General Development Archive

Code Editors Renew Approach to IDEs

Call it a back-to-basics movement or simply professionals seeking the best tools to get the job done well and on time. With enterprises putting a premium on productivity, a quiet revolution among programmers is eschewing the heavy, feature-filled IDE and turning instead to the venerable standby: the code editor. Developers seek more control over productivity with an old programming tool standby.

Agent Support in libferris 1.1.10

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).

Documenting Source Code

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."

Mix-and-Matching Software?

SDTimes has an article about Transitive Technologies which claims to have a software-based binary translation package. The software, called QuickTransit, "decodes application binaries into an intermediate form, optimizes blocks of code and stores them in cache, then encodes for the target processor." There's nothing on the Transitive website, but there this page explaining (in very general terms) the software means for binary translation. Mix-and-match your software perhaps?

SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux 2.0 now Available

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced that it is has released SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux 2.0 – The Simple Driver Solution. This release is based on SciTech’s SNAP (System Neutral Access Protocol) architecture and targets the Linux enterprise markets with a host of features designed to reduce the total cost of ownership associated with maintaining Linux on corporate enterprises. Read more for the rest of the press release.

Ch 4.0 Released

Ch is a superset of C language. It parses and executes C code directly without intermediate code or byte code. It does not distinguish interpreted code from compiled C/C++ code. The new Ch 4.0 is the most complete C interpreter in existence and is embeddable in other programs and hardware.

Secure Programmer: Developing secure programs

This column explains how to write secure applications; it focuses on the Linux operating system, but many of the principles apply to any system. In today's networked world, software developers must know how to write secure programs, yet this information isn't widely known or taught. This first installment of the Secure programmer column introduces the basic ideas of how to write secure applications and discusses how to identify the security requirements for your specific application. Future installments will focus on different common vulnerabilities and how to prevent them.

1st International DotGNU Collaborative Coding Competition

The DotGNU project is holding an international competition in the area of collaboratively implementing the System.Windows.Forms namespace in the C# class libraries, a GUI framework that will allow developers and end users to run and develop applications on many different platforms, anything from GNU/Linux, MS Windows, OS X to even handhelds. Participants will have a chance of winning one of fifteen monetary prizes totalling US$ 4500. The full anouncement is here.

Get the new Rational Developer PowerPack

Sign up for the free Developer PowerPack of your choice, and over the next 6 weeks you’ll get a robust collection of resources—designed by developers for developers—that will enable you to evaluate Rational developer tools. You can choose from the following PowerPacks: Java Platform edition, XDE Developer - .NET edition, Rose Enterprise for Windows, Embedded Solutions, and Rapid Developer for J2EE Development.