See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

LWN first covered the Web100 project back in 1999. This project seeks to optimize TCP/IP stacks (starting with Linux) for top performance over high-speed, wide-area networks; it is aimed at the needs of scientific laboratories and others who need to move massive amounts of data around.

The Web100 project has announced its alpha 1.0 release. The work so far seems to be mostly oriented toward instrumenting the Linux TCP/IP stack so that its performance can be monitored and improved. The implementation is defined by the Web100 TCP Kernel Instrumentation Set (TCP-KIS).

The project leaders are aiming to achieve fairly wide usage of their efforts:

In addition to the software release, Web100 programmers continue to refine TCP software so that users can automatically achieve the highest possible transfer rate. This effort has already led to a first draft of a new Internet Engineering Task Force standard. As the development of new standards progresses, Web100 researchers hope that other operating system vendors will adopt the Web100 enhancements. Such changes will make increased TCP traffic flows easier to handle and more transparent for the users of high-speed networks.

The Web100 software currently consists of two components, a kernel patch that works with Linux kernel 2.4.16, and a shared user-space library of utilities known as the Userland. The alpha 1.1 version of Userland was just released, and features a few bug fixes and documentation updates.

The Web100 software may be downloaded here.

Audio Projects

JACK API enhancements. The JACK Audio Connection Kit API has been improved. "The JACK API now includes provisions for shared transport control, including looping. Substantial improvements to stability have been achieved, as well as some architectural changes to support new "drivers". The ALSA PCM driver has been modified to support use for playback only, greatly helping those with consumer audio interfaces."

Education

Linux in education report #65. The Linux in education report number 65 is out. The Audio Bookshelf linux-based CDROM distribution is the featured topic, other educational Linux projects are also covered.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter for Feb. 28, 2002. The February 28, 2002 Embedded Linux Newsletter is available. Topics include a review of Redsonic's embedded Linux toolkit, the new Intel embedded CPU chips, the ELC's embedded Linux platform specification, and more.

Linux system development on an embedded device (IBM developerWorks). Anand K Santhanam and Vishal Kulkarni describe the components that are needed for developing Embedded Linux applications. "Especially if you're just starting out in embedded development, the wealth of available bootloaders, scaled-down distributions, filesystems, and GUIs can seem overwhelming. But this wealth of options is actually a boon, allowing you to tailor your development or user environment exactly to your needs."

Libraries

Sun releases ABIcheck (Gnotices). The GNOME Gnotices site mentions that Sun has released the source code to ABIcheck, a tool that checks to make sure that an application uses library ABIs correctly. See the ABIcheck home page on SourceForge for more information. The ABIcheck source has been released under the LGPL.

Mail Software

rbl-milter 0.2 released. Version 0.2 of rbl-milter, a mail filter for sendmail, is available. This version supports multiple RBL lists, adds compatibility with older resolver libraries, and features autoconf configuration.

Stopping Spam with SpamAssassin (Perl.com). Simon Cozens writes about spam filtering on Perl.com. "I get a lot of spam. An absolute massive bucket load of spam. I got way over 100 pieces of spam in the first three days of this month. I get so much spam Hormel Foods send trucks to take it away. And I'm convinced that things are getting worse. We're all being bombarded with junk mail more than ever these days. Well, a couple of days ago I got to breaking point, and decided that the simple mail filtering I had in place up until now just wasn't up to the job. It was time to call in an assassin. "

Web-site Development

PHPmole: Free development environment for Midgard and PHP. PHPmole, an Integrated Development Environment for the Midgard web platform, has been released. "PHPmole aims to provide the free software world with a web development environment comparable to DreamWeaver and MS Visual Studio, with additional content management functionalities.

Unlike most Midgard applications and development tools, PHPmole is a native client-side program designed for the the GNOME desktop environment." (Thanks to Henri Bergius.)

Zope 2.6 features wiki. Brian Lloyd has announced a new Zope 2.6 wiki site that has been created for the purpose of discussing Zope 2.6 development.

The latest Zope Members' News. This week's entries on the Zope Members' News include Zope 2.5.0 support for the Wing IDE, TCPWatch 1.1, Emil email client v.0.5, and more.

Documentation

LDP Weekly News. The March 5, 2002 edition of the LDP Weekly News covers the new version of the GNU Free Documentation License. New documentation includes a Linux Complete Backup and Recovery HOWTO, and a Spanish translation of the Linux Network Administrators Guide, 2nd Edition.

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

Audio Applications

AlsaPlayer 0.99.54 released. Version 0.99.54 of the AlsaPlayer PCM player is available. The change log lists improvements to libalsaplayer, a new preferences system, improvements to the JACK interface, code cleanups, and a few more features.

WaveSurfer 1.3 released. Version 1.3 of the WaveSurfer audio file editor has been released. The changes include support for separate sound windows, linear, exponential, and logarithmic fade filters, faster plotting, bug fixes, and more.

XMMS 1.2.7 released. Version 1.2.7 of XMMS, the X MultiMedia System, has been released. This version features visual enhancements, cddb server connectivity improvements, mpg123 stability improvements, and more.

Web Browsers

Encompass 0.4.5 released (Gnotices). A new version of the Encompass web browser has been announced. Version 0.4.5 features bug fixes and the ability to download files.

Mozilla Independent Status Reports (MozillaZine). MozillaZine features a number of Mozilla Independent Status Reports, including a report from the Second European Mozilla Developers Meeting, and updates on the ThinSkin, Abzilla, and mozCalc projects.

Desktop Environments

People of KDE: Falk Brettschneider. This week's People of KDE interview features Falk Brettschneider, author of QextMDI and contributor to KDevelop 2.

Kernel Cousin KDE #34. Issue #34 of Kernel Cousin KDE covers Project Crystal, KMenu side image colors, aRts, a FAQ that promotes KDE, and the Karbon vector graphics program.

Graphics

Sketch 0.6.13 Released. Version 0.6.13 of the Sketch vector drawing tool has been released. This version adds multi-line text handling, new import filters and conversion tools, simple color separation, an eps security fix, and more.

Office Applications

Kernel Cousin GNUe #17 and #18. Two new editions of Kernel Cousin GNUe are available. Issue #17 looks at GNUe error messages, installing GNUe on Red Hat, using Forms with the Application Server, Forms issues, and more.

Issue #18 covers a General Ledger schema, European privacy laws, Debian packages, ERP standards, and more.

Miscellaneous

Nautilus File Manager Scripts. A collection of scripts that can be used by the GNOME Nautilus file manager have been published. Many scripts are available for archiving, execution, querying, processing, file system management, dealing with multimedia, and more.

Programming Languages

C

Open64 Compiler v0.14 released. Version 0.14 of the Open64 C, C++, and Fortran90/95 compiler for the Itanium processor has been released. "It includes all the modifications made by the ORC team."

Caml

Caml Weekly News. The Caml Weekly News for March 5, 2002 looks at the ARM OCaml cross-compiler, WDialog-2.00-test2, O'Caml DLL-hell, Report 0.3, and tools from the C-- project.

The Caml Hump. This week's entries on the Caml Hump include the oclisp minimal lisp interpreter, OCCamlBurg for generating code from pattern matching specifications, OCamlError for dissecting stack traces, the OCamlARM cross compiler, and more.

Java

Chapter 4: The Java Platform (O'Reilly). O'Reilly has put chapter 4 of the book Java in a Nutshell by David Flanagan online. "This chapter switches gears and covers the Java platform -- a vast collection of predefined classes available to every Java program, regardless of the underlying host system on which it is running. The classes of the Java platform are collected into related groups, known as packages."

Understanding JTS - An introduction to transactions (IBM developerWorks). Brian Goetz discusses the Java Transaction Service (JTS) on IBM's developerWorks. "The Java Transaction Service is a key element of the J2EE architecture. Together with the Java Transaction API, it enables us to build distributed applications that are robust to all sorts of system and network failures."

Lisp

Condition Handling in the Lisp Language Family. Kent Pitman has published his paper on Condition Handling in the Lisp Language Family. "The Lisp family of languages has long been a rich source of ideas and inspiration in the area of error handling. Here we will survey some of the abstract concepts and terminology, as well as some specific language constructs that Lisp has contributed."

GNU CLISP 2.28 released. GNU CLISP Version 2.28 has been released. Some of the changes include the implementation of a number of new ANSI CL functions support for weak hash tables and internationalized lisp programs, and the UI language can be changed dynamically.

Perl

The Perl Review. A new downloadable (PDF) Perl magazine makes its debut this month. The Perl Review has articles on Perl one liners, extreme publishing, parroty bits, singletons, and camels & needles.

perl 5.7.3 Available (use Perl). Intended to be the last developer release before Perl 5.8.0, Perl 5.7.3 has been announced. The developers are looking for help testing the release out. "The less common platform you have, the more important this is, since the Perl developers do not have access to all the possible platforms, or the required programming and debugging experience on those platforms."

Perl 6 Porters for March 2, 2002. The latest Perl 6 Porters digest has articles on topicalizers in Perl 6, garbage collection, .NET CLR, PDDs, Parrot Magic Cookie assignments, and more.

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary. The March 4, 2002 PHP Weekly Summary looks at PHP 4.1.2, QA testing, MySQL constants, and more.

Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! for March 4. This week's Python-URL is out, with news and links for the Python community. Topics include Unicode in Python, playing MP3 files, the Papercut news server, a TWAIN scanner interface for Python, and more.

The Daily Python-URL. This week's entries on The Daily Python-URL looks at the new PyZine technical journal, the Ly Literate Programming engine, the Gumbie GUI generator for Jython, the Python Sound Project, the U.N. Bot game, Guido's "Introduction to Python" tutorial, and much more.

Ruby

The Ruby Garden. This week, the Ruby Garden features a new version 1.6.7 release of Ruby, and a redesigned Ruby Garden Wiki.

Ruby Weekly News. The March 4, 2002 Ruby Weekly News looks at the JTTui textmode user interface, the rpkg package tool, RDoc for turning documents into XML, the FOX GUI Toolkit, and more.

Tcl/Tk

Two weeks of Tcl-URL. Here's Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for February 27, with the latest from the Tcl/Tk development community. Topics include portable Tcl, the risks of Visual Basic, MetaKit, and more.

The Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for March 6 is also available. The issue looks at Wiki references, Tk selection deficiencies, the new Tcl 8.4a4 release, dealing with .pbm images, and working with threads.

XML

The Visual Display of Quantitative XML (O'Reilly). Fabio Arciniegas A. talks about the visual display of XML data. "While quantitative XML data is everywhere, a less common thing to find is examples of effective ways to display such information. Most resources will merely show you how to use XSLT to convert XML data to HTML, which is often not nearly enough when you need to explain complex or large sets of data. This article discusses the creation of useful graphical presentations of quantitative XML data using XSLT and SVG."

Integrated Development Environments

GNUstep Weekly Editorial. The March 1, 2002 GNUstep Weekly Editorial mentions the new GNUstep web site, looks at efforts to make a GNUstep window manager, and discusses changes in gnustep-make, among other things.

Developing C/C++ Applications with the KDevelop IDE (Linux Journal). The Linux Journal walks us through KDevelop. "In the treeview on the left side, you should see some books that you can unfold and that contain documentation included with KDevelop--almost 500 pages that can help you in almost every development situation. The second folder in that tree contains books with the API documentation of the Qt and KDE libraries."

Revision Control Systems

The State of Arch. Tom Lord has sent out a pointer to an online survey concerning the development of the arch revision control system. "arch is briefly (re)introduced. The primary goals for arch are stated and its state assessed. Three possible ways for development on arch to continue are presented along with a survey to help me choose from among them."

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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