See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

SourceForge provides an incredibly useful service to the open-source developer community, and VA Linux should be greatly thanked for that. The current statistics show that around 16,000 projects are hosted there. One has to wonder, however, if the community would not be better served by a more decentralized model for the hosting of open-source projects.

Having a large percentage of projects under development on a single site tends to concentrate all of the risks in one place, whether they are related to corporate troubles, network crackers, or legal attacks. The news from VA concerning SourceForge is fairly reassuring, but it makes one think about what would have happened if there had been staff cuts in that area.

It might be time to consider the old adage: Don't put all of your eggs in one basket.

Clusters

Linux-Cluster mailing list. Rik van Riel has created a metalist for Linux cluster projects in an effort to share infrastructure between the multiple clustering projects currently underway.

Databases

Mini SQL 3.0 pre 1 released. Hughes Technologies announced the availability of Mini SQL 3.0 pre 1, also known as mSQL. See the release notes for details on the changes in this release, which include a completely redone query engine.

aboutSQL: GROUP BY (ONLAMP.com). John Paul Ashenfelter continues his series on SQL programming with an article that introduces the SQL GROUP BY directive.

Embedded Systems

A developer's perspective on PocketLinux (LinuxDevices.com). Part 5 of a series from Jerry Epplin on the status and history of Linux on PDAs looks at Transvirtual's PocketLinux, the Java based solution for handheld devices. "PocketLinux for the iPAQ uses the handhelds.org kernel and builds a GUI platform on top of it. But PocketLinux, provided by Transvirtual Technologies, is in a sense more ambitious than the others, in that it is targeted toward development by both programmers and non-programmers."

Network Management

OpenNMS Update, February 27th, 2001. The latest issue of the OpenNMS Update has been published. Highlights include updates to the status of various projects and an early adopter program status.

PortMon 0.6 released. Version 0.6 of PortMon has been released. "PortMon is a port monitor program that keeps track of open ports on servers to be sure they are still up and talking."

Science

Danforth Center's Kilo Cluster Helps Researchers Study the Building Blocks of Life (Enterprise Linux). Enterprise Linux magazine has published an article about a Linux based Beowulf cluster that is being used for genetic research. "Skolnick rejected RISC-based solutions as being either too big, too slow or too expensive, and decided on a Beowulf cluster using Intel Pentium III processors at 733 MHz, and running the Linux operating system. And, he found he could afford a system with 1,040 processors (520 nodes), giving him peak performance of 335 Gflops."

Web-site Development

ht://Dig 3.20 b3 released. After nearly a year of inactivity, a new version of the popular web site search engine, ht://Dig 3.20 b3 has been released. The release notes contain a long list of bugs that have been fixed.

Announcing OpenFlow 1.0. Paolo Bizzarri has announced the availability of OpenFlow 1.0, an open-source workflow management system. "OpenFlow is a workflow management system, written in Zope + Python. It has been heavily based on the Chautauqua workflow."

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

Application Links
GIMP
Mozilla
Galeon
High Availability
ht://Dig
mnoGoSearch
MagicPoint
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

Open Source Code Collections
Berlios
Freshmeat
OpenSourceDirectory
Savannah
Le Serveur Libre
SourceForge
Sweetcode

Programming Languages

ERLANG

New site: Erlang-fr.org. Mickael Remond has put together Erlang-fr.org, a web site devoted to all things Erlang. The site is in French.

Java

Writing multithreaded Java applications (IBM developerWorks). Alex Roetter discusses Java multithreaded applications in an IBM developerWorks article. "A program or process can contain multiple threads that execute instructions according to program code. Like multiple processes that can run on one computer, multiple threads appear to be doing their work in parallel. Implemented on a multi-processor machine, they actually can work in parallel. Unlike processes, threads share the same address space; that is, they can read and write the same variables and data structures."

O'Reilly Network Launches Independent Java Web Site. O'Reilly has announced the creation of a new web site dedicated to Java, ONJava.com, that it claims will be an advocate for open source software development in the Java community. The site will also cover open source Sun initiatives like the Jakarta and JXTA projects under the Apache open source license.

Lisp

CLiki: a Common Lisp Wiki. The CLiki site provides a Wiki style collaborative authoring environment for users of Common Lisp on Unix systems. Check it out for the latest in the world of Lisp.

Perl

Using Perl and Tellme (WebRef). Check out this WebRef tutorial for some interesting ideas and examples of using Perl to write an interactive VoiceXML applications for Tellme. Tellme.com provides a commercial service that connects a toll-free phone number to a computer with speech synthesis and voice/DTMF recognition capabilities.

Perl 5 Porters for February 28, 2001. The February 28, 2001 issue of Perl5 Porters is out. Topics include "smoke testing" all possible configurations, overriding, Unicode, and more.

PHP

An Introduction to PHP (O'Reilly). John Coggeshall introduces PHP in an O'Reilly Network article. "At a fundamental level, PHP has all of the features of a complete programming language (control structures, repetitive tasks, and variables) but perhaps one of its most powerful features is database access. With PHP it is possible to access over 19 different types of databases and manipulate data within those databases based on input from the user via a web page."

PHP Weekly Summary for February 26, 2001. The February 26, 2001 edition of the PHP Weekly Summary is available. The PHP 4.0.5 release cycle is discussed as are library upgrades and Apache 2.0 support.

Python

Python 1.6.1 available. Version 1.6.1 of Python is available for download. This version features some minor bug fixes over Version 1.6 and falls under a new license, the "CNRI Open Source GPL-Compatible License". Also, see the announcement for Python 1.6.1 from Guido van Rossum.

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!, February 26, 2001. Dr. Dobb's latest issue of the Python-URL! summary is now available. Topics this week include discussions on Python 2.0 and functional programming, mp3 management, updates to gnome-python, and an open-source port of Python to the Palm Pilot.

Guido talks about nested scopes (python.org). Python.org has posted an ongoing discussion about Nested Scopes, a somewhat controversial addition planned for Python that may break legacy code. "We have clearly underestimated how much code the nested scopes would break, but more importantly we have underestimated how much value our community places on stability. At the same time we really like nested scopes, and we would like to see the feature introduced at some point."

XML-RPC for Python. Secret Labs has released xmlrpclib 0.9.9, a Python implementation of the XML-RPC protocol.

Dive Into Python Chapter 3. Chapter 3 of the online Python book Dive Into Python has been announced. This chapter covers classes, exceptions, file handling, and more.

Smalltalk

SNRC-ST 3.2. Version 3.2 of SNRC-ST, the Signature Revealing Naming Convention Smalltalk is available. "Generic Types are a solution to the question: 'How do I reuse a collection interface with different element types?'. More generally it is applicable anywhere where one type serves as a parameter to another."

Tcl/Tk

ActiveState adopts Tcl. ActiveState has announced that it will be providing a home for Tcl development, stepping into the void created when Ajuba Solutions dropped the language. ActiveState will be hosting the Tcl community site, providing "supported" versions of Tcl, and offering consulting services.

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!, February 26, 2001. The latest issue of the Tcl-URL! summary is now available. Topics this week include tree and drag-n-drop support in Tcl, an Impress announcement, and the introduction of tclpython.

Moodss 14.0 released. Version 14.0 of moodss, the Modular Object Oriented Dynamic SpreadSheet has been announced. The program can display data in various forms including tables, graphs, bar graphs, and 3D pie charts and has interfaces to Perl, Python, C, and Tcl.

Tclpython 1.1 released. Version 1.1 of tclpython has been released. Tclpython allows the execution of Python code from a Tcl interpreter.

ImPress 1.1-b8 released. Version 1.1-b8 of the ImPress Tcl/Tk desktop publishing and layout package has been released.

Documentation

LDP Weekly News. David Merrill at the Linux Documentation Project has posted the latest issue of the LDP Weekly News. Highlights include the addition of the Linux Palm Quickstart and a Unix Hardware Buyers Howto, along with updates to the Linux Installation, Linux Kernel, PHP and Linmodem Howto's.

Training

LPI Newsletter, February 2001. The LPI Newsletter for February 2001 has made its way to LWN.net's doorstep. This month's news includes a job analysis survey, conference reports from LinuxWorld NY and the Paris Linux Expo, and LPI efforts in Russia.

Software Development Tools

Extreme Rapid Development (Software Development Online). If Rapid Development is just too slow, check out Extreme Rapid Development in an article by Peter Norvig. Several commercial and freely downloadable tools for Python, Lisp, and Dylan are examined.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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