General Development Archive

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.

Although the C language has been around for close to 30 years, its appeal has not yet worn off. It continues to attract a large number of people who must develop new skills for writing new applications, or for porting or maintaining existing applications. This article has been written with the needs of the developer in mind, and offers suggestions that may help them in their job.

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.

This article explores the new Python 2.3 itertools module, and gives you a sense of the new expressive power available with combinatorial iterators and how iterators -- conceived as lazy sequences -- are a powerful concept that opens new styles of Python programming.

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.

"Few languages have been as popular over the years as BASIC. Until about a decade ago, almost every programmer cut his teeth learning BASIC. Indeed, the name itself came from Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. If you've had BASIC training, can you find a familiar flavor that runs under Linux? Because it is not enough to find a good BASIC language implementation for Linux; one must find a BASIC language variant that approximates the style of BASIC to which you are accustomed." Read the article at DevChannel by Russell Pavlicek.

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.

OneStat.com today reported that more and more internet users choose for screen resolution 1024x768 which is the most popular screen resolution for exploring the internet. Users with monitors set to the most common resolution 800x600 for web sites have an approximate 31.7 percent global usage share. Seeing these numbers, both web designers and also application and OS developers should take into account that their projects (not counting specialized 3D/CAD/DTP apps etc) should be designed in a way that they totally fit and are usable on 800 pixels wide.

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

So, which programming language do you prefer? Come in and vote!

"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.

While covering TechEd 2003 for us last week, Chad Myers managed to sit down and interview Eric Gunnerson, a Program Manager in the Visual C# .NET group at Microsoft. In the interview, Eric discusses the future of C#, other languages, and more.

SciTech Software, Inc. announced it has released SciTech MGL 5.0 R10 for multiple operating systems including Linux, under a dual-license structure. Developers can now use SciTech MGL under the LGPL, or through SciTech’s commercial software license for those seeking to offer closed source solutions. Both versions come complete with source code and more than 1600 pages of online documentation. SciTech MGL comes with direct support for VGA, VESA VBE and DirectX compatible graphics cards out of the box via the SciTech SNAP Graphics device driver architecture.

Learn how C++ program structure works, from the perspective of functions and data. This sample chapter covers function definitions, inline functions, recursion, pointers to functions, and functions with default arguments. It also describes structures and unions, member functions, and passing structures and unions as arguments. Additionally, you'll learn about C++ storage classes, exceptions, namespaces, and free store memory. Another dev article, named "Using Java Development Tools in Eclipse" is also available.