See also: last week's Development page.

Development tools

Java

An interview with James Gosling, the "father of the Java programming language", according to the article, contains some interesting comments. On the question of whether Sun will ever make the Java code open source, he says, "It's unlikely that we will go totally open source in the way some people use that phrase. We're pretty close to it. The main issue for us is that one of the real strengths of Java is that it's a very strong cross-platform. We try to make it as free as possible but still enforce interoperability.

On the other hand, when the question of Java on Linux came up, he pointed the finger back at the Linux community for the problem. "he inter-operability problems with Linux are just horrible. You have to be excruciatingly careful because all the different flavours of Linux are all slightly different."

When these comments were mentioned on the java-linux mailing list, the reaction was mostly puzzlement. To the best of the knowledge available, the problems with the current Java port have nothing to do with differences between Linux distributions. Cees de Groot commented in this posting, "Well, he's right that it is horrible, but not right about the reason. The port is hard because of differences between Solaris and Linux (threads, signals, X11, SMP, stuff like that - it's a horrible mix). The differences between Linux glibc releases are there, 2.0, 2.1 and 2.1.2(?) are binary incompatible, but as far as I can tell these differences are actually due to support for the stuff that the JVM needs getting better."

Perl

Python

Tcl/tk

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

Development projects

Both the GNOME and KDE weekly reports are on hold for the next week, so expect double reports next time around. In addition, with the hurricane hitting North Carolina, many websites supported by Red Hat were down while this issue was being developed, so news from those projects may be missing or behind. We'll try to get caught up next week.

AOLserver

Gnome

High Availability

Maintenance of the Linux-HA FAQ has moved over to Volker Wiegand, as noted in this note from Harald Milz, the former maintainer.

Slides from Lars Marowsky-Bree's talk on LVS, given at the Linux Kongress '99, are now available (in MagicPoint format).

KDE

The second annual KDE Developers Meeting has been announced for October 7-10 at the University of Erlangen, in Germany. Caldera Systems and SuSE are sponsering the meeting.

Midgard

Mozilla/Netscape

• Building Web Content, Applications, and Services with Mozilla and W3C Standards
• Enhancements to the Mozilla Plug-in API
• Embedding Gecko into Software Applications

MozillaZine has a report up from the Jazilla project, which, you may remember, is building a Java-based version of Mozilla. Matthew Schmidt reports, "In the last few months, Jazilla has gained speed has the programmers that were involved have regained interest in light of recent motivation and some new interest in the project. Work has begun on an open source pure Java renderer, but the project needs help. Anyone with experience on the Swing Text package or the Swing HTML package is definitely wanted, although we will take anyone who wants to help."

Wine

Since the latest snapshot still dates back to August 15th, the news this week focuses on development, including a port to BeOS, integrating the OpenGL libraries with Wine, and thread safety. One piece of good news: Ove Kaven received $600 in funding from CoSource and with it, has started development on the 32bit Winsock, very good news since the current Winsock "is still from the Win16 days".

Zope

A Zope Birds of a Feather session is being planned for the Atlanta Linux Showcase next month.

Check out this week's Zope Weekly News for other Zope tidbits.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

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