General Development Archive

Why waste your time figuring out an algorithm for storing things in a file? And why spend time debugging the code? Let the Boost library do it for you. Saving your data to your own custom-made file formats is easy with the help of the Boost serialization templates. Jeff Cogswell shows you how to save the data and read it back in with ease.

This article gives an introduction to the Spring framework, including Spring aspect-oriented programming (AOP) and the Inversion of Control (IOC) container. It provides an example to inject dependencies, or services, into a working credit card account application rather than having to build them in from the ground up.

For Linux users, HLA is a strong programming tool that allows them to create powerful programs on a variety of different levels. As HLA becomes more feature-rich, additional applications will be written using HLA under Linux. With HLA and Linux, programmers can develop new and exciting applications anyone can use. Read more.

PySWT is a Python Binding to the IBM Eclipse SWT library, to provide Python with a cross platform native looking GUI.

Many times, you need to know how a certain filesystem looked like at some point in time, and you want to be able to roll back changes that happened to it after that point. While there are multiple solutions to achieve this goal, certainly one of them is to use filesystem snapshots. One of the capabilities of unionfs is to offer the possibility of consistently freezing the status of the filesystem at any given point in time (snapshot). Read more...

Irrespective of the language programmers choose for expressing solutions, their wants and needs are similar. They need to be productive and efficient, with technologies that do not get in the way but rather help them produce high-quality software. In this article, we share our top ten list of programmers' common wants and needs.

If you are considering moving to .NET development and don't want to break the bank by forking out the money for Visual Studio Builder have a comparison of .NET tools you might want to use. The review includes SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop, XDevelop, Visual SlickEdit, and DreamWeaver.

Patches are small, sometimes temporary "quick fixes" that address often critical software flaws. Patches are usually made available by software vendors in between service packs or version upgrades upon confirmation that a software flaw affects a large number of users with usually serious consequences.

Analysts of the software industry often point out that the majority of software written in the world is not commercially released, but used in-house. Computerworld has an interesting profile of a well-known company that writes virtually all of its software in-house. It discusses some of the challenges they face, the temptations to use more off-the-shelf software, and some available apps and tools that they do use, that have proved to be useful.

Celtix, a collaboration between Iona and ObjectWeb, is a low-end, freely available back-end integration tool that adheres to Java standards. It's an enterprise service bus (ESB) -- a standards-based integration server, which use messages to carry data between different programs.

Capacity planning is an important part of the work that Systems Administrators perform on a regular basis. The knowledge about the current utilization levels becomes indispensable to predict when the next hardware upgrade will be needed. Moodss (Modular Object Oriented Dynamic SpreadSheet) is a free tool for collecting data from different systems and making it readily available for analysis.

REAL Software announced today that REALbasic 2005 for Linux, a groundbreaking new visual development environment for Linux, is available for public beta and can be downloaded now from www.realsoftware.com/demo. REALbasic 2005 for Linux Standard Edition will be offered for free when it ships in August. The Mac OS X version was posted today.

Quick feedback. More testable code. Finding serious problems early. What's not to like? Michael Kelly pleads the case for unit testing.

Separation of concerns is increasingly on the programmer's radar. Given the growing range of data access products and platforms, it is now essential to separate data producers from data consumers. The observer pattern provides a simple but powerful model for achieving this crucial design goal.