General Development Archive

This article looks at four open source development environments for working with Python code on Unix-like operating systems. He evaluates two general-purpose editors/environments and two Python-specific ones, and compares the merits of each.

The Zero Install system removes the need to install software or libraries by running all programs from a network filesystem. The filesystem in question is the Internet as a whole, with an aggressive caching system to make it as fast as (or faster than) traditional systems such as Debian's APT repository, and to allow for offline use. It doesn't require any central authority to maintain it, and allows users to run software without needing a root password. In this editorial, we will see how software is accessed via Zero Install and how we can distribute our own programs through it.

Quentin Clark provides an overview of WinFS, including what benefits it produces, what it is, and how it's put together. This MSDN TV episode introduces WinFS as a basis for more detailed presentations.

ActiveState today announced the release of Tcl Dev Kit 3.0. The solution includes new features for the rapid development and delivery of professional quality Tcl applications, and sets a new bar for developer productivity and performance for in-depth code analysis, management, debugging, and deployment.

This article discusses Jython, a software project that aims to provide seamless integration between Java and Python. This article requires a basic understanding of both languages.

This article kicks off a six-part series that focuses on important data structures and their use in application development. We'll examine both built-in data structures present in the .NET Framework, as well as essential data structures we'll have to build ourselves. This first installment focuses on defining what data structures are, how the efficiency of data structures is analyzed, and why this analysis is important. In this article, we'll also examine the Array and ArrayList, two of the most commonly used data structures present in the .NET Framework.

As someone who is always looking to maximize performance and efficiency from my computers, I was delighted to have stumbled upon a program named Distcc a while back. According to their website distcc is a "fast, free distributed c/c++ compiler."

Eclipse is an open source integrated development environment that has gained considerable popularity in 2003. Philippe Mougin provides an introduction plus some expert opinions from the last ECOOP conference. In related news, Eclipse 3.0 M5 was released recently.

Prof. Andreas Zeller from the Saarland University, Germany, announced his Tool Igor: "Your program does not work? The 'AskIgor' Web service automatically finds out why. Researchers of Saarland University, Germany, have started a Web service that automatically finds out the causes for program failures – automatically, quickly, and for free. At www.AskIgor.org, programmers may submit buggy Linux programs; Diagnosis tools for Java and Windows programs are underway." Read more here.

CoyoteGulch just posted an analysis of GNU C and C++ optimizations, using a genetic algorithm to discover the most effective optimization flags for different algorithms.

Grid components need to talk to each other. The distributor needs to talk to the grid providers, the providers need to talk back, and clients and management tools need to talk to the distributor and providers. Providers may need to talk to each other, or they may need to look up information from another machine to determine information or status information from the grid. In this tutorial the author looks at ways to handle communication in a Python grid framework, from the basics of the TCP/IP system to the simplified, externally managed e-mail solution.

LinMagAU features an article on how to get multi-boot capabilities with GRUB and LILO.

The new presentation subsystem in the next version of Windows, code-named "Longhorn," offers powerful new capabilities to developers. This new subsystem, code-named "Avalon," allows developers to take advantage of its capabilities through a language—Extensible Application Markup Language (code-named "XAML"), as well as through modern object-oriented programming languages such as C#. Because most applications written to Avalon will probably be a mix of XAML and programming code, this article discusses XAML tags used to control page layout along with the procedural code written to respond to events.

Software maker Borland Software expects later this year to deliver on its plans to bundle tools that work with Java and Microsoft's .Net software.