LWN - Development

Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page All in one big page See also: last week's Development page.	Development tools Ada David A. Wheeler wrote in to mention that GNAT version 3.11p has just been released. GNAT is a widely-used, open source Ada95 compiler. Preliminary RPMs and Debian packages are available, along with additional information, on the Ada for Linux Team home page. Java JDK 1.2 for Alpha/Linux. "Uncle George" has announced the availability of version 1.2 of the Java JDK for the Alpha architecture. This is a port of the non-commercial sources from Sun. A mirror of the port is also available and recommended. There is still no new news (and therefore no good news yet) on the Blackdown Team's JDK 1.2 port. It is still held up due to threading problems that prevent it from passing the required tests. For those of you under considerable pressure to move to Java 2 (JDK 1.2), Jerry Treweek mentioned that he is willing to make available an alpha of jrex v1.1, a remote executor that allows you to keep your Linux development environment, but submit compilation of code to an NT workstation (presuming you have one available). Perl The next Perl release grows closer and closer. Maintenance trial 5 for perl5.005_03 is available under Graham Barr's CPAN directory. From the Perl Institute's News page, we note that 20 new perl monger groups have been announced, in sixteen different countries. 22 new or updated modules have been announced so far since last week. Pliant Hubert Tonneau has presented his new language, Pliant. He sent us this note describing the language a bit. By exploring the Pliant web-site, we found some more information on what Pliant is and why he decided to create it. Pliant is "more a new generation of language than an improvement in a given programming language family". Instead of building a new language with a few new interesting features, he chose to build a "very tiny language with a trivial syntax" to allow advanced features to be added to the language via modules. Take a look and see whether you like what he's put together or not! It is in a very early stage still and he is now looking for help to further improve it. Python The Call-for-Papers for this year's O'Reilly Python Conference is out. The conference will be held August 21st through the 24th in Monterey, CA and will contain two days of tutorials followed by two days of conference. Version 1.0alpha2 of the Remote Microscope software from CRNI is now available. The Remote Microscope system provides a Java applet that allows users to access and control an optical microscope over the Internet. The release announcement indicates that the new release contains minor interface and configuration improvements as well as bug fixes. pyslang-0.1.5 is now available. It includes bug fixes and improved portability for the python extension which provides cross-platform low-level text-mode user interaction facilities. Version 0.5.4 of wxPython, a Python extension module that encapsulates the wxWindows GUI classes, is now available. This week's Python-URL! is edited by Mike Orr. It is the first edition to try the experiment of using the USENET Message ID for the URLs instead of the Dejanews-specific ID. This is done to make Python-URL! more portable to non-Dejanews archives. If you have a problem with this change, be sure and send feedback to Cameron Laird. A technical explanation of Message-IDs is attached to the end of this week's edition. In addition, this week's Python-URL! contains pointers to postings on ILU 2.0alpha14, DCOracle 1.1.0, standard APIs for drawing and printing, Pythondoc and "getting PyTix 1.12 to work on Python 1.5". Smalltalk The Call-for-Papers for the 9th ECOOP Workshop for PhD Students in Object Oriented Systems (PhDOOS '99) has been released. The workshop will be part of the 13th European Conference on Object Oriented Programming (ECOOP '99), to be held in Lisbon, Portugal, June 14th through the 18th, 1999. A website for the workshop is available. ObjectShare will premier VisualWorks 3.0 for Linux at the upcoming LinuxWorld conference. Tcl/tk This week sees the introduction of a new Tcl resource, Stoian Jekov's free, on-line Tcl/Tk Journal. The first issue was released on Friday, January 15th, 1999. It contains an article on "Concepts of Architectural Design for Tcl Applications" by Alexandre Ferrieux. This week's Tcl-URL! is now available. It contains several new software and resource announcements, as well as the usual pointers to some of the more interesting threads of the week. Version 6.3 of moodss, a modular spreadsheet, is now available. mod_dtcl version 0.4.2 is being made more widely available than other early releases of the free/open source implementation of server parsed Tcl, under Apache. David Welton included the README for it in his announcement. A Russian Tcl mailing list is now available.	February 4, 1999

	Development projects DDD Users of the (really nice) DDD debugger may want to have a look at this call for help and see if you can chip in a bit. The maintainer of DDD is getting overwhelmed by the task of keeping DDD going and dealing with users, and needs a hand. (Thanks to Vitaly Fedrushkov for passing the note on to us). Ganymede Ganymede is a network directory management system, developed over the past three years and just released under the GPL. It is similar in concept to Microsoft's ActiveDirectory and Novell's NDS. Jonathan Abbey dropped us a note which describes ganymede in more detail. Written in Java, it uses a multi-threaded server and provides a graphical client and console applets. The Ganymede server will run on any operating system with a Java 1.1.6 or better JDK, but the install scripts are heavily Unix-oriented, so it is likely to be difficult to install and configure under Windows NT or other non-Unix operating systems. It is known to work on Solaris 2.5, Solaris 2.6, Solaris 2.7, Linux 2.0.x with the Blackdown JDK port, FreeBSD with the FreeBSD JDK port, and on AIX. For more information, documentation and screenshots, check out the Ganymede page. Alternately, you can download Ganymede from here. Icecast icecast 0.9 is out. Several big changes are incorporated, including a Remote Administration interface, stream relay and JavaCast, a pure Java implementation of the server. KDE kde 1.1pre2 rpms are available for Red Hat 5.1 and 5.2 and for Caldera OpenLinux 1.3. New KDE packages from the past week include: kpacman-0.2.4 kderadio-0.3.3 kreatecd-0.2.1 kheisepro-1.3 kvirc-0.9.0 kmaster-0.8 kmpg-0.4.1 kover-0.31 GNOME GNOME 0.99.5 is out. The release includes gnome-libs, gnome-network, gnome-pim gnome-utils, mc and gnome-games. Note that Miguel is having problems with insufficient disk space which caused a lot of wasted time in producing this release. If you have any large disks to donate, or extra memory, please let him know. Gnumeric 0.8 is out. The announcement indicates that the more important change is integration of Adrian Likins' documentation into the build system. Many buxfixes, of course, are also included. Debian users will be happy to note that gnome-apt is now available. Version 0.3 is considered to be very usable, although there are a couple of known annoying bugs. New GNOME releases from the past week include: gdm-0.7.1 gxTar 0.0.6 Gnome Media 0.99.5 Mozilla/Netscape The jazilla.org site has had a face lift!. Check out the New Site, which has definitely improved a great deal. Here is Sunny Hundal's note with several comments on the new site. Several of the following items were pulled from the Mozillazine, always a good source of information on the Mozilla project. If you are curious about XUL, (pronounced Zool) the eXtensible User-interface Language, check out this essay by Dave Hyatt. The NPL and MPL are scheduled for overhauls. Draft versions of the new licenses will be posted to Mozillazine over the next two weeks. The drafts will include minor changes to the patent infringement portion of the licenses. The changes are intended to "encourage greater adoption of the Mozilla code base". Lyx Version 1.0.0 of Lyx has been released! Lyx is an advanced open source document processor. Lyx "encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance". It promises fast and easy creation of short notes and letters, but its functionality is primarily aimed at complex documents like technical documentation, doctoral theses and conference proceedings. Check out the announcement for more details, or go straight to the Lyx home page. Qt The beta version of Qt 2.0 has been announced. An anonymous source provided us with this screenshot of a partial port of KDE to Qt 2.0. It demonstrates one of Qt's new styles, the "platinum" look, meant to appeal to MacIntosh aficionados. In addition, a screenshot of the Qt "metal" demo (Qt widgets) is also available. Siag Office Siag Office contains the Siag spreadsheet, the PW word processor and the Egon enimation program. The latest release, 3.1.4 has support for Spanish, German, French and Swedish. More information can be found on the Siag home page. Wine Wine 990131 is now available. The announcement indicates that the new version contains a lot of new OLE "stuff", improvements to DirectDraw support, and better messages queues, along with bug fixes, new functions and new stubs. Douglas Ridgway will be giving a talk on Wine at the upcoming LinuxWorld Expo. He hopes to meet with any other Wine hackers that show up, so keep an eye out for him!
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