General Development Archive

The inability to keep crosscutting concerns separate can really get in the way of creating a clear and understandable system. Find out how to keep your aspect-oriented software from becoming a tangled mess in this sample chapter.

Protothreads are an extremely lightweight, stackless type of threads written in portable C code. Protothreads provide blocked waiting and sequential code execution on top of event-driven systems, without the overhead of full multithreading or per-thread stacks. They are designed for severely memory constrained systems, has a very low RAM overhead, and can be used with or without an underlying OS. New in version 1.1 is the PT_YIELD() operation that allows a protothread to yield the CPU.

I read a lot of reviews comparing GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows, and inevitably the topic of installing software comes up. Most reviews indicate that installing software in Windows is much easier than that of the desktop GNU/Linux world. I decided to do my own comparison based on my desktop usage to see the difference. The following are my results. Those of you that come from the Windows world may be a tad bit surprised at the ease in which software can be installed.

After two and a half years of work, autopackage 1.0 has finally escaped into the wild. It has a fundamentally new design, and offers an alternative system of software distribution and management on Linux. This article will talk about what this means for the Linux community, and what new directions and possibilities it opens up. It'll talk about problems remaining to be solved, and finally it will propose solutions for them. If you just want to see what autopackage is like, check out the screenshots or the Flash demo, available from the website.

There has been a lot of buzz about the seeming rise of dymanic languages. Here is an article and interview with some of the top people in their respective language field (even more here).

Falko Timme wrote a tutorial describing how to create images of your Linux system with SystemImager. SystemImager lets you create images of your installations. So you can make a backup of your systems, clone your systems (if you have to maintain more than one machine with exactly the same software), or even distribute your software over the internet. To do so, you need an image server (should have enough disk space to store your images) and a so-called golden client (i.e., your "perfect system" of which you want to make an image).

'Obfuscation' is to make something difficult or unusually obscure. One of the ironies of Ruby programming is the general desire of Rubyists to believe that a goal to accomplish readability in code overshadows even at times its functionality. At times to the point of obsurdity. Enter the International Obfuscated Ruby Code Contest with prizes up to $750.

Xactium has published a white paper on Language Driven Development (LDD). LDD is a revolutionary approach to designing and implementing software and systems. LDD makes huge productivity gains by bridging the gap between the way developers think about their problem domain, and the languages and tools that implement the solution.

This article introduces CMT technology, such as chip multi-processing and simultaneous multi-threading, from a software developer's perspective.

This chapter will help you, the algorithm designer, to leave the parallel algorithm design abstract enough to support portability while ensuring that it can eventually be implemented effectively for the parallel systems on which it will be executed.

How do you design a computing system to provide continuous service and to ensure that any failures interrupting service do not result in customer safety issues or loss of customers due to dissatisfaction? Historically, system architects have taken two approaches to answer this question: building highly reliable, fail-safe systems with low probability of failure, or building mostly reliable systems with quick automated recovery.

Over 100 Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) have signed an online petition that demands Redmond resume development and support of "classic" Visual Basic, a-k-a VB6. The MVPs are calling for all VB developers and IT leaders to review and consider signing the petition.

Quality assurance isn’t just testing, or analysis, or wishful thinking. Although it can be boring, difficult, and tedious, QA is nonetheless essential. Ensuring that a system will work when delivered requires much planning and discipline. Convincing others that the system will function properly requires even more careful and thoughtful effort. QA is performed through all stages of the project, not just slapped on at the end. It is a way of life.

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) provides a flexible and efficient way to store, transmit, and express data. The open source community has produced an impressive lineup of XML editing utilities. In this article Ryan Paul takes a look at some of the most useful.