General Development Archive

My physics teacher likes to say that physics like to make problems they face look like ones that they know how to solve. A simple harmonic oscillation was one he frequently used in class, as is presumably the case in physics in general.

The well-crafted C++ library should be full-featured and complete. In this last article of his series, Hal Fulton emphasizes that the developer should also pay special attention to areas such as testing and documentation, both of which are neglected too often.

In recent years "scripting languages" are becoming a path which is a must go for rapid application development. The open source community has seen many scripting language implementations. Some really popular and good ones available are perl and python.

This article argues that next-generation programming systems will accomplish this by combining three specific technologies: compilers, linkers, debuggers, and other tools will be plugin frameworks, rather than monolithic applications; programmers will be able to extend the syntax of programming languages; and programs will be stored as XML documents, so that programmers can represent and process data and meta-data uniformly.

This article shows how to grid enable applications using the first two of the six strategies so the applications can run as single or multiple instance batch jobs that are location independent. It explains the characteristics of applications using these strategies and details what the application developer must, should, and can optionally do to implement these strategies. A major objective when using Strategy 1 and Strategy 2 is to ensure that the application is as flexible as possible regarding middleware products.

Autopackage, the distro neutral packaging framework for Linux systems, got the release of 0.5 with major improvements in nearly every area have been made, including:

Luax is a similar framework as Java or Python for that matter, offering OS-independent programming platform for writing any kind of applications. Unlike Java, LuaX uses existing C/C++ open source libraries extensively (SDL, etc.) to do its work.

The new programming model of grid services allows applications to be abstracted through their interface, enabling cross-platform and cross-programming language interoperability. This article demonstrates this by showing how to implement and deploy an existing application as a grid service using the IBM® Grid Toolbox for Multiplatform.

This article discusses a "Minority Report"-alike user interface developed at Microsoft (video here). In the meantime, Windows Forms 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 (both codenamed "Whidbey") are the next release of Microsoft’s smart client platform and tools.

This article is about Open Source software development. Given the unrelenting ideal of better software that remains the guiding principle of the Open Source world, it is inevitable that it crosses paths with Xtreme Programming, in philosophy to a large extent and in practice to some. The author also examines some "Xtreme" influences on F/OSS development -- what these are and what these can be.

The Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) is an open source framework for developing model-driven applications. It creates Java code for graphically editing, manipulating, reading, and serializing data based on a model specified in XML Schema, UML, or annotated Java. This article will step you through the process of creating a model, generating code, using the generated apps, and customizing the editor.

Garbage collection (GC) is a technology that frees programmers from the hassle of explicitly managing memory allocation for every object they create. Traditionally, the benefit of this automation has come at the cost of significant overhead. However, more efficient algorithms and techniques, coupled with the increased computational power of computers have made the overhead negligible for all but the most extreme situations.

Partial template specialization is a vital technique for writing rich and useful collections. It can serve a useful purpose in many C++ programs, and is just one of the many new areas of standards conformance in Visual C++ .NET 2003. This article demonstrates how Visual C++ can be used to incorporate the .NET Framework into C++ applications.

This article shows you how to develop a Struts application in the Eclipse IDE, with the help of the Easy Struts plug-in. You'll get an introduction to Easy Struts, installation and configuration steps, and instructions on building a basic Struts application through a progressive example. Different ways of enhancing the Struts application -- such as connecting to a database, modularizing the application, internationalizing and localizing content, handling exceptions, and creating custom plug-ins -- are also covered. Finally, you will learn how to deploy your Struts application on the Tomcat Web server.