General Development Archive

This article revisits the working of metaclasses and their relation to other OOP concepts. It contrasts class instantiation with inheritance, distinguishes classmethods and metamethods, and explains and solves metaclass conflicts.

"Whether X configuration is getting you down or you need a lightweight graphics solution for that embedded app, Richard Drummond thinks SciTech has the answer." LinuxFormat's complete review is posted at SciTech's web site in PDF format.

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.

SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux is a simple to use, easy to configure alternative to XFree86 Graphics Drivers. This latest release supports 125 graphics cards on multiple Linux distributions with full 2D acceleration and adds support for the latest hardware from ATI.

PHP developers have just released PHP 4.3.3. This release fixes a large number of bugs and all users of PHP are urged to upgrade. Full list of fixes can be found in the news file . Read the release announcement here

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.

The World Intellectual Property Organization was planning on having a discussion at its next conference on open collaborative projects (such as the internet), including open source software. So many participants were interested in the open source discussion that it started quite a buzz. Now, lobbyists with pockets full of money from Microsoft and other interests are pushing to have the meeting scuttled. They say that a discussion on open source has no place in a meeting about Intellectual Property (as if non-proprietary IP isn't IP too).

"Depending on how much you care for writing new versions of old programs, Reiser4 could be either one of the greater boons to software engineers or one of the greater banes. Either way, programming on Linux will likely never be the same. It's not too remote a possibility that other popular platforms will be influenced as well." Read the article at Kuro5hin.

When HP World starts in a few days, users can expect to hear about some new server management software that covers Unix, Linux and Windows in one go, and it's called Nimbus.

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.

From Slashdot: "Hans Reiser has benchmarked Reiser4 against ext3 and Reiserfs 3. Reiser4 turns out to be way faster than V3, and for ext3, why don't you check out the results yourself ? Han's Reiser states, "these benchmarks mean to me that our performance is now good enough to ship V4 to users", and he will be probably sending in a patch within the next couple of weeks to be included in the 2.6/2.5 kernel." Benchmarks against XFS would be most interesting too.

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

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.

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.