General Development Archive

"There's a significant shift afoot in storage fundamentals, and it's not storage area networks (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS)-- although both will have critical roles in these new fundamentals. The shift involves the facilitating role that metadata will play in abstracting the specifics about data and where it's stored from the applications, end users, and operating systems requiring access to it." Read the article at ZDNews.

GCC 3.3.2 includes numerous new features, improvements, bug fixes, and other changes. Grab it here. Additionally, this interview at WindowsForDevices is with a young Russian programmer who earlier this year launched a project to port the open source GCC C/C++ compiler and supporting tools (library, manager, linker, etc.) to Windows CE and the Pocket PC platform.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant said it is working through ECMA International, the Geneva-based standards organization, to push the development of a standard set of language extensions that will create a binding between the International Standards Organization (ISO) standard C++ programming language and Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).

This article shows how to develop a plug-in that embeds the HSQLDB pure-Java relational database server into the Eclipse Workbench. Although not as powerful as DB2 and not as popular as MySQL, HSQLDB can satisfy the needs of a wide range of Java applications, because of its extensibility and low memory/processor requirements. NewsForge also has an article about Eclipse.

In the dawn of the renovation of freedesktop.org's web site, David Zeuthen announced the release of HAL 0.1. HAL is an implementation of a hardware abstraction layer, as defined by Havoc Pennington's paper. It encompasses a shared library for use in applications, a daemon, a hotplug tool, command line tools and a set of stock device info files. Carlos Perelló Marín also announced the design of a similar concept, but it is expected the two projects to merge. More people are encouraged to join this innovative project. Elsewhere, Gnome's Seth Nickell is giving us a first taste of his effort to replace the Init system.

LinuxGazette features interesting articles on their issues for August and September, including an article introducing the assembly language.

Grid computing represents a big step in the world of computing. The technology is still fairly nascent, but at the developerWorks Grid computing zone, they're publishing a steady stream of new articles, tutorials, resources, and tools. Many visitors interested in Grid computing are asking some very basic questions: What do we do with all of this stuff? Where do we start? How do the pieces fit together? What comes next? This page provides an overview for readers who want to learn about Grid computing but don't know where to start. It places the basics of Grid computing into their proper context and ties together relevant developerWorks articles, tutorials, and tips.

Rafeeq Rehman and Christopher Paul explain how to use compilers and assemblers productively in a development environment.

There is now a plugin interface in libferris so that the filesystem can use AI to make suggestions as to what emblems a file should have. Currently I have Bayesian (bogofilter) and Support Vector Machine (svm_light) agents. The interface supports anything that can train on selected files and the attachment of emblems and then proffer a fuzzy assertion or retraction given an example file. The agent's beliefs are all collected and resolved to give an overall fuzzy assertion/retraction belief based on how trusted you think the agents are (the trust resolution should allow many resolution paths in the next release).

Jef Raskin (former Apple developer) has written a critique of the current state of Integrated Development Environments. He notes that programmers have been struggling with the same problems for 30 years, and although new IDEs have simplified many tasks, many are still a usability nightmare, noting, "most current IDEs make adding comments difficult, sometimes painful: You often have to wrap comments by hand, discouraging paragraph-length explanations, or at least discouraging their editing. It is incredible to see antediluvian interfaces in 21st-century products."

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced that Open Watcom 1.1 has been released. This update includes a number of eagerly anticipated fixes and enhancements and can be downloaded, free of charge, from the Open Watcom web site.

This is the fourth tutorial in series of learning Cocoa for MacOSX. Read the article at MacDevCenter.

AWK may not be the first language that comes to mind when you need to write a program, but its flexibility may surprise you. The article is at LinuxJournal.

Dave Kleikamp announced the release of JFS 1.1.3 on the lkml yesterday. Anyone using JFS who recently upgraded to the 2.6-test Linux kernel will want to take note of the new version of the utilities.