General Development Archive

Aleksey Dolya interviews Brian Kernighan, one of the creators of the AWK and AMPL languages and someone who has seen the birth of UNIX and C.

Python 2.3 has just been released. Changes, Release Notes and Highlights for more info.

Pixelglow Software announced the availability of macstl 0.1 -- a new C++ source library.

REAL Software announced that the next version of REALbasic will generate native applications for Linux (in addition to Mac Classic, Mac OS X and Windows). The IDE is not ported, you will have to cross-compile a Linux binary. And they now have a Visual Basic migration tool that will help developers port their VB applications to these other platforms.

A Grid computing environment provides the virtual computing resource that will be used to execute applications. The functional components(security, resource managament, informations services, and data managament)of a grid environment, as well as non-functional considerations such as performance requirements or operating system requirements, must be well understood when considering enabling an application to execute in a grid environment. This article helps you determine whether an application is a good candidate to execute in a grid environment.

The filesystem is a database, but it has always been unsuitable as the computer's primary one. Programmers have to write specialized programs to get the functionality they need. Now, new advances in software like Plan 9, the Reiser 4 filesystem and Linux are making the improvements the filesystem needs to become viable. Plan 9 is using the filesystem as the integral system interface, and the Reiser filesystem is unifying pointlessly different but equivalent namespaces. For operating systems to improve for users (that always includes programmers), they need to incorporate these new ideas.

Slashdot first reported that Jim Gray (a Microsoft researcher) explains the relative cost of supercomputing/clustering/gridding for various types of task.

wx.NET is a C# wrapper for wxWindows, providing a portable GUI toolkit for .NET programs. wx.NET can be used with various implementations of the CLI, including .NET, Mono, and DotGNU Portable.NET. Other C# wrappers for popular freely available toolkits are GTK# and QT#. Also, more developers are needed to assist porting Mono or dotGNU to Mac OS X.

Microsoft announced the availability of its Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) software initiator package, including the Microsoft iSCSI initiator service and its driver.

REBOL Technologies recently released the source code for the REBOL/View Desktop to promote open source development of future versions. The Desktop module is the default user interface displayed when REBOL/View is started. The Desktop is essentially a non-web-based Internet browser that provides a simple method for users to execute REBOL applications distributed across systems the world over.

Extreme Programming (XP) founder Kent Beck likes to say he made up XP's fundamentals during a particularly troubled project in 1996. While strictly true, from talking to him you sense he'd really been formulating the process for quite some time. Find out what Kent thinks about the contribution of the Java platform to software development's success (or lack thereof). In this interview he explains how better applications can arise from the ashes of failure.

Multi-platform toolkit wxWindows 2.4.1 has been released. This contains bug fixes to 2.4.0, including improved behaviour on Windows XP.

Having written open source software myself, and being a subscriber to mailing lists, etc, there is a realization that the number one thing missing from smaller open source projects is feedback from users.

"These are syntactically interesting features, not life-changing events. Most programmers who've spent a few years in the industry learn large numbers of languages. C# is just a particularly interesting addition to the pack." Read the article at ZDNet.