General Development Archive

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.

Inside Memory Management

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-18 General Development 5 Comments

Memory management is one of the most fundamental areas of computer programming. In many scripting languages, you don't have to worry about how memory is managed, but that doesn't make memory management any less important. Knowing the abilities and limitations of your memory manager is critical for effective programming. Get an overview of the memory management techniques that are available to Linux programmers, focusing on the C language but applicable to other languages as well.

Take a good look at your Heap

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-17 General Development 28 Comments

Have you had your Java Heap looked at lately, well maybe you should. It could be oozing something nasty. Why walk around wondering if your Heap has a leak? Use the free HeapAnalyzer graphical tool and check yourself before your wreck yourself.

PVFS2 : A High Performance Parallel File System

Guest post by Rob Latham 2004-11-12 General Development 12 Comments

As part of the development team, we're announcing PVFS2 version 1.0 here in Pittsburgh at the SC2004 conference!

Regarding Gambas

Guest post by Daniel Campos Fernández 2004-11-11 General Development 48 Comments

For a few years, I've been working in the real world, I mean the enterprise world, sorry. In every company I've worked for, they offered me the opportunity to learn a lot of new things, or at least that's what they always said in the first meeting before sending me to be just another company programmer. But in fact I've learned some very important things, just not about programming. I had to learn about these things on my own, about the needs of a real company in the real world.

Imperfect C++: Functors and Ranges

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-08 General Development 9 Comments

In most cases, functors and ranges cause a minor issue of too many keystrokes, but in some cases, they can cause a serious impediment to maintainability. This chapter will teach you to deal with this problem while it's still a minor one.

Using Generics in Visual Basic 2005

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-08 General Development No Comments

Tired of writing the same class code over and over to meet specific datatype requirements? John Mueller recommends generics.

Perl 6 Grammars and Regular Expressions

Submitted by ibm 2004-11-08 General Development 3 Comments

Perl 6 is finally coming within reach. This article gives you a tour of the grammars and regular expressions of the Perl 6 language, comparing them with the currently available Parse::RecDescent module for Perl 5. Find out what will be new with Perl 6 regular expressions and how to make use of the new, powerful incarnation of the Perl scripting language.

Gcc 3.4.3 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-06 General Development 20 Comments

The GNU Compiler Collection is a suite of compilers that compile C, C++, Objective C, Fortran, Java, and CHILL for a wide variety of architectures. Version 3.4.3 was released recently.

Introduction to Unicode

Eugenia Loli 2004-11-01 General Development 33 Comments

Unicode, or the Universal Character Set (UCS), was developed to end once and for all the problems associated with the abundance of character sets used for writing text in different languages. It is a single character set whose goal is to be a superset of all others used before, and to contain every character used in writing any language (including many dead languages) as well as other symbols used in mathematics and engineering. Any charset can be losslessly converted to Unicode, as we'll see.

Design By Contract for C

Submitted by .luke 2004-10-30 General Development 21 Comments

OnLAMP features a new article on how to use a simple implementation of DBC with C code. If you ever wanted to know what designing by contract is, and why C's assert is not enough read this.

IBM releases eclipse 3.0.1 embedded Interface toolkit

Submitted by ham367 2004-10-29 General Development 2 Comments

The Abstract User Interface Markup Language toolkit is a rapid-development tool to assist developers in writing GUIs to run as either Swing applications or on the Web -- without any changes. This article takes you on a tour of the AUIML toolkit, which includes rapid prototyping with the eclipse-based Visual Builder, DataBean implementation, built-in data validation, built-in internationalization and more.