General Development Archive

After years of anticipation, PHP 5 was released today. This release represents a milestone in the evolution of PHP. It sports the new Zend Engine II, a completely re-worked object model, and many many new features.

Python is a flexible and powerful dynamic scripting language with full object-oriented features. Its many proponents say that the Python language allows them to express their intentions more directly and efficiently than other languages. But newcomers to Python from the Java technology or Microsoft .NET world may find themselves missing their feature-rich and polished IDEs and development tools.

Fernando has previewed Visual Studio 2005 Codename "Whidbey" Enterprise Developer Edition Alpha. Below is an excerpt: " Visual SourceSafe is a viable solution that lets you effectively manage project files. It tracks and stores changes to a file so that developers can review a file's history, return to earlier versions of the file and develop programs concurrently."

Mark Mitchell announced the availability of GCC 3.4.1. Mark explains, "there are no new features in this release, but there are a lot of improvements for various languages and architectures."

This article showing you how to deploy a secure and manageable Subversion installation that uses Apache 2.0 as a central authentication checkpoint.

This article describes Performance Inspector, which contains a suite of performance tools for Linux. The author describes how to download and install the required software and tools, and how to collect performance data. She also provides details on how to use the five basic tools, which you can use to analyze performance of your C/C++ and Java apps, as well as performance of your system as a whole.

Gambas is a Visual Basic-like programming framework for Unix and Linux. It compiles to byte-code, and executes programs with an interpreter. Currently, Gambas GUI programs rely on the Qt toolkit, but GTK+ 2.x bindings are in the works, as seen in this Gnomefiles page.

This installment introduces you to the Natural Language Toolkit, a Python library for applying academic linguistic techniques to collections of textual data. Programming that goes by the name "text processing" is a start; other capabilities for syntactic and even semantic analysis are further specialized to studying natural languages.

Given the nature of open source software, many Linux applications are distributed in a "tarball" containing source code that you must build before you can run the application. Larger applications can take several hours to build. This article shows how you can use the distributed C compiler, distcc, to speed up the compilation of these sources so you can start using them sooner.

Today the Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of the royalty-free 3.0 release of the Eclipse Platform, adding enhancements that improve flexibility, scalability, interoperability and responsiveness. Eclipse is an award-winning universal platform for tools integration, software modeling and testing that has been broadly adopted by commercial vendors, academic institutions and open technology developers. With release 3.0, Eclipse now extends its sophisticated object-oriented development technologies to support a rich-client platform (RCP) that enables construction of desktop applications.

Christoph Schittko discusses various techniques for diagnosing common problems that occur when converting XML to objects and vice versa with XML Serialization technology in the .NET Framework.

Ximian's Jeffrey Stedfast blogs on algorithm optimisations on binary search trees. Update: More of this.

Neural nets, also known as artificial neural networks, mathematically model bioelectrical networks in the brain. Massively parallel and more inductive than deductive, they are used for everything from voice and character recognition to artificial intelligence. Python developer Andrew Blais introduces you to the simplest of the neural nets, the Hopfield -- and his net.py application gives you a hands-on opportunity to explore its ability to reconstruct distorted patterns.

This chapter is a short, casual introduction to Subversion. If you're new to version control, this chapter is definitely for you. We begin with a discussion of general version control concepts, work our way into the specific ideas behind Subversion, and show some simple examples of Subversion in use.