General Development Archive

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.

Writing to text files or to the console in a C++ program? You might need to format some text data, and the C++ streams class includes some handy formatting features that allow you to do great things. Jeff Cogswell shows you how to use it to line up your text columns, right- or left-justify your text, and set the precision of your floating point numbers.

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.

I spend a great deal of time with XML data transfers, and use XSLT on a regular basis to transform, conform, or calculate the XML into formats that I can use. Originally, I used the mapping tool within Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2002 for complex XSLT. Although it had limitations, the tool presented everything in a visual manner that made editing quick and much less painful.

The purpose of this article is to give a novice programmer the basic idea of what OOP is, as implemented using PHP. Readers should have a basic knowledge of programming ie what variables are, variable types, basic methods of writing comments, and how to enter code into a text editor.

GCC 3.4.0 was released (mirrors) and it includes numerous new features, improvements & bug fixes.

N|vu is a web development application with a WYSIWYG interface that is aimed to be user friendly, easy and powerful, sponsored by Linspire. This review looks at this program in detail and aims to help users to get an idea about it.

For years the development scene has been dominated by the C family of languages, primarily C itself and its immediate successor C++. Recent years have given rise to other C-descendents, however, such as Sun's Java and Microsoft's C#.

This essay is a manifesto about software for collaboration -- why the world's future depends on it, why the current crop of tools isn't good enough, and what programmers can and must do about it.

In this installment, David looks at Python's two standard modules for unit testing: unittest and doctest. These modules expand on the capability of the built-in assert statement, which is used for validation of pre-conditions and post-conditions within functions. He discusses the best ways to incorporate testing into Python development, weighing the advantages of different styles for different types of projects.

Eclipse is one powerful IDE. I've been using it for a few weeks and in this article, I will be reviewing a few of the features that make it such a wonderful tool.

In this episode, learn how to make use of some new features added to Visual C++ in Visual Studio 2005. These include adding OpenMP to your application, optimizing your application with Profile-Guided Optimization, and building a 64-bit application.

Here is an introduction to the style of Objective-C Cocoa and some reasons why the author at Kuro5hin hopes more programming will be done in this style in the future.

The O'Reilly Network has put online a few interesting development articles with subjects of Java & Lisp, Python on OSX and managed C++ on .NET.