General Development Archive

Rolling with Ruby on Rails by Curt Hibbs

Eugenia Loli 2005-01-21 General Development 22 Comments

The Ruby community is abuzz about Rails, a web application framework that makes database-backed apps dead simple. What's the fuss? Is it worth the hype? Curt Hibbs shows off Rails, building a simple application that even non-Rubyists can follow.

Use reentrant functions for safer signal handling

Eugenia Loli 2005-01-21 General Development 5 Comments

In the early days of programming, non-reentrancy was not a threat to programmers; functions did not have concurrent access and there were no interrupts. In many older implementations of the C language, functions were expected to work in an environment of single-threaded processes. Now, however, concurrent programming is common practice, and you need to be aware of the pitfalls.

OOP Is Much Better in Theory Than in Practice

Submitted by Lumbergh 2005-01-20 General Development 84 Comments

Has the Object-Oriented Programming been hyped too much, or do we suffer from the OO paradigms exposed in languages such as C++, Java, C#? How about languages that support features such as prototyping and/or multi-dispatch?

Changing Software and Legacy Code

Eugenia Loli 2005-01-18 General Development 4 Comments

The old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," doesn't necessarily apply in the case of technology. Projects continually require alterations, updates, and enhancements. This chapter outlines the nature of code change, and suggests some of the challenges to be faced when making these changes.

Dissecting shared libraries

Eugenia Loli 2005-01-12 General Development 1 Comment

Shared libraries use version numbers to allow for upgrades to the libraries used by applications while preserving compatibility for older applications. This article reviews what's really going on under the book jacket and why there are so many symbolic links in /usr/lib on a normal Linux system.

Making the transition to 64 bits

Eugenia Loli 2005-01-11 General Development 15 Comments

As 64-bit PowerPC processors become more widely available, it becomes desirable to make applications run in the 64-bit computation mode, providing access to larger address space and faster 64-bit arithmetic. This excerpt from a longer Technical Library article covers some of the issues faced when porting existing 32-bit code to the new computing model -- or when embarking on new 64-bit development.

Free Networking Book

Submitted by Alex Moskalyuk 2005-01-10 General Development 17 Comments

Eugene Blanchard made his Introduction to Data Communications (also known as Introduction to Networking) available for free. The book covers a broad variety of topics such as RS-232, Ethernet, RF, TCP/IP and many other topics in its 63 chapters. This is a valuable reference and read for those just starting to understand networking and data communications as well as seasoned professionals in the field.

Linux: Tuning The Kernel With A Genetic Algorithm

Submitted by Rahul Sundaram 2005-01-09 General Development 24 Comments

Kerneltrap has a discussion on the proposed patches to Linux kernel which enables Linux to use genetic algorithm for use in CPU and IO schedulers. Genetic algorthims are self optimising over time for particular kinds of workloads and this could be one way of smarter kinds of scheduling. An interesting idea though it yet remains to be seen what would turn up

Xen, a new, high-performance x86 virtualization system

Submitted by Rahul Sundaram 2005-01-08 General Development 14 Comments

Linux Magazine has an extensive article the technical details and motivation behind Xen by one the developers.

Gambas 1.0 Released

Submitted by Laurent Carlier 2005-01-06 General Development 16 Comments

With Gambas, you can quickly design your program GUI, access MySQL or PostgreSQL databases, pilot KDE applications with DCOP, translate your Basic program into many languages, create network applications easily, and so on...

Open Sourcing Netscape Servers and a New Document Viewer

Submitted by Rahul Sundaram 2005-01-06 General Development 9 Comments

Red Hat developer Christopher Blizzard, who maintains the Mozilla packages, has a rather extensive blog on the plans for Open Sourcing Netscape servers that Red Hat recently brought out from AOL. Another interesting Blog is on Evince, a new document viewer to replace GPDF and Gnome Ghostview by Redhat developer Bryan Clark.

Navicat 5.3.1 (Database GUI Application)

Submitted by kevin 2005-01-05 General Development 14 Comments

Navicat 5.3.1 (a cross-platform MySQL client, available for OS X, Linux and Windows) now offers support for customizable History Log path, resizable Manage User window and improves the import/ export wizards. The database management tool is an integrated GUI tool, which can perform MySQL administration and database development, enabling to import/export to and from different file formats, backup data, transfer database from server to server, create visual sql queries and manage multiple databases on local or remote MySQL server. It also includes a full featured graphical manager for setting the users and access privileges. Download an evaluation.

The Surprising Legacy of Y2K

David Adams 2005-01-04 General Development 19 Comments

American RadioWorks has an interesting investigation into the longer-term effects of the Y2K scare, especially its impact on the world's IT infrastructure. Y2K was a real potential problem, which was first ignored, but then most likely over-reacted to. But it was probably responsible for the rise of the Indian offshore IT boom. It also resulted in big productivity gains as decades of cruft were removed from datacenters during the fixes. For example, when the NY Stock Exchange was able to reassmble its systems six days after 9/11, it was because of the Y2K-related work they'd done.

Linux-Windows Single Sign-On

Submitted by TTF 2005-01-01 General Development 58 Comments

This article explains steps to have your users logging on at their Linux/Unix desktops with their Windows AD accounts

Autopackage 0.7 Released

Submitted by Rahul Sundaram 2004-12-24 General Development 35 Comments

Autopackage, a Linux distribution neutral binary packaging framework has released a new version. New features include: First API stable release, Self contained Installers, Multi architecture support, Better documentation, Support for internationalisation, Support for Gconf schemas, A brand new graphical management software for easy uninstallation of autopackaged apps. A 1.0 release is expected by Feb 2005.

BBC launches open source network testing platform

Submitted by Rahul Sundaram 2004-12-24 General Development 3 Comments

BBC's research and development team has released yet another open source project for network testing. Dubbed the Kamaelia project, released on Tuesday, is designed to simplify the creation and testing of new protocols for large-scale media delivery systems. This follows earlier efforts like the open source dirac project to create video codecs tailored towards streaming.

EU-Funded Project to Ease Free Software Development

Submitted by Rahul Sundaram 2004-12-24 General Development 5 Comments

With efficiency as its driving goal, a consortium of European research institutions and open source software companies have paired up to manage the complexity of large scale, modular projects by establishing a program called EDOS, Environment for the Development and Distribution of Free Software.

Guerilla Software Development

David Adams 2004-12-23 General Development 32 Comments

This story is almost too cool to be true. A contractor working for Apple in the early 90s developed a graphing calculator application that took full advantage of the new PowerPC processor, but his project was cancelled while the software was in its early stages. He was out of a job, but his ID badge still worked. So he kept coming back to work, at no pay, for months, hiding from management, to finish the job, and dozens of Apple employees pitched in to help. In 1994, his app, "Graphing Calculator," shipped with the OS.

Changes in the Open Source Database Landscape

Submitted by Rahul Sundaram 2004-12-21 General Development 7 Comments

Newsforge reviews the effect of recently open sourced databases like IBM's Cloudscape and CA's Ingres and its effect on the classic open source players like MySQL and PostgreSQL as well as the proprietary database leader Oracle

Embed Perl Scripting in C applications

David Adams 2004-12-17 General Development 5 Comments

You get the benefits of an established language to expand the functionality of your application in a flexible way without users having to rebuild the application to use it. In this tutorial, you'll learn a process for embedding a scripting language into an application. You'll see how to build the application and how to provide wrapper functions that support full argument and return value support.