General Development Archive

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.

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.

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.

The Kuro Box promises something fairly interesting: a usable single-board PowerPC computer, for only US$160 -- when other PowerPC development boards often cost ten times as much.

The Smalltalk green book, Smalltalk-80, Bits of History, Words of Advice text is now online. Also, the now discontinued SharpDevelop book Disecting a C# Application: Inside SharpDevelop is now available for download.

The LLVM 1.4 release is out! It features a huge assortment of improvements in functionality,generated code quality, and compile times. Be sure to download the release, read the release notes, or just learn more about LLVM here.

The Facade pattern puts up a new interface — that is, a facade — in front of the original system. In this sample book chapter, you'll learn when to apply it, and how to do so. Elsewhere, this chapter provides an overview of Unified Modeling Language (UML), a graphical language for modeling businesses, software applications, and system architectures.

For tracking down memory leaks and other performance issues, the ease and flexibility of Valgrind may make up for slow runtimes. Memory and performance problems plague most of us, but tools are available that can help. One of the best, most powerful and easiest to use is Valgrind. One thing stands out when you use Valgrind--you do not need to recompile, relink or modify your source code. Also have a look at KCacheGrid and Alleyoop which work with valgrind.

Open source stacks such as XAMPP from Apache Friends are simplifying open source development by making it easier to write and distribute applications in a stable and standardized environment. The trend of combining Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl into integrated middleware stacks promises to make open source development more competitive with J2EE application development, at least for low-end applications. Our Take: I use XAMPP nearly every day, at home and at work, as a testbed. It's one of my top three essential open source apps, and - by far - one of the easiest to use.

The MSDN Magazine Dec 2004 is released with articles of Windows developer interest. Articles include Operators in Basic, .NET Code tuning and profiling, Optimization for .NET apps on PocketPCs.

This sample book chapter details the ways in which C programs deal with data, and how you mess with text and numeric data.

Web services and service-oriented architectures continue to move into the mainstream. With IBM Rational XDE Developer v2003 — .NET Edition and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 to support you, there really aren't any excuses left to avoid exploring Web services. Start using them quickly and effectively through hands-on exercises. You'll be happy to see how easy it is to model and generate .NET XML Web services.

The Smart Package Manager project has the ambitious objective of creating smart and portable algorithms for solving adequately the problem of managing software upgrading and installation. This tool works in all major distributions, and will bring notable advantages over native tools currently in use (APT, APT-RPM, YUM, URPMI, etc).

Although the C language has been around for close to 30 years, its appeal has not yet worn off. It continues to attract a large number of people who must develop new skills for writing new applications, or for porting or maintaining existing applications.