General Development Archive

In June 2005 the Ecma General Assembly approved the third edition of the standards for C# and CLI. With the first edition of the standards in 2002 and their adoption by ISO/IEC in 2003, the industry was given powerful tools to enable vendor-neutral development of Web services. Today, Ecma is keeping pace with the growing needs of the developer community by publishing the third edition.

If you're interested in PBX systems or Virtual Private Servers, there's an interesting article on using Virtual Private Servers to secure and even run multiple instances of Asterisk (open source PBX software) on one machine. It's like running a small telco in a box!

IBMs Eclipse based Agent Building and Learning Environment (ABLE) enables developers to build intelligent Java agents on Linux using machine reasoning and implement their own AbleBeans and AbleAgents and plug them into ABLE’s Agent Editor. Version 2.3 includes a new Eclipse plug-in administration console for distributed agent platform, an updated Eclipse rule and agent editors, a new PetriNet agent, and an updated example project.

"Everyone of us always wanted to have the ability to compile for Windows and Unix in one makefile, right? Unfortunately, there is very few documentation on this topic and I had quite a hard time to get things working the way I wanted to. I wrote this small how-to to share the way I managed to build my toolchain with other people."

Every project requires investments in terms of time, money, and other resources. This chapter will help you analyze the requirements of your project at hand, and decide how to proceed in light of the investments required to make it work.

Kevin Burnett has written an article over on the Novell website, about programming using script languages on Linux.

Groovy took a gigantic leap this past April, with the formal release of a new parser aimed at standardizing the language as part of the JSR process. If you weren't paying attention before, now's the time to start. The new syntax is chock full of enhancements to the language designed for a short learning curve and a big payoff. Resident Groovy practitioner Andrew Glover walks through most important changes to Groovy's syntax and shows you a handy feature you won't find in classic Groovy.

Classpath 0.17 has been released. This is mainly a bug fix release for issues found with eclipse 3.1 and free Swing applications just after our 0.16 release. But it also includes some exciting new features.

The Spec# programming system is a new attempt at a more cost effective way to develop and maintain high-quality software. Spec# is an extension of the object-oriented language C#. It extends the type system to include non-null types and checked exceptions. It provides method contracts in the form of pre- and postconditions as well as object invariants.

Ruby on Rails is a relatively new web application framework built on the Ruby language. It is billed as an alternative to existing enterprise frameworks, and its goal, in a nutshell, is to make your life -- or at least the Web development aspects of it -- easier. This article will contrast the Rails framework against a typical J2EE implementation using common open source tools that are regularly found in enterprise applications.

Django for Python is the most recently announced of what is becoming a long line of web frameworks inspired by Ruby on Rails. Others that have popped up include MonoRail for .NET & Mono, Subway for Python, Trails for Java, Catalyst and Maypole for Perl. In the context of all these rails derivatives, this article on "Could Rails have been built without Ruby?" is an interesting read.

In this excerpted chapter from his upcoming book, Programming Indigo, David Pallmann describes the Indigo programming model for building service-oriented applications.

The Question: With the emergence of .NET, J2EE, Python, PHP, et. al, has Perl lost its niche as a scripting glue language? The Answer: Tim O'Reilly gives his two cents.

In the Japanese edition of his latest book, Bjarne Stroustrup added an extended essay, reflecting on C++ use over the last decade, and presenting plausible directions for the next revision of the C++ standard. Download the PDF to see what he has to say.