See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

This list represents the kind of collaboration that is only likely to occur in an open-source software environment where everybody is free to share their ideas as well as their source code. Normally, developers of those three languages work in a friendly competition mode, it is heartening to see that they are also trying to work together for the gain of all.

Developers of other languages should also consider the idea of this type of cross-pollination effort. The idea could also be tried with other open-source projects that involve parallel work on similar projects. Areas that seem likely to gain from such a collaboration include KDE, Gnome, and other window environments, database projects, CAD/CAM projects, game developers, and audio editor packages, just to name a few possibilities.

It will be interesting to see if the mailing list proves to be beneficial to its members.

Audio

Alsa 0.9.0 beta 5 released. A new beta release of the Alsa sound driver has been announced. This release features uniform support for multichannel cards and raw IEC958 (S/PDIF) audio interfaces.

CORBA

omniORB 4.0 and omniORBpy 1.4 available. AT&T has released a preview version of omniORB, a CORBA2 ORB and omniORBpy, a CORBA to Python mapping. The current stable version of omniORB is 3.0.4. The omniORB project is being released under a GPL license, the libraries are being released under the LGPL license.

Embedded Systems

Honey, I shrunk the Linux system! (LinuxDevices.com). LinuxDevices.com looks at the movement towards SBC's (single board computers) running embedded Linux, in this case using the CerfCube as an example implementation.

Interoperability

New Wine Snapshot. The was announced on June 29, 2001. The new version contains better font metrics support in the PostScript driver, an in-progress major window manager redesign, 64 bit file size support, and several bug fixes.

Science

Review: Free Practice Management (Linux Med News). Ignacio Valdez from Linux Med News reviews FreePM, an open-source medical practice management system. "This is the first review of an open source medical software project that LinuxMedNews has done. That this review is possible is a milestone in and of itself as only recently has open source medical software come far enough for a useful review. What is more astonishing however, is that FreePM has reached its current beta 3 state of development in only 1.5 years. According to the company, it is ready for comparison to its closed-source competitors that cost far more." FreePM has a GPL license and is based on Zope and Python.

System Administration

Powertweak 0.99.1. A new version of the powertweak tool has been released. Powertweak allows users to configure CPU, network and other low level hardware options using a graphical or curses based interface. (Thanks to Lenz Grimmer)

Web-site Development

Zope Weekly News. The July 1, 2001 issue of the Zope Weekly News is out. This issue looks at the EuroZope Conference, Zope sales, and the Zope 2.4 beta 2 release.

Zope 2.4.0 beta 2 released. Version 2.4.0 beta 2 of Zope has been released. This version supports and requires Python 2.1, and includes improved WebDAV support, product refresh without restart, and more.

Analog version 5.02 released. Version 5.02 of the Analog web log analyzer is available. This release features improved support for non-English languages.

Window Systems

New releaes of Gtk-Perl. A new release of the Gtk-Perl bindings (version 0.8008) has been released. It can be retrieved from the CPAN archives or from the Gtk-Perl web site.

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

Caml

Caml Weekly News. The June 27 through July 3, 2001 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out. Topics include an ocaml-ldap binding, a Functional Constraint Library over integer finite domain, and A preliminary Caml/Java interface.

FORTRAN

g95 Progress. Work continues on the g95 Fortran 95 compiler project. The developers have been making steady progress towards the goal of a running compiler.

Java

Janos Virtual Machine v0.5.0 released. Version 0.5.0 of the Janos Virtual Machine has been released. "The Janos Virtual Machine (JanosVM) is an Open Source virtual machine for executing Java bytecodes. Unlike any available virtual machine, the JanosVM supports multiple, separate process-like entities (called 'teams' in the JanosVM) within a single VM, without reliance on any underlying OS or hardware support for such separation."

JSP Security for Limiting Access to Application-Internal URLs (O'Reilly). Jamie Jaworski writes about securing Java based web applications in an O'Reilly OnJava article. "A Web application that is accessible via several URLs is susceptible to URL-probing attacks. You may intend that your users access the individual application URLs in a way that makes sense for your application. However, some users (and most hackers) may not comply. Instead, they'll jump straight to the middle of your application and request URLs that are carefully calculated to circumvent your application's security features."

Lisp

Lisa 0.9.3 Beta released. A new beta release of LISA has been released. LISA version 0.9.3 Beta contains a number of building and portability updates.

ECLS 0.2 released. Version 0.2 of ECLS, the Embeddable Common Lisp "Spain" has been released. This version features rewritten error system, an included ANSI test suite, and bug fixes in the bytecode compiler.

Perl

Perl Leads Sun Web Client Survey (use Perl). A informal survey of Web languages, first noted at use Perl, shows that developers appear to use Perl more than PHP, C or JSP for Web development. The original survey can be found on Sun's Solaris Developer Connection.

Perl.com gets revamped. O'Reilly has revamped the perl.com site. It looks more like an O'Reilly site now and has a slight problem with page width. The site carries some new articles, including one which explores the question of converting Perl code to C.

YAPC::America 2001 Reports. Reports from the recently concluded YAPC::NA 2001 event have been placed online.

Object technologies and HTML templates in CGI programming (IBM developerWorks). Eugene Logvinov illustrates the use of object oriented Perl applied to cgi scripting in an IBM developerWorks article. "Object-oriented implementation in CGI-scripting is unpopular, as I discovered while trying to find a good guestbook script. I wanted a script that I could easily modify by changing the design, adding new features, etc., and that I could use to build a forum. Of the thirty free guestbook scripts on the Web, none was suitable for me. So I turned to object technology as a solution for reusable Web applications based on HTML templates."

For more background on Perl cgi programming, the same author also looks at the Perl CGI.pm module in another article. (Thanks to Kelli Wiginton.)

Perl 5 Porters for July 2, 2001. The July 2, 2001 edition of the Perl 5 Porters is out. Topics include freestanding modules, testing mechanisms, and more.

This Fortnight in Perl 6 (17 - 30 June 2001). The Perl 6 Porters for the most recent fortnight is out. Topics include a comparison of Perl to Java, Multiple classifications, the internal string API, and more.

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for July 2, 2001. The July 2, 2001 edition of the PHP Weekly Summary has been published. Topics include dealing with out of memory conditions, issues with upgrading DOMXML, the Zend Engine 2 roadmap, the pcntl extension, the MetaL - XML Meta Language compiler, and more.

Python

Functional programming in Python, Part 3 (IBM developerWorks). In this next installment of a series on Python programming, author David Mertz examines higher order functions of the Xoltar Toolkit.

SOAP.py 0.9.7 released. Version 0.9.7 of SOAPpy, a SOAP implementation in written in Python, has been announced. This version features several bug fixes and the ability to specify an http_proxy.

Scheme

New Scheme FAQ available. The Scheme Language FAQ has been rewritten and is available online. Scheme is a derivative of Lisp.

Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! for July 2, 2001. The July 2, 2001 issue of the Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! includes discussions ranging from compiling Tcl with the free Borland C++ 5.5 compiler, to a Tcl binding for FLTK, to the desktop publishing package Impress.

XML

Electronic Publishing with XML (O'Reilly). John McKeown and Benjamin Jung look at the process used to generate the XML Europe 2001 conference proceedings. The proceedings were written in XML, of course. "In the past, the proceedings for XML Europe have been available in both paper and electronic formats. For various reasons, the conference organizers, GCA, discarded the paper version this year and opted for an electronic publication only. This was distributed on CD-ROM to each of the conference delegates. Additionally, the GCA used this publication as the basis for an online version on their web site. XML technologies were used throughout the creation process."

XML on the Cheap (O'Reilly). Ed Dumbill looks at several free XML tools and resources in an O'Reilly XML.com article. "If you're new to XML, or simply want a starting point to play around with it a little, there are plenty of resources on the Web you can use for free, many without even installing software on your computer.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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