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 Java Sun has made available a pre-release of the JDK 1.2.2. You can check out the release notes or the nice list of bug fixes. (Registration is required to access both of these pages). The Beta 2 version of the J/View3D toolkit has been announced and is available from the J-Extreme.int web site. Perl Microsoft has moved into Perl development with the announcement of a three-year agreement with ActiveState for a "Perl Open Source development and support contract." The announcement mentions that "A significant amount of the development effort will be released as Open Source code under the Artistic License". It will be very important to watch this first move of Microsoft into the open source development world. Have they chosen a product under the Artistic license because they believe it will allow some way to "embrace and extend" the perl product, as they attempted to do with Java and have done successfully with other projects? We're going to get a chance to find out as this agreement unfolds. An interview with Larry Wall shows up as the cover article for the May Linux Journal. "In terms of biographical beginnings, my father was a pastor, as were both my grandfathers, and many of my ancestors before that. My wife likes to say that preachers are bred for intelligence (though I suppose she might be saying that just to flatter me). Be that as it may, I did receive a fairly decent set of brain construction genes. Beyond that, I also received a rich heritage of ideas and skills, some of which found their way into Perl culture. For instance, the notion that you can change the world. The idea that other people are important. The love of communication and an understanding of rhetoric, not to mention linguistics. The appreciation of the importance of text. The desire to relate everything to everything else. The passion to build up rather than tear down. And, of course, the dead certainty that true wealth is measured not by what you accumulate, but by what you pass on to others. " Python Franco-philes can rejoice in the the creation of a Python newsgroup in French. For more information, check out their announcement. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh	June 3, 1999

	Development projects New Projects The Free Electronic Commerce Software project has started up, and is seeking additional developers to help them get going. In response to a mention of his Voice over IP code in a Letter to the Editor, Roland Dreier has made the source code for his internet telephone program available, along with a mailing list for the discussion of the development. Enlightenment Rasterman hits the road. Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler has left the Red Hat Labs, evidently with a certain amount of bad feeling. See his announcement as posted on Slashdot. He says it will be a good thing for him and for the Enlightenment window manager. (Thanks to David T. Blake). Ganymede Ganymede, a Java-based network directory system, has now released version 0.99.1. The announcement contains details on the changes in the latest version, which appears to be getting closer to useability in production environements. Gnome More in-depth news on Gnome development came our way this week from Havoc Pennington's GNOME Summary for May 24th through the 31st. From it, we learned of the Gnome 'White Papers' web site, containing short documents that describe key pieces of Gnome technology, which just came up this past week. On the site, you'll find Dave Mason's document describing the entire Gnome application development framework. The summary mentioned above contains a lot of other interesting items, including a new commercial company planned to support Gnome and write custom Gnome software, a Gnome Workshop logo, Debian packages, Gnome PPP and more. Many thanks to Havoc for sharing this information with all of us. ht://Dig Updates on the development of ht://Dig are now available, starting with a lengthy State of the Code sent to the developer's list. A more user-level State of the Project covers what has changed in the past six months and what can be expected to change in the next six months. Progress is steady and response to the idea of an ht://Dig conference was enthusiastic, so the conference is a go. You can sign up now. It will be held August 19th and 20th in The Hague, Netherlands. KDE KDE Development News from Navindra Umanee is available again this week. KDE afiocionados will want to peruse it to get the full details, including pointers to the beginning of the release process for KDE 1.1.2. This upcoming release will feature the KDE Theme Manager, a selection of themes, and more. The release process is expected to take approximately 9 weeks. Also in this week's News comes more word of cooperation between the KDE and Gimp development teams and, on the opposite front, an alliance with the ImageMagick team, an interesting development. Debian users will want to check out a list of pointers in the News to debian packages for KDE. Midgard Henri Bergius' latest report on the Midgard Project is now available. Development on this web application development platform seems to be going strong, with a new roadmap in place, plans for a new site, and work to make Midgard interoperable with other web development tools. Samba The folks at VMWare have donated licenses to the Samba team, to support their development efforts. This donation should help to speed development - now compatibility with other operating systems can be tested without dual-booting or using extra systems. See the brief news item on the Samba site. (Thanks to Sean Summers). Zope A calm week in Zope-land has been reported by this week's Zope News from Amos Latteier. Work on the beta of the Portal kit is moving forward furiously, Brian Lloyd is busy smashing bugs and press on Zope this week has been good, including the following: Troubleshooting Professional Magazine's article on Zope, by Steve Litt Computing Canada's article on Open Source, which mentions Zope. If you want to join in the fun, check out this job posting, looking for a contract Zope programmer. Some other humorous links lie in the report itself, so you probably want to check it out ... Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh
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