General Development Archive

Poll: Favorite Version Control System

Eugenia Loli 2004-06-05 General Development 46 Comments

For all you developers, click in and vote for your favorite Version Control System!

Arch for CVS Users

Eugenia Loli 2004-06-04 General Development 11 Comments

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.

Making An Operating System Faster

Eugenia Loli 2004-06-03 General Development 21 Comments

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.

High Level Assembly

Eugenia Loli 2004-05-31 General Development 9 Comments

From Slashdot: Randall Hyde has developed a programming language called High Level Assembly (HLA). It is a great way for new programmers to develop applications for both Windows and Linux. It works with a variety of assemblers, including Gas, Fasm, Masm and others.

Subversion: The new-generation CVS

Eugenia Loli 2004-05-29 General Development 26 Comments

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.

The Python Enterprise Application Kit

David Adams 2004-05-28 General Development 5 Comments

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.

SAX processing in Python

Eugenia Loli 2004-05-26 General Development 5 Comments

An application developer can choose any one of a number of strategies to read and use an XML document. In some very simple examples a script containing a number of regular expressions might do the job, but normally a more rigorous technique is required. The Simple API for XML (SAX) is one of the two key techniques for analysing and processing XML documents (the other is the more complicated Document Object Model (DOM)). Read the article here.

Subversion 1.0.4 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-05-22 General Development 7 Comments

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.

Subversion 1.0.3 Security Update Released

Submitted by Steve 2004-05-19 General Development 10 Comments

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."

Why Today’s Programming is Still Similar to what it was Decades Ago

Guest post by Takuya Murata 2004-05-18 General Development 89 Comments

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 Class in C++: Part 2

Eugenia Loli 2004-05-17 General Development 13 Comments

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.

FOX 1.2 Released

Submitted by Sander Jansen 2004-05-17 General Development 23 Comments

The multi-platform C++ Fox toolkit 1.2 has being released. There's also a "Whats New" article written by Lyle Johnson in addition to the announcement.

On Scripting Languages

Guest post by Ritesh Kumar 2004-05-13 General Development 84 Comments

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.

Extensible Programming for the 21st Century

Submitted by Treza 2004-05-12 General Development 25 Comments

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.

Make shared memory work for you, not against you

Eugenia Loli 2004-05-12 General Development 10 Comments

In terms of time and space shared memory is probably the most efficient inter-process communication channel provided by all modern OSes. This article explains how to Use Shared Objects On Linux.

Batch anywhere and Independent Concurrent Batch

Eugenia Loli 2004-05-10 General Development No Comments

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 0.5, “Deja vu” Released

Submitted by Alex 2004-05-10 General Development 21 Comments

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:

XSLT: Taming a functional language

Eugenia Loli 2004-05-06 General Development 26 Comments

If you're coming from a different programming background, one feature of XSLT (all versions) may seem especially difficult to grasp. I'm not referring to the XML-based syntax; once you get a feel for it, it is surprisingly transparent (even if bulky). For many novices, much more puzzling is XSLT's lack of an assignment operator. Read the article at DevChannel.

Introducing the Luax Framework

Submitted by Asko Kauppi 2004-05-06 General Development 5 Comments

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.

Deploy a C application as a grid service

Eugenia Loli 2004-05-06 General Development No Comments

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.