General Development Archive

Testing time/date-specific functions can be complicated. Unfortunately, because of this, many companies don't bother testing these functions. This chapter will help you understand why testing these functions is critical, and how you can go about getting it done.

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 article describes features of a future version of Sun's HotSpot JVM implementation. It introduces some of the synchronization optimizations slated for Mustang, the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE), version 6.0, which has been on the "to-do" list for many JVMs for quite some time.

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.

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.

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.

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.