General Development Archive

Review: Kylix 3 has Plenty of Programming Power

"It is not as if I am new to Kylix. I am a Delphi programmer since version 1, and I always keep my C++ skills up. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to the release of Borland's Kylix 3, the Rapid Application Development environment for Linux that includes both Delphi language and C++ IDE's (integrated development environment). The code produced with Kylix can be recompiled with minimal changes under Microsoft Windows using either Delphi for Windows version 6 or greater, or C++ Builder version 6 or greater." Read the review at NewsForge.

The /opt and /usr Issue Revisited

"I suppose it's a losing battle, but it's one worth fighting, anyway. What makes me think of it is a thread I noticed on the freedesktop.org mailing list. In that thread, Andreas Pour, with whom I do not agree about much, defends obvious common sense against what over the last couple of years has been a growing onslaught. He's absolutely right, but that isn't always enough." Read it at LinuxAndMain.

UNIX To Windows Code Migration Guide

This document illustrates guidelines and best practices required to port existing UNIX applications to the Windows environment, which can potentially reduce the time, cost, and risk associated with a traditionally painful migration process. This guide covers planning and practical issues involved in migration or co-existence between UNIX and Windows and provides a review of the different ways in which such a migration can be done. Ideal for both UNIX programmers as well as Windows programmers, this is a valuable source of information for anyone looking to take advantage of Windows.

GNU C library 2.3 Released

Glibc 2.3 is out and prelinking support was added for ELF targets, startup times are significantly reduced (C++ and Qt/KDE applications will be most benefited from this - with this support on glibc there is no reason to revert to manual prelinking KDE which reportedly created stability issues). Read-only stdio streams now use mmap to speed up operation. The malloc functions were completely rewritten. The runtime now can handle the ELF thread-local storage (TLS) ABI on some platforms. This release has been ported to PowerPC64/Linux. Download it in a bz2 (13 MB) or gunzip (17.5 MB) tarball formats.

Linus Merges XFS on Kernel 2.5.36

From LWN: "Linus has just merged the XFS filesystem into his BitKeeper tree; it will thus show up in the 2.5.36 kernel. XFS is a high-performance, journaling filesystem from SGI; it now becomes the fourth journaling filesystem (alongside ext3, ReiserFS, and JFS) supported by the Linux kernel. (Other stuff which has been merged, so far, for 2.5.36 includes an IEEE-1394 ("Firewire") update, the next big set of IDE patches, the "huge page" patch for i386 systems, and a number of other tweaks)."

Objective-C: the More Flexible C++

"It is a surprising fact that anyone studying GNUstep or the Cocoa Framework will notice they are nearly identical to the NEXTSTEP APIs that were defined ten years ago. A decade is an eternity in the software industry. If the framework (and its programming language--Objective C) came through untouched these past ten years, there must be something special about it. And Objective-C has done more than survive; some famous games including Quake and NuclearStrike were developed using Objective-C." Read the introduction to Objective-C at LinuxJournal.

SharpDEvelop 0.90 is Released

Code Completion is now back, in the new version of SharpDevelop.The forms designer received a major working over and now can handle invisible controls and autogenerates C# and VB.NET code for the forms. Stability overall also has improved. In similar news, Borland Software Corp will increase its support for .NET with development tools the company believes will win corporate backing despite reduced IT spending, Gavin Clarke writes.

SciTech to GPL its Proprietary Device Driver Architecture

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced the intention to release the bulk of its proprietary device driver development tools under a new dual license structure. SciTech’s commercially available graphics driver pack, SciTech SNAP Graphics, currently supports nearly 180 graphics chip sets on multiple OS’es with full 2D acceleration. Access to all existing SciTech SNAP drivers will remain available under SciTech’s commercial license and will not be Open Sourced due to existing NDA’s with chip vendors.

.NET and J2EE Web Services Interoperability Demonstration

This IBM article shows how J2EE (WebSphere for Linux) and .NET can work together using Web services standards. Specifically it explains how EJBs can interact with COM+ components using Web services standards developed on WebSphere Studio and Visual Studio .Net. You can download WebSphere Studio for Linux. Update: On a related note, Microsoft released its Web Services Development Kit Technology Preview.

Microsoft Developer Tools Roadmap 2002–2004

This document contains a summary of Microsoft's plan for Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework over the next two releases. Designed to assist customers in their planning process, it is not a comprehensive "feature dump," but more an overview of general themes and direction—an explanation of the development issues that Microsoft is planning to help customers address in each new release.

Karelia Speaks Out Against Apple; Plans Port To Windows

This is just a follow-up to our previous story about Apple designing the new Sherlock 3 to be very similar to Watson. We raised the question if this policy (the OS company competing with its own third party developers in the application space) was a good thing or not in the long run. Now the company behind Watson, Karelia, openly speak against Apple's policy and they are planning to port their (great) application to Windows. On a similar note, did anyone got even close to start working on this? Update: Stardock's CEO, Brad Wardell, wrote an editorial related to the question above.

Borland to Wield Tools Against Microsoft

Borland, in the midst of a turnaround after years of financial struggles and strategic missteps, is preparing to go head-to-head against Microsoft next year with new programming tools that allow developers to build software for Microsoft's Windows operating system and its overarching .Net software strategy. Borland's suite of tools, code-named Galileo, will be positioned to compete against Microsoft's popular Visual Studio.Net tool suite, said Ted Shelton, Borland's chief strategy officer. In the meantime, Borland has just released Kylix 3 for Linux.