General Development Archive

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.

In nearly all secure programs, your first line of defense is to check every piece of data you receive. If you can keep malicious data from entering your program, or at least keep it from being processed, your program becomes much harder to attack. This article shows how to validate input -- one of the first lines of defense in any secure program.

How did we get from there to here? The history of computing is marked by ages. In each age, the basic design of how we work with computers changes. Many people probably think we're in the brave new Internet age at this time, but considering the nature of computing, we're likely just at an intermediary stage. We're just now peeking into the next age -- the age of the truly distributed computing system --the coming of the grid.

ActiveState today announced the release of Visual XSLT 2.0 at the Microsoft PDC. Visual XSLT 2.0 addresses customer's demands for a flexible debugger and a Visual Schema Mapper. The Just-In-Time de-bugger doesn't need source code and automatically senses and debugs code; it is the first of its kind for XSLT. The solution also includes a Visual Schema Mapper that has "drag and drop" functionality.

The author is one of the top Linux developers around, and a long-time UNIX champion. Fellow Linux developers will benefit from the useful, common-practice shell scripting techniques that the author and his Codemonks Consulting partners employ on a daily basis in their Linux development and applications services work.

LLVM is a new infrastructure designed for compile-time, link-time, runtime, and "idle-time" optimization of programs from arbitrary programming languages. LLVM is written in C++ and has been developed over the past 3 years at the University of Illinois. It currently supports compilation of C and C++ programs, using front-ends derived from GCC 3.4. New front-ends are being written for Java bytecode and CAML.

"Servers need what free desktop applications needed before KDE came: a common framework. A common way of configuration, a common way of being configured using GUI tools, a unified view to monitor them… there are also options that many server have in common, like a IP to listen to or the allowed IP ranges." Read the editorial here.