General Development Archive

PowerPC Development from the Bargain Basement

David Adams 2004-12-16 General Development 33 Comments

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.

OpenCVS Under Development, to be Released Soon

Submitted by thequbemaster 2004-12-15 General Development 28 Comments

The OpenBSD project will soon release OpenCVS, a GNU CVS compatible, BSD licensed alternative. "The OpenCVS project was started after discussions regarding the latest GNU CVS vulnerabilities that came out. Although CVS is widely used, its development has been mostly stagnant in the last years and many security issues have popped up, both in the implementation and in the mechanisms."

Two Developer Books Now Online: Smalltalk and SharpDevelop

Submitted by Lumbergh 2004-12-10 General Development 17 Comments

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.

LLVM 1.4 Released

Submitted by Tanya Lattner 2004-12-09 General Development 2 Comments

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.

Clusters with Linux and Ruby

Submitted by riffraff 2004-12-06 General Development 7 Comments

LinuxJournal has a nifty article on how to build simple clusters with Ruby, based on real world experience from the National Geophysical Data Center. Article here

Understanding The Facade Pattern; Introduction to the UML

Eugenia Loli 2004-12-05 General Development 31 Comments

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.

Valgrind 2.2.0: Memory Debugging and Profiling

Eugenia Loli 2004-12-03 General Development 7 Comments

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.

Gambas speeds database development

Eugenia Loli 2004-12-03 General Development 17 Comments

Gambas, designed by Benoît Minisini, is a new graphical development environment for Linux that aims to improve database development times. More here.

XAMPP: Easy Integrated Development

Adam Scheinberg 2004-12-02 General Development 16 Comments

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.

MSDN Magazine Windows Development Articles

Eugenia Loli 2004-12-01 General Development 1 Comment

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.

Python 2.4 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-30 General Development 38 Comments

The python final release of Python 2.4 was just released. Python 2.4 is the result of almost 18 month's worth of work on top of Python 2.3. New features are, but not limited to, function decorators, generator expressions, a number of new module and more.

C Data Types: An Understandable Guide for Beginners

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-30 General Development 11 Comments

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

XDE guide for Visual Studio .NET developers

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-29 General Development 6 Comments

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.

Virtual Filesystem: Building A Linux Filesystem From An Ordinary File

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-27 General Development 18 Comments

This article will show you how to encrypt the filesystem and mount it with ACL (Access Control Lists), which gives you rights beyond the traditional read (r), write (w), and execute (x) permissions for the three user groups "file", "owner", and "other".

About the Smart package manager

Submitted by someguy 2004-11-27 General Development 34 Comments

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).

Best practices for programming in C

Submitted by Jones 2004-11-25 General Development 59 Comments

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.

Interview with David Roundy of Darcs on Source Control

Submitted by Steve Mallett 2004-11-24 General Development 3 Comments

In the aftermath of our last interview with Tom Lord, regardless of personalities, it became apparent that the idea of decentralizing CVS is a big deal. Many mentioned darcs as an alternative to Arch. Mark Strosberg has interviewed project head-hancho David Roundy about darcs, his "theory of patches", what's next, and on using Haskell for the project.

Plan 9-style File System for Linux/BSD

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-22 General Development 25 Comments

Client and server implementations of the 9P and 9P2000 distributed file system protocols for Unix-based operating systems. Download the latest from here.

Python 2.4 RC1 released

Submitted by spank_da_monkey 2004-11-20 General Development 19 Comments

The first release candidate of Python 2.4. Python 2.4 is now close to release- there should be few or no new features, merely bug fixes.

Software Tools of the future

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-19 General Development 14 Comments

What are the sofware tools of the future going to be? It's an interesting question, with many facets. Here are some important trends in design and construction tool strategy, which will effect the kinds of software tools that will bee delivered in the future. It looks at how to improve software development efficiency through visual modeling, generating code from abstract models, and systematic reuse.