See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

Graphical capabilities cover a wide range, modules are provided for visualizing grid, scalar, vector, and tensor data sets. The screenshots show some relatively complicated plots that were done with MayaVi. .

The Users Guide lists the capabilities of MayaVi. Several dataset formats are supported including VTK and PLOT3d. The package supports the use of simultaneous datasets. A number of data filters are included. Exported file formats include PostScript, PPM, BMP, TIFF, JPEG, and PNG.

The latest release is version 1.1, dated November 19, 2001. This release features scripting capabilities, operation from the Python interpreter, command line arguments, and a number of new graphics capabilities.

Binaries and source code are available for download here. Linux dependencies include glibc 2.2, Tcl/Tk 8.3.X, Mesa/OpenGL, XFree86 4.X, and libstdc++ 6.2-2.so.3. See the installation instructions for setup instructions.

Audio Projects

The latest from LINUXMUSIC. This week LINUXMUSIC looks at Midge, a text to midi program, and Midi on UNIX, a general purpose MIDI system.

Ogg Traffic for December 12, 2001. The current Ogg Traffic contains project status from the open-source Ogg Vorbis audio compression package. Topics include an upcoming Ogg Vorbis RC3 release, status from the various Ogg developers, and a new game that uses Ogg for sound.

Documentation

LDP Weekly News for December 18, 2001. The December 18, 2001 edition of the LDP Weekly News is out. This edition features a new Development for Multiple Linux Distributions mini-HOWTO, and lists a large number of updated documents.

Electronics

Gerber Viewer 0.0.6 released. A new version of Gerber Viewer, the printed circuit CAM file inspection tool, has been released. Version 0.0.6 features GUI improvements, better drill file support, performance improvements, and bug fixes.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter. The LinuxDevices.com Embedded Linux Newsletter for December 13, 2001 is out, with the usual roundup of news from the embedded Linux community.

Network Frameworks

Mono & the .NET Framework (Dr. Dobb's). Dr. Dobb's Journal is running an article by Miguel de Icaza and Brian Jepson on Mono and the .NET framework. Check it out for an in-depth description of Mono.

Printing Systems

LPRng 3.8.3 available. A new version of the LPRng printing system is available. Release 3.8.3 fixes one small bug with the lpr -Pname variant of the print command.

LPRng author Patrick Powell has also put a lengthy Printing Cookbook on the LPRng site. "This is a set of Recipes for Printing, a set of procedures that can be used to set up and diagnose printing in a range of system environments. The main emphasis will be on using the LPRng print spooler, either by itself or with other print spooling systems."

Printing without Spooler (LinuxPrinting). Meanwhile, LinuxPrinting looks at the Direct-O-Matic system for stand-alone printing applications: "Modern printer spoolers as CUPS, PPR, or LPRng have a lot of features for printing in networks with many users, but for a single user with a single printer they are often overkill. They require a working network configuration (at least the so-called 'loopback device', an emulation of a network consisting only of the local machine), they need a daemon which is always running, and, especially for big jobs, a lot of disk space."

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

Web Browsers

mozillaZine updates. The latest mozillaZine lists a new version of Chatzilla which recognizes the faces standard, and an upcoming 0.9.7 branch for Mozilla.

Desktop Environments

People of KDE: Arash Zeini. The "People of KDE" series talks with Arash Zeini, who is translating the system into Farsi. "I thought [KDE] would stand for good and reliable software as well as technology. But since you are asking, allow me to be a little sentimental! In these times of war, blindness and a lot of haterage this great collaborative effort may stand for more than technology and software."

GNOME 2.0 Developer Platform Beta: 'Everyone's Excited and Confused'. The GNOME 2.0 Developer Platform API has been frozen and the first release has been announced. The release is claimed to be "100% parallel installable" with the latest GNOME 1.x platform libraries.

GNOME Summary. The GNOME Summary for December 15, 2001 is out. It looks at the GNOME 2.0 developer platform beta, the Evolution 1.0 release, and more. The new GNOME 2.0 dependency chart is just as twisted as one would expect...

GNUstep Weekly Editorial. The December 14, 2001 edition of the GNUstep Weekly Editorial is out with the latest news from the GNUstep object oriented development environment community.

FLTK developments. The latest FLTK developments include the release of FLTK v1.1.0b7, Fl_DragBar 1.0, and Ruby/FLTK.

Games

3D Applications Comparison. MagnetHead has posted a comparison of a number of open and proprietary 3D applications. Contributions are welcome.

Graphics

Gdk-pixbuf 0.14.0 is released. A new version of the Gdk-pixbuf library has been released. "This includes a backport of the BMP loader from GTK+ 1.3 and bugfixes."

GUI Packages

XML UI: from XSD to XML. Ben Martin writes about the creation of XML documents from XSD schema files with XSL and libglade2. The Ferriscreate application from the Ferris virtual filesystem is shown as an example application. "From the programmers perspective, obtaining data from the user via a GUI form is a pain. Usually this is solved by the creation of two functions, one to create a GUI window and populate it, and another to save the data and destroy the UI. In this ad-hoc style the schema of what is edited is never made explicit. The rules governing what data must be present and the dependencies between the various information gathered are either not coded anywhere or are a wash with the GUI style information."

wxWindows 2.3.2 released. Version 2.3.2 of the wxWindows cross-platform C++ GUI library has been released. This version adds bug fixes, GTK+ improvements, and support for MacOS X.

Multimedia

GStreamer 0.3.0 released. Gnotices is carrying the news of the GStreamer 0.3.0 release. GStreamer is a comprehensive streaming media framework that, by all appearances, is approaching an impressive level of capability. This release contains over 100 plug-ins for working with audio and video files - it remains a development release, however, and even fewer guarantees than usual are on offer.

Office Applications

First Gnumeric 1.0 release candidate. The first Gnumeric 1.0 release candidate is available. It is, of course, a bug fix release; free beverages are being awarded to those who find any remaining problems.

KOffice 1.1.1. Here's the announcement for the KOffice 1.1.1 release. It's primarily a bug fix release, but there are a few new features as well.

AbiWord Weekly News. The AbiWord Weekly News for December 17, 2001 is out. The big item is the announcement of a feature freeze, with the long-awaited AbiWord 1.0 release planned for late January.

AbiWord 0.9.6 'We Love the internet' released. Version 0.9.6 of the AbiWord word processor has been released. This version features a number of bug fixes and some new plug-ins. The plug-ins allow access to web based dictionaries, encyclopedias, babelfish translations, and more. See the Changelog file for all of the details.

Kernel Cousin GNUe #7. The December 15, 2001 edition of Kernel Cousin for GNU Enterprise is out. Progress continues with this effort to build open source business tools.

Programming Languages

Caml

Caml Weekly News. The Caml Weekly News for December 12 through 18, 2001 is out. Topics include pairs vs. records, a third shared patch, outil, the new OCaml 3.0.4 release , SCaml, and more.

Java

Using OpenJMS withTomcat (O'Reilly). Jim Alateras shows how to work with OpenJMS and Jakarta Tomcat. "This article illustrates how to integrate OpenJMS with Jakarta Tomcat. It deals exclusively with Tomcat v4 (or Catalina), which is the next-generation servlet/JSP container, and OpenJMS v.0.7."

Transparent Data Pipelines for JSP (O'Reilly). Satya Komatineni introduces Transparent Data Pipelines in an O'Reilly article. "Despite the undeniable popularity of JSP among Java programmers, there is a substantial amount of doubt, if not criticism, over its suitability as a front-end language for delivering HTML pages. One of the main complaints is that it breaks the MVC (Model-View-Controller) paradigm."

Perl

A Drag-and-Drop Primer for Perl/Tk (O'Reilly). Steve Lidie illustrates Drag-and-Drop functionality on O'Reilly's perl.com site. "This article describes the Perl/Tk drag-and-drop mechanism, often referred to as DND. We'll illustrate DND operations local to a single application, where we drag items from one Canvas to another."

Perl 6 Porters for December 9-15, 2001. The latest Perl 6 Porters contains discussions on slice contexts, Make portability issues, performance patches, aggregate keys, and more.

Perl module listings move (UsePerl). The UsePerl site has consolidated all of the new Perl module listings to their own page. A virtual cornucopia of Perl awaits the eager hacker.

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for December 18, 2001. The latest PHP Summary covers a number of fixes to PHP, discussions on PHP error reporting and test suite improvements, and other PHP news.

Python

Python 2.2c1 released. The "first, and hopefully only release candidate for Python 2.2" is available. A number of Python PEPs have been implemented in this release. Python 2.2 is scheduled for release very soon.

This week's Python-URL. Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for December 17, 2001 is out. Covered topics include the first Python 2.2 release candidate, how Zope could be made better, XML, and more.

Python on the Side (O'Reilly). Stephen Figgins examines four Python applications by Doug Bell: "ConvertAll, a unit conversion program; FlyWay, a route planner for pilots; rpCalc, a reverse polish calculator; and TreeLine, a simple tree structured information storage program."

Ruby

The Ruby Garden. The latest Ruby Garden articles include a look at Radical, a Ruby based web application server, announcements for two new Ruby books, a Spanish Ruby documentation project, and more.

Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL. Here's Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for December 18, 2001, with the usual collection of happenings in the Tcl/Tk user community.

XML

Comparing XML Schema Languages (O'Reilly). Eric van der Vlist explores XML Schema Languages on O'Reilly's xml.com. "This article explains what an XML schema language is and which features the different schema languages possess. It also documents the development of the major schema language families -- DTDs, W3C XML Schema, and RELAX NG -- and compares the features of DTDs, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG, Schematron, and Examplotron."

XML Matters: XML-RPC as object model (IBM developerWorks). David Mertz examines the XML-RPC function invocation protocol on IBM's developerWorks. "XML-RPC is a remote function invocation protocol with a great virtue: It is worse than all of its competitors. Compared to Java RMI or CORBA or COM, XML-RPC is impoverished in the type of data it can transmit and obese in its message size. XML-RPC abuses the HTTP protocol to circumvent firewalls that exist for good reasons, and as a consequence transmits messages lacking statefulness and incurs channel bottlenecks."

XML and Modern CGI Applications (O'Reilly). Kip Hampton looks at the Perl CGI::XMLApplication module on xml.com. "CGI is not without its weaknesses, and despite well-funded campaigns from a number of software vendors, CGI is still widely used and shows no signs of going away anytime soon. This month we will be looking at a module that offers a new take on CGI coding, Christian Glahn's CGI::XMLApplication. "

Miscellaneous

Open64 Compiler Updates. The Open64 Compiler Suite has new documentation available and the Open64 User Forum Report documents a recent Open64 meeting. Open64 includes 64 bit compilers for C, C++, and FORTRAN 90/95.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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