General Development Archive

CherryPy uses the same concepts as CGI to bind a Web server to a Web application, but it improves performance and gains persistence across requests by handling all its requests within a single process. Find out how to write Web applications with CherryPy, an application framework for Python that makes Web applications easier to write than plain CGI.

"Some of the readers of my previous review of the Echo2 framework expressed concern that I didn't write a complex enough application to give it a fair shot. Fair enough, I just finished writing a new web application using the Echo2 framework, complete with input validation and database access using Hibernate for object-relational mapping." Read on.

Todd Blanchard has just released ObjectiveCLIPS (), a new open source project for Cocoa development on Mac OS X. ObjectiveCLIPS combine Cocoa and Core Data together with CLIPS (the original NASA's artificial intelligence engine) and F-Script, a high-level scripting language for Cocoa. Now, Cocoa developers can design rule-based applications around their Core Data object models. The inference engine can reason about rules and apply them when needed. ObjectiveCLIPS is easily embeddable in applications.

If you're writing production code in Ruby and haven't been exposed to optimization strategies, take a look at this tutorial. Learn how to profile and optimize Ruby code (free reg. req.) with RubyInline and ZenOptimize, two tools that make this process easier.

Echo2 is an open source Java web development framework that aims to simplify the development of web applications using the AJAX model. I read the online tutorial, downloaded the library and wrote a simple test application to see if Echo2 lives up to its promise.

Do you think the pixel is the only unit of measurement for building graphical displays? Come on, you can measure better than that! This article offers tips for user-friendly HTML layout and interface design, and explains why pixels aren't always the best unit for the job.

Agile development methodologies might be the new fad in software design, but how much emphasis is there on secure code? Australian .NET developer and consultant at Readify, Rocky Heckman, reveals some concerns of agile development methodologies.

Ultimate++ 0.98.7 was released. Ultimate++ (U++) is an attempt to provide the optimal Windows/Linux development platform based on C++. By utilizing of new ideas in C++ development, Ultimate++ achieves significant reduction of source code complexity for most applications when compared to other development platforms. To get a clue how development using U++ looks like, see this example.

"RealSoftware's REALBasic 2005 - the popular cross-platform interactive development environment for Mac OS X and Windows - is scheduled to debut for the Linux platform later this month, perhaps as early as the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. For the past couple of weeks, I've been falling asleep each night to the glow of beta versions of REALBasic 2005 running happily on SUSE Pro 9.3 on my monitor."

Web content syndication is an area of growing importance on the Internet. Atom 1.0 provides a simple, well-defined, and unambiguous format for content syndication on the Web. This article shows you how this popular Web content syndication format stacks up to RSS, discusses Atom's technical strengths relative to other syndication formats, and offers several compelling use case examples that illustrate those strengths.

The advent of JUnit has been a boon to developers. Unfortunately, many think it's enough to learn the JUnit API and write a few tests in order to have a well-tested application. This idea is worse than not testing at all because it leads to a false sense of code health. Learning JUnit is the easiest part of testing. Writing good tests is the hard part. This article presents some common JUnit antipatterns and shows how to resolve them.

Don't be jealous of programmers using new languages, such as Python or C#! C++ gives you many ways to iterate through data you've stored in containers, supports for-each, and has helpful devices called lambda functions. Jeff Cogswell shows you how you can fly through your containers with ease.

Peter Golde, one of the original designers of the C# language, has been working recently on Power Collections for .NET, which is now released. According to the web site Power Collections is a "Community Project to Develop the Best Public License Collection Classes for .NET"

Building on two previous articles -- Three ways to connect a database to a Geronimo application server and "Dive into EJB Web applications with Geronimo" This article will show you how to develop a stand-alone (fat) client that can communicate with an EJB application running inside the Geronimo application server.