See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

"The aim of the Psyco project is to show that it is possible to execute Python code at speeds approaching that of fully compiled languages. The current prototype operates on i386-compatible processors. Preliminary results show potential speed-ups of a factor 10 to 100, which means that we can hope execution speeds closer to fully optimized C than to traditional Python."

The project overview notes that Psyco works by replacing the most inner loop of the standard CPython implementation, which means that it can be integrated into CPython. "The name Psyco, or Python Specializing Compiler, comes from the fact that the emitted machine code is specialized to specific values of the data, not only to the pseudo-code (a.k.a. bytecode) to interpret." There is also a hint that the Psyco code may be useful for speeding up other interpreted languages, it was written with that in mind.

Some of the compatibility issues include missing bytecodes, a number of code assumptions, assumptions that object types won't change, and no support for the Python debugger, among other things. Psyco may not be useful for all of the Python code ever written, but it could be very useful for speeding up certain types of code.

The Psyco code and documentation are licensed under the GPL license.

Directory Management Systems

Ganymede 1.0.8 released. Version 1.0.8 of the Ganymede network directory management system has been announced. This version features changes to the database format for support of larger numbers of data objects, improvements to the XML loader, and other bug fixes.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter (LinuxDevices.com). The LinuxDevices.com Embedded Linux Newsletter for November 15 is out, with the usual collection of interesting stuff from the Embedded Linux community.

Mail Software

PerlMx 1.2.2 Released (milter.org). Milter.org examines the latest PerlMx mail filtering software. PerlMx version 1.2.2 is a maintenance release with a number of bug fixes.

Network Management

OpenNMS update. After a bit of a break, the OpenNMS project has produced a new development update. They have released OpenNMS 0.9.0, which brings a great many changes and improvements. There is also, now, a commercial support offering available at OpenNMS.com.

Printing Systems

CUPS v1.1.12 released. A new version of the CUPS printing system has been released. "CUPS 1.1.12 adds support for Polish PPD files, adds a missing directory definition to the cups-config script, and fixes bugs in the CUPS-Add-Printer and CUPS-Move-Job operations."

LPRng 3.8.1 available. Version 3.8.1 of the LPRng printing system is available. The CHANGES relating to version 3.8.1 include a number of bug fixes.

Omni printer driver adds more printers. The Omni printer driver now supports 392 different printers, the list of supported printers just keeps growing.

Science

Parsing Protein Domains with Perl (O'Reilly). James Tisdall talks about Perl and Biology software on perl.com. " Biological data on computers tends to be either in structured ASCII flat files--that is to say, in plain-text files--or in relational databases. Both of these data sources are easy to handle with Perl programs."

Web-site Development

ASPSeek v.1.2.6 released. A new version of the ASPSeek web search engine is available. This release features a bunch of bug fixes and some minor tweaks.

Create RSS channels from HTML news sites (O'Reilly). Chris Ball discusses techniques for creating a Remote Site Summary with Perl on O'Reilly's perl.com site. "Even if you haven't heard of the RSS acronym before, you're likely to have used RSS in the past. Whether through the slashboxes at slashdot or our own news summary at use.perl.org, the premise remains the same - RSS, or 'Remote Site Summary' is a method used for providing an overview of the latest news to appear on a site."

The latest news from the Zope Members. This week, the Zope Members' news looks at the following new releases: BlogFace 0.1a, LDAPUserFolder 1.0, CMFLDAP 1.1, Parsed XML 1.2.1. Other Zope news is also featured.

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

Desktop Development

Browsers

Galeon 0.12.8 Released. Galeon 0.12.8 has been released. This version is release candidate 3 for Galeon 1.0 and includes more bug fixes.

Desktop Environments

Second Evolution 1.0 release candidate. The second release candidate for Evolution 1.0 is now available. Numerous bugs have been fixed since the first one came out; the developers are hoping to flush out the rest with this version.

A New GNOME Summary. The latest GNOME Summary has been published. Topics include GNOME-print's new True Type support, a new home for GTKSharp, the GNOME Foundation elections, free beer for Gnumeric bug finders and more.

KDE 3.0 Screenshots (KDE dot News). KDE dot News takes a look at the latest screenshots from the upcoming KDE 3.0 release.

Games

PyUI 0.8 released. Version 0.8 of PyUI, a Python based GUI library that was originally developed for game software, has been announced. "The 0.8 release includes many improvements including keyboard navigation, cleaner drawing, a re-designed default theme, text wrapping, GUI callback events and the re-introduction of transparency . The stability and maturity of PyUI have advanced greatly since the 0.7x releases thanks mainly to the code contributions from Peter Freese."

Office Applications

Gnumeric 0.76 released. Gnumeric 0.76 has been released. Almost everything is frozen at this point, with the exception of translations and bug fixes; the developers are aiming for a stable release on December 15.

AbiWord Weekly News #70. Issue number 70 of the AbiWord Weekly News is available. Lots of bugs are being fixed in preparation for the upcoming 0.9.5 pre-release.

Miscellaneous

This week in DotGNU. The This week in DotGNU newsletter for November 17 is out. Covered projects include the IDsec authorization effort, and the list of 20 DotGNU projects.

Programming Languages

Caml

Caml Weekly News for November 20, 2001. The latest Caml Weekly News is out. Topics this week include the first source release of Ocamlnet, pre-releases of OCamlCVS and OCamldoc, and a Debian package for CamlIDL.

The Caml Hump. This week, the Caml Hump also looks at OCamlnet, which is a collection of OCaml modules that provide application-level Internet access.

Lisp

Common Lisp, Typing and Mathematics. Francis Sergeraert has published a tutorial that aims to help mathematicians make use of Common Lisp.

Perl

Birth of the POE Documentation Project (use Perl). The POE (Perl Object Environment) Documentation project has been created. "The aim of the POE Documentation project is to break the POE docs up into manageable topical chunks that make sense to new users."

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for November 19, 2001. The November 19, 2001 edition of the PHP Weekly Summary is out. Topics this week include the Sablot extension, reports from the PHP conference, PHP licensing, the PHP 4.1.0 countdown, a new porter extension, PHP 4.1.0 RC2, a new file_md5() function, a new RTF extension, and more.

Python

Python 2.2 beta 2. The second (and probably last) beta of Python 2.2 has been released. There's a few small new features, but this release is mostly dedicated to bug fixes, as one might expect.

This week's Python-URL. Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for November 16 is out, with the latest from the Python development community.

Python Projects (FreshMeat). Ryan Kulla pushes Python in an article on FreshMeat. "When I found what Python had to offer, I was amazed. I could write big applications very quickly, and the source code was always easy to read because of how Python is built. Best of all, Python is so easy to learn that you can literally learn it in a weekend just from reading the online tutorial."

Optik: a Python command line parser. Version 1.1 of Optik has been released."Optik is a powerful, flexible, extensible, easy-to-use command-line parsing library for Python. Using Optik, you can add intelligent, sophisticated handling of command-line options to your scripts with very little overhead." Optik is licensed under the BSD license.

Ruby

The Ruby Garden. This week, the Ruby Garden looks at a new Ruby parser from Markus Liedl.

Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL. Here's Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for November 20 with the latest from the Tcl/Tk community.

XML

XML::LibXML - An XML::Parser Alternative. This week's featured Perl tool for working with XML is XML::LibXML. Kip Hampton takes a look on O'Reilly's XML.com. "Expat and XML::Parser have proven themselves to be quite capable, but they are not without limitations. Expat was among the first XML parsers available and, as a result, its interfaces reflect the expectations of users at the time it was written. Expat and XML::Parser do not implement the Document Object Model, SAX, or XPath language interfaces (things that most modern XML users take for granted) because either the given interface did not exist or was still being heavily evaluated and not considered 'standard' at the time it was written."

XML::SAX::Expat Released (use Perl). Meanwhile, use Perl looks at XML::SAX::Expat. "XML::SAX redefines XML processing in Perl. It frees you from the chains of SAX parser details. It elevates your soul. It even freshens your breath. [think: DBI for XML]"

Basic XML and RDF techniques for knowledge management (IBM developerWorks). Uche Ogbuji shows how to add semantic knowledge to an RDF application with WordNet synonym sets in the third article in a series on IBM's developerWorks. "With the added knowledge of the WordNet lexical database, you can search a set of RDF data for related concepts, not just one keyword at a time. As the demonstration issue-tracker application shows, that means searching once for instances that fit within the concept of 'selection' rather than searching individually on 'vote,' 'choice,' 'ballot,' and 86 other related terms."

Miscellaneous

Jext 3.0 programmer's editor released. A new version of Jext has been released. " Jext is a powerful 100% pure Java programmer's text editor. Mainly written for programmers, Jext was designed from the ground up to suit your needs. From beginner to skilled coder, everyone should find what they need in this editor." Jext features syntax colorizing for ASP, C, C++, Eiffel, Python, Java, JSP, Perl, PHP, HTML, TeX and XML. The latest release features improved PHP support. Jext has been released under the GPL license.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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