General Development Archive

PROMELA is not a programming language. PROMELA is a language for building verification models. As a result of this specialization, PROMELA contains many features that are not found in mainstream programming languages. These features are intended to facilitate the construction of high-level models of distributed systems. Gerard Holzmann provides an overview in this chapter from his book, "The SPIN Model Checker: Primer and Reference Manual."

It's easy to get lost in the world of "little languages" -- quite a few have been written to scratch some itch of a company, individual, or project. Rexx is one of these languages, with a long history of use on IBM operating systems, and good current implementations for Linux and other Free Software operating systems. Rexx occupies a useful ecological niche between the relative crudeness of shell scripting and the cumbersome formality of full systems languages.

Is there something fundamentally misguided about the way we write programs today? Why is it so difficult, if not impossible, to write bug-free programs that contain more than 20 to 30 million lines of code? Do we need a radical new paradigm shift in programming? If so, what might it look like? One response came from Sun's Victoria Livschitz, a senior IT architect and Java Evangelist who has an interesting history.

Get the latest DB2, Lotus, Rational, Tivoli, and WebSphere Linux code from IBM on DVD, for free. This is the fastest way to get access to all of IBM middleware that has been ported to Linux. The package contains almost 8 GB of IBM tools and products at no charge, including Rational Rose and PurifyPlus, WebSphere Studio Site Developer, WebSphere SDK for Web services, WebSphere Application Server, DB2 Universal Database, Tivoli Access Manager, and Lotus Domino Server.

Resilient is a secure, object-oriented, serviceable, real-time software platform for embedded devices. The platform enables developers to debug, profile, and update code running on embedded devices in the field, vastly improving reliability and development productivity. The compactness makes it possible to fit the virtual machine, core libraries, device drivers, TCP/IP networking stack, and user applications in less than 128KB of memory. The Resilient Technology Preview was released last week. It can be downloaded for free for non-commercial use.

Hans Reiser of the ReiserFS project created benchmarking tests designed to be fairly representative of the file-size distribution of most users. "Reiser4 does quite well on all benchmarks," he said. "With , we took five different technical gambles, and all of them worked. The result is very high.

Object Caml is an ML type of language. For the non-gurus: it's a functional language that can also be programmed in a non-functional and object-oriented way. Read about it at the latest issue of the LinuxGazette online magazine.

Memory management is scary. It should be: A lot can go wrong—often very wrong. But a moderately experienced C or C++ programmer can learn and understand memory hazards completely. Once you have that knowledge, you should feel only confidence, not fear. Read the article here.

NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is a tool that allows programmers to create such installers for Windows. It is released under an open source license and is completely free for any use. After almost two years of development the NSIS 2 Team is happy to announce the release of NSIS 2.0.

ACMQueue has four interesting articles on developer's collaboration and distributed development: "Building Collaboration into IDEs", "Culture Surprises in Remote Software Development Teams", "The Sun Never Sets on Distributed Development" and "Distributed Development Lessons Learned".

This guide mainly focuses prime issues that are involved in writing professional code, which is very efficient both in terms of space & time as well as be easily ported to other systems with small changes.

Threads strike fear into the hearts of many programmers. UNIX's process model is simple and well understood, but it is sometimes inefficient. Threading can often allow for substantial improvements in performance, at the cost of a little confusion. This article demystifies the POSIX thread interface, providing practical examples of threaded code for consideration.

A service domain applies autonomic computing principles for aggregating Web services and grid services. The service domain technology provides a service grid and can create, filter, discover, cluster, organize, select, route, recover, and switch Web services and grid services autonomically. Using service domain objects enables you to implement business solutions easily and quickly. In this article, we discuss how to invoke and access a service domain to start the operational phase.

Every C++ program -- and every networking app -- needs a good logging mechanism. ACE provides you with more than one way to handle such things. Consider your application and how you expect it to grow over time. Your choices range from the simple ACE_DEBUG macros to the highly flexible logging service. Regarding .NET, exception handling is more than just throwing and catching objects. There are many design elements in providing a robust system, and providing a sound exception handling, logging, and tracing schema are among the first steps. In this chapter from ".NET Patterns: Architecture, Design, and Process" book, you'll learn best practices for determining when to throw, catch, and log your errors.