General Development Archive

Public Beta of REALbasic 2005 for Linux, for free

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-14 General Development 50 Comments

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.

Getting Started with eXtreme Programming

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-12 General Development 40 Comments

The second edition of 'Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change' explains how and why to use XP. But where to start? XP Explained uses the analogy of entering a swimming pool to describe how organizations get started with XP. There are toe dippers, racing divers, cannonballers, and all manner of variations in between. In this paper Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres characterize these styles.

Should We Be Doing More Unit Testing?

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-06 General Development 27 Comments

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

Publish and Subscribe Using C++ and the Observer Pattern

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-01 General Development 20 Comments

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.

Balancing Power, Cooling, and Performance

David Adams 2005-05-30 General Development 11 Comments

Power consumption, supply voltage, junction temperature, system cooling requirements, and processor clock rate are all physically and thermodynamically related. By understanding the relationships, system cost and complexity trade-offs, and resource requirements, system designers can strike a better balance between requirements. See how you can incorporate emergent cooling and adaptive power control methods into embedded system designs.

Free Rexx Runs Everywhere

Guest post by Howard Fosdick, Pres FCI 2005-05-23 General Development 27 Comments

You might have heard of the Rexx scripting language from its role as the dominate scripting language on mainframes, OS/2, and the AmigaOS.

Subversion 1.2.0 Released

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-23 General Development 31 Comments

The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community. A number of feature enhancements, the most notable of which is support for locking are to be found on version 1.2.

GCC 3.4.4 released

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-23 General Development 3 Comments

The GNU project and the GCC developers have announced the release of GCC 3.4.4. This release is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 3.4.3 relative to previous releases of GCC.

C++: Throw by Value, Catch by Reference

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-22 General Development 20 Comments

Catching and Throwing in C++ can be tricky, but this chapter will help you to know when and how to use these functions effectively, as well as when you shouldn't be using them.

Performance Test Tools and Release Dates

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-22 General Development 2 Comments

Performance test tools can sometimes work better than traditional functional test tools for functional testing, Mike Kelly says.

LLVM 1.5 Released

Submitted by Reid Spencer 2005-05-18 General Development 10 Comments

The sixth major release of the LLVM compiler infrastructure was released today by the University of Illinois CS department. LLVM provides a comprehensive set of libraries and tools for building optimizing compilers with bytecode, JIT, and static compilation. For more information on LLVM, please visit the LLVM web site.

Introduction to Free Pascal 2.0

Guest post by Daniël Mantione 2005-05-16 General Development 75 Comments

After five years of development, Free Pascal 2.0 is ready. With the new compiler, its authors believe they are ready to become a larger open source development platform. In the MS-DOS world, Pascal was one of the major programming languages and is by means of Borland Delphi an important programming language in the Windows world. In the open source world, Free Pascal is the leading Pascal compiler and while open source is a bit biased using the C language, the Pascal language has a lot to offer to open source programmers.

How Effective is Your Test Automation?

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-08 General Development 6 Comments

Do you know, for sure, absolutely, that your automated test is testing what you think it's testing? Probably not, now that we've introduced some doubt. Mike Kelly explains how to get from "I think it's working" to "Yes, it's working correctly."

Ant: Building a Better Build File

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-08 General Development 14 Comments

Want to keep your build file lean, mean, and totally maintainable? Marcus Zarra tells you why Jakarta's Ant is a relatively easy-to-use way to build your projects (and how to avoid its common pitfalls).

Weekend Reading with O’Reilly Programming Articles

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-07 General Development 7 Comments

"Build a Dashboard Widget", "Building Cocoa-Java Apps with Eclipse", "Generic Java Types, Part 2" and "Creating a Windows DLL with Visual Basic". Enjoy the weekend reading.

Gcc 4.0 Vectorizer

Submitted by Carice 2005-05-06 General Development 18 Comments

The new gcc 4.0 compiler shipped with Apple's Mac OS X 10.4 makes use of a new component, the loop vectorizer. This allows gcc to compile code that will take advantage of altivec optimizations without the need for the developer to explicitly use altivec code.

Fortress, next Fortran?

Submitted by ahmetaa 2005-05-05 General Development 33 Comments

Fortress is a new language for from a team that includes Guy Steele, Common Lisp guru and contributor of Java. Language is introduced as the "next Fortran". Fortress language spec and an early overview.

Ada 2006 Draft ISO Standard available

Submitted by Anonymous 2005-05-03 General Development 38 Comments

Ada - a modern programming language designed for large, long-lived applications - and embedded systems in particular - is set to get some extensions in its next incarnation Ada 2006. There is a talk here, highlighting the most important changes (eg. cyclic type structures, Java-like interfaces, standardization of the Ravenscar tasking profile, container libraries, etc.). Updated drafts of the standard are available here. For general information about Ada there is a Wikibook Programming:Ada.

GCC 4.0 Review

Submitted by Omega 2005-05-03 General Development 19 Comments

An interesting review and performance testing of the new GCC 4.

C++ Common Knowledge: Polymorphism

Eugenia Loli 2005-05-02 General Development 23 Comments

The topic of polymorphism is given mystical status in some programming texts and is ignored in others, but it's a simple, useful concept that the C++ language supports. Find out all about it in this sample chapter by Stephen Dewhurst.