical computing, shell programming and embedded scripting. It was announced the availability of Ch 5.1 and Embedded Ch 5.1. Ch which enhance embedded ch scripting with thread handling. They allow you to abort a run time embedded ch thread. It supports MingW for SDK and Embedded Ch. This release also fixes many bugs. More here.

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

"Dylan is an advanced, object-oriented, dynamic language which supports the rapid development of programs. When needed, the programmer can later optimize programs for more efficient execution by supplying type information to the compiler. Nearly all entities in Dylan (including functions, classes, and basic data types such as integers) are first class objects. Additionally Dylan supports multiple inheritance, polymorphism, multiple dispatch, and many other advanced features."

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."

Unfortunately, in the real world you will never see a project perfectly follow any of the development models. You will never be given a thoroughly detailed specification that perfectly meets the customer’s needs and you will never have enough time to do all the testing you need to do. It just doesn’t happen. This chapter will help you understand that software testing doesn't alway go perfectly, and help you prepare for that eventuality.

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).