See also: last week's Development page.

Development tools

Java

San Jose Mercury columnist Dan Gillmor says that Sun should turn Java into an open-source product. His article makes that point that this may be the only way to save the language. "There's no doubt that Java, for all its successes in certain areas, has lost some of the momentum it enjoyed even as recently as a year ago. Andreessen thinks -- and I agree -- that Sun could give Java a huge boost by following Netscape's open-source lead."

Perl

• Config::Access 0.01, simple text-file based access control based on TCP wrappers
• grepmail 1.7, search email archives for patterns
• HMAC::MD5 v0.01, compute a digest from a key
• HMAC::SHA1 0.01, compute an HMAC SHA-1 digest
• HTML::EP 0.1101, a modular, extensible system for Perl embedded HTML
• NetServer-Generic-0.03 and NetServer-SMTP-0.01, writing simple TCP/IP servers and a minimal SMTP interface
• XML::Grove 0.04, define a set of objects representing XML documents

Python

Python 1.5.2 is apparently in alpha for PSA members. A mention was made that threads and tkinter will be useable together, but only sort of and there are still problems.

• LDAP-based phonebook, a web server which parses RFC-1959 requests sent over http (pre-release)
• whiz, a CGI forms tool (pre-release)
• Knowbot 1.0 alpha 2 the first public release of Guido's mobile agent system.

Tcl/tk

Slides from John Ousterhout's talk at the Tcl conference are now available, along with results of the Ouster-votes taken during his talk. Ouster-votes are informal polls that John takes during his yearly presentation. From the poll, you can get an idea of what people are using Tcl for and in what direction Scriptics is likely to take Tcl.

Also mentioned in the poll, the Tcl/Tk workpace sources will soon be opened to allow read-only access to the Internet. That will allow more people to play with the latest development versions.

Development projects

The Innerworld Project is a new project which is developing a number of components which will come together to create a modular, dynamic, and real-time virtual world server. Upon initial release, the project will move to an open development model, but for now, the development is private. However, if you believe you have something to contribute, contact them via email. The end result will be "freely available".

GNOME

Due to bandwidth problems, the Gnome FAQ has temporarily moved. Steven Hill volunteered to help out.

KDE

Linuxconf

The Linuxconf mirror site run by Don Schupp has been taken off-line indefinitely due to damage done by a cracker. Don reported, since keeping ahead of the almost daily attempts to hack my box is costing me too much time, my mirror site is shutdown. It is sad to see volunteer efforts like this frustrated by the malice or ignorance of others.

Linux-embedded

Mozilla/Netscape

Oliver White posted this week's Jazilla Report, which summarizes some items we've mentioned before, but also covers what some of the individual Jazilla contributors are currently working on. Sounds like they've gotten some good responses to their recent publicity.

Wine

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