General Development Archive

The Apple Developer Connection looks at the Eclipse developer's platform.

This article gives an overview of Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft's version control technology, and provides a look at where this technology is headed in the future.

There are times when a directory needs watched.  For reasons of its own, a program may need to know when a file is deleted, updated or renamed.  If .NET is involved, this is a trivial task.  Create an instance of the FileSystemWatcher; set some properties, and the task is completed.  If a non .NET solution is required (and regardless of the hype, some people haven’t embraced .NET in all of its glory.), the ReadDirectoryChangesW function must be used, however the documentation for ReadDirectoryChangesW is sketchy at best.

There has been a lot of commentary recently about Gnome, and a common source of confusion seems to be Gconf - what is it, how does it work, and so on. Some people even seem to confuse Gconf with the registry database in Windows. I will attempt to clear some of this confusion and give an overview of Gconf, and why it looks the way it does.

Versions up to and including 1.0.4 have a potential denial of service and heap overflow issue related to the parsing of strings in the 'svn://' family of access protocols. This affects only sites running svnserve. It does not affect 'http://' access; repositories served only by Apache/mod_dav_svn do not have this vulnerability. This release fixes this issue.

Though not mentioned on the main Eclipse website yet, Eclipse 3.0RC1 is available for download on their main download site.

Get up-to-speed on the latest in Grid Computing application development. 1) Global Grid Forum; 2) Open standards architecture; 3) GGF and grid data; 4) Modeling and Managing State; 5) GGF Security.

Example: You have the Linux 2.4.26 kernel source. Fact: You want to install the newest 2.4.xx kernel. Problem: You have GCC-3.4.0 installed. Solution: Temporarily install GCC-3.3.3. Here's where relink comes in!

CVS users, don't let the next-generation version control system scare you. The basic functionality in Arch can be just as simple as CVS. LinuxJournal covers the basic commands you need to get started.

The performance of computer hardware typically increases monotonically with time. Even if the same could be said of software, the rate at which software performance improves is usually very slow compared to that of hardware. In fact, many might opine that there is plenty of software whose performance has deteriorated consistently with time. Moreover, it is rather difficult to establish an objective performance metric for software as complex as an operating system: a "faster OS" is a very subjective, context dependent phrase. Read the article at KernelThread.

Software development is an iterative process that benefits from coordination between developers and with historical archives. To facilitate such practices, developers can turn to special versioning software. In this article we will explore Subversion, one of the most recently released version control suites. Read the article at DevChannel.

PEAK is a Python framework for rapidly developing and reusing application components. While Python itself is already a very high-level language, PEAK provides even higher abstractions, largely through the clever use of metaclasses and other advanced Python techniques. In many ways, PEAK does for Python what J2EE does for the Java™ language.

Subversion 1.0.4 is a bugfix release that fixes a few problems. "svn up" can now delete unversioned data on Win32 filesystems. Memory leaks in "svnlook diff/changed/dirs-changed" were plugged. An insecure script example in the pre-commit-hook template and the inability to do a checkout to "/" were fixed.

The Subversion development team has released version 1.0.3. This is a security bugfix release and the team suggests all Subversion users upgrade: "Subversion versions up to and including 1.0.2 have a buffer overflow in the date parsing code. Both client and server are vulnerable. The server is vulnerable over both httpd/DAV and svnserve (that is, over http://, https://, svn://, svn+ssh:// and other tunneled svn+*:// methods). Additionally, clients with shared working copies, or permissions that allow files in the administrative area of the working copy to be written by other users, are potentially exploitable."