General Development Archive

"One of the great advantages of Cocoa is getting a lot of functionality with little code. There are classes in the Cocoa Framework that handle much of the necessary work in creating applications that have multiple documents. NSDocumentController, NSDocument and its closely related cohort NSWindowController combine to give you a powerful starting point when building your own multiple document applications. The best way to illustrate the power that these classes offer is with an example; that's how HTMLEditor.app was born. HTMLEditor is a basic text editor that has file associations for HTML. No big deal right? Well, over the next month or so, HTMLEditor will be extended to include a number of additional features, forming the basis of a series of articles." Read the rest of the MacOSX Cocoa/Project Builder step-by-step tutorial at StepWise.

IBM WebSphere Developer Domain just came out with a high level comparison of WSAD and Visual Studio.NET. Instead of debating benchmarks, the article examines the major differences and how each company supports Web services.

"In Ed's previous column, he focused on socket programming and performance within a single system. In a future column he will pick up where he left off, but his topic this month is management of threads and processes in Linux and Windows systems. He walks through the differences between processes and threads, shows how to create and destroy them, and writes a program you can use to study thread management on your systems." Read the intersting aricle at IBM DeveloperWorks.

"According to Anders, generics (parametic polymoprhism) is one of the directions in which C# would evolve. Microsoft already has a prototype of the runtime in generics. "The trick is to proceed with caution," he advises." Read the rest of the interview with the creator of C# at TheRegister.

Borland on Friday will ship a new software development tool for C++ programmers. The new version, Borland C++ Builder 6, features support for Web services, allowing developers to build software that is accessible over the Internet via PCs, cell phones and other handheld devices. The cost is $2,999 for the enterprise edition, $999 for the professional edition and $69 for the personal edition. In other development news, Rational Software on Tuesday introduced a new software development tool that is compatible with software from Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems. The software company, which has worked mostly with Microsoft in the past, announced Tuesday that its new XDE Professional v2002 product will work with Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net development tools and IBM's rival WebSphere Studio development tools. The XDE, or extended development environment product, has also been designed to support IBM's Eclipse IDE, software based on Sun's Java technology.

"Intel's C++ Compilers for Linux and Windows smoke GNU C and MS Visual C++ in number crunching benchmarks" the article at Open-Magazine suggests. We are not surprised at all, as we already talked about this on OSNews, months ago.

"Ruby. Perhaps you've heard of it? "Oh, yeah, I think it's one of those new object oriented scripting languages", you say. I know a lot of you might be thinking "Not another new language! I'm perfectly happy with (COBOL/C/cshell/awk/Perl/...); why does the world need another programming language?!", while a few others are thinking 'Cool, a new language to explore'." Read the rest of the article, an introduction to the Ruby programming language, at FreshMeat.

Good news for the Krusader fans, as version 1.0 was released today after 1.5 years of development. Krusader is a KDE/QT-based file manager and being similar to Norton or Midnight Commander it should already have lots of friends among the Linux users. Krusader seems to be today the only real & viable alternative to Konqueror or Nautilus today under a Linux desktop. In a related note, Gnumeric 1.0, the Gnome Office spreadsheet was released recently.

The founder of the Python programming language, Guido van Rossum, writes: "On December 21, just in time to be placed under the Christmas tree, we're issuing the final release of Python 2.2. We're proud of this release, and expect that you'll like it". Read what's new in the new version and other related information.

Eclipse, IBMs open sourced development tool donation (which is now supported by an organization of a number of companies), just got a little stronger as the released their first plugin sub-project. The C and C++ IDE for the Eclipse platform, with focus on Linux development and deployment. On a similar note, developerWorks is offering a trial download for WebSphere Studio Application Developer for Linux which is a pluggable tool-development and integration platform that incorporates the technology found on Eclipse.

The Bochs IA-32 Emulator Project unveiled a new version of the popular Bochs emulator to the public today, improving on the stability and ground breaking improvements of Bochs 1.2. Bochs 1.3 includes many major enhancements including a powerful menu-based configuration system and networking support for Linux and Windows NT/2000. Other additions in this release include support for ISO-format disk images, improved mouse performance, physical CD-ROM support for all versions of Windows, parallel port emulation, enhanced debugger, and many cpu and device model improvements. Bochs 1.3 also adds native support for Mac OS X and Amiga MorphOS, along with improved support for BeOS.

The new version of the PHP programming language, PHP 4.1.0, includes several other key improvements: A new input interface for improved security (read below), Highly improved performance in general, Revolutionary performance and stability improvements under Windows. The multithreaded server modules under Windows (ISAPI, Apache, etc.) perform as much as 30 times faster under load! We want to thank Brett Brewer and his team in Microsoft for working with us to improve PHP for Windows. Versioning support for extensions. Right now it's barely being used, but the infrastructure was put in place to support separate version numbers for different extensions. The negative side effect is that loading extensions that were built against old versions of PHP will now result in a crash, instead of in a nice clear message. Make sure you only use extensions built with PHP 4.1.0. Turn-key output compression support. Lots of fixes and new functions.

"Obviously, Kylix OE is not a moneymaker for Borland. It is a gift to the open source community. That community does not even represent Borland's target developer market. Borland customers are, for the most part, programmers and IT shops firmly entrenched in the Windows world. It's aimed at Delphi users who are branching out from writing for the Windows platform to Linux. Not the other way around." Get the rest of the story at LinuxWorld.

In last month's column, Dr. Edward G. Bradford, senior programmer at IBM, covered synchronization primitives and gave a reprise on pipes. This month he takes a first look at communication using sockets. Ed demonstrates some techniques for writing a sockets program and shows how his programming techniques perform in various operating system environments.