See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

Knoda, ("Knorr's Datenbank"), is a database front end for the K Desktop Environment (KDE). It is based on the hk_classes C++ database library. Knoda works with the Mysql database and the documentation indicates that it can be installed under the Mandrake and SuSE distributions. Knoda was written by Horst Knorr.

"Knoda is a GUI for accessing relational databases in KDE. It comprises a Form generator, a Table and Query generator and a Report Designer." The general information page further details what Knoda can do. The screenshots page shows some examples of Knoda's capabilities.

Version 0.5.1 of Knoda has just been released, new features include support for KDE2 and KDE3 as well as an XML export filter and bug fixes. See the changelog for the complete list and project history.

These pages also have some useful information:

• The Knoda documentation page, which has the API documentation and several tutorials.
• The Knoda FAQ which has some useful installation tips.

Knoda can be downloaded here. It is licensed under the GPL and the LGPL.

Audio Projects

MPEG audio analysis tools. We have received an announcement from CSIRO for a set of frequency domain audio analysis tools. Maaate is a framework for doing work with MPEG compressed files, and Bewdy allows one to work with MP3 files. (Thanks to Silvia Pfeiffer.)

Education

SEUL/edu report for March 18, 2002. The March 18, 2002 SEUL/edu report features discussions on GNU license issues in Canada, teaching Linux to high school students, the Free Assessment Summary Tool (FAST), multi-language support for Tux Typing, data formats for educational use, and more.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter for March 14, 2002. The March 14, 2002 edition of the LinuxDevices Embedded Linux Newsletter is out with the latest embedded Linux news.

Tracking Down Killer Bugs (Dr. Dobbs'). Eric McRae discusses embedded system debugging techniques on Dr. Dobbs'. "In the field of embedded system development, there occasionally arises a bug that defies all normal techniques for discovery. These "killer" bugs are characterized by unpredictability, an unclear hardware/software basis, and their proximity to a major project deadline."

Network Management

iptables-1.2.6 released. Version 1.2.6 of the iptables firewall software has been released. It features a bunch of bug fixes. (Thanks to Harald Welte.)

Science

Tk Family Practice Version 50 Released (LinuxMedNews). LinuxMedNews reports on the latest version of the Tk_familypractice medical record system. Features include an improved install script, better progress note templates, a file chooser dialog, improved internationalization, and more.

BioPerl 1.0 Release (Bioinformatics). Bioinformatics has an announcement for the 1.0 release of BioPerl, a set of Perl extensions for handling biological data. "Bioperl has been used worldwide since 1998 but the project has always used conservative release numbering - for example, for the last 2 years, the stable release series was 0.7. By moving to 1.0, Bioperl is declaring that it is 'feature complete' for sequence handling, the most common task in bioinformatics. "

Web-site Development

Liferay Enterprise Portal v1.0. Liferay, a new J2EE open source portal server has been released for Linux and Windows. The portal is built on Oracle9i. Liferay is licensed under the MIT Open Source License.

Bricolage 1.2.2 Released (use Perl). Version 1.2.2 of the Bricolage content management and publishing system has been announced. "This is a maintenance release with many bug fixes."

This week on Zope Members' News. New items on the Zope Members' News site include a new PHParser, FunctionalTests 0.2, and a note on a Zope talk at the Open Source Content Management Summit in Zurich, Switzerland on Mar 21-22 2002.

Asp2php news. A few updates have been added to the Asp2php project. "Fixed some bugs in the 'function' conversion. I also totally updated the GUI. It should work A LOT better now. "

Apache AxKit 1.5.1 Released (use Perl). A new version of AxKit, a mod_perl mime encoding sniffer for XML files, has been announced. This release features bug fixes, it is also the first release to be included as part of Apache.

Introducing AxKit (O'Reilly). Barrie Slaymaker takes a look at AxKit on O'Reilly's perl.com. "Starting from the basics, this series explains how to install a basic AxKit server and then explores AxKit's more powerful capabilities. "

Documentation

LDP Weekly News. The March 12, 2002 LDP Weekly News features a new Latvian HOWTO as well as numerous updated documents.

The March 19, 2002 LDP Weekly News mentions that Joy Goodreau will be replacing David Merrill as the collection editor. Thanks go to Dave for all of his hard work, and welcome to Joy. New documents include a Compaq T1500 Linux HOWTO, and an English-language GNU/Linux distributions HOWTO.

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 0.99.57. Version 0.99.57 of the AlsaPlayer PCM player is available. This version features bug fixes, added scopes, and more preferences.

Web Browsers

Have You Seen These Hackers? (Mozilla). The Mozilla project is searching for a number of former developers, they need to find them and ask their permission for the relicensing of Mozilla.

Switching from IE to Gecko (NewsForge). NewsForge has an encouraging article about a web browser developer making the switch to Gecko. "Howard Ryan is CEO of Custom Browser, Inc. , a company that codes (you'd never guess from the name) custom Web browsers. He's a Windows guy, and most of his work has been based on Microsoft Explorer's rendering engine. But Howard is starting to use Mozilla's Gecko in his own custom and embedded browsers, and says moving to Gecko from Explorer is not only a good idea, but is amazingly simple for browser developers because, he says, 'the Gecko API is identical to the IE API.'"

Desktop Environments

Kernel Cousin KDE #35. Issue #35 of Kernel Cousin KDE covers recent release candidates for KDE3, Krayon, KOffice file thumbnails, CVS documentation accidents, and more.

People of KDE: Andy Fawcett. One of the more recent endeavours in the KDE world is the KDEduware project. This week dot.kde.org speaks with team member Andy Fawcett. "I help out with the KDE Edu project, doing testing, giving advice (I have some teaching experience), and maintaining some of the website . When we 'went public' with the project, I somehow managed to coordinate getting the text in seven different languages, all in the space of a day, and for which I am very grateful to the poor fools people on IRC who volunteered to translate."

The KDE Three Meeting. Cristian Tibirna has compiled a summary of the recent KDE Three Meeting, which covered various KDE 3.0 development issues.

KDE Worldwide Goes Live. Chris Howells has announced a new project, KDE Worldwide, which aims to promote KDE around the world by assisting with the localization of KDE.

GNOME-2.0 Installation Guide Online (Gnotices). A new GNOME-2.0 Installation Guide has been announced. "This GIG2 explains not only how to compile and install the GNOME 2.0 Desktop Environment itself but also how to compile and install the GNOME 1.4.1 applications into the new GNOME-2.0 Desktop Environment."

New GNOME themes site (Gnotices). Sunshine In A Bag is a new GNOME themes site that has been announced. Its purpose is to be a resource site for all GNOME related themes.

GNOME Summary for March 16, 2002. The March 16, 2002 GNOME Summary looks at Rhythmbox 0.1, GStreamer 0.3.3, GnuCash 1.6.6, Ada bindings for GTK+ 2.0, the GNOME 2.0 desktop Beta 2, and more.

GUI Packages

Python/C# Mania: New Bindings Expand KDE Languages. A number of new bindings have been released for KDE and Qt, adding C# and Python to the list of supported languages.

Interoperability

Xfsamba 0.44 Samba navigator. Version 0.44 of Xfsamba, a GUI-based Samba navigator, has been released. (Thanks to Joe Klemmer.)

Multimedia

KWinTV: Future Vision (KDE.News). KDE.News reports on Richard Moore's latest version of KWinTV, a television card interface for KDE.

Office Applications

AbiWord 0.99.3 Released (Gnotices). In the move towards the AbiWord 1.0 release, the AbiWord team has announced version 0.99.3. "The AbiWord team continues to make great progress towards 1.0. In the 4 weeks since 0.99.2 was released we've closed tons of bugs, completed RTF import/export, added great new image handling facilities and have made AbiWord significantly faster."

Programming Languages

C++

Implementing C++ Servlet Containers (Dr. Dobbs'). John Hinke introduces C++ servelet containers on Dr. Dobb's. "What if the full power of the Java servlet API could be harnessed in C++ to create a pure C++ web application by using the same techniques used when creating Java web applications? C++ developers would then be able to create C++ web applications without needing to use multiple languages, or using a slower technology such as Java or CGI."

Caml

Caml Weekly News. The March 19, 2002 Caml Weekl News is available. Topics include profiling, PXP-1.1.4, a lablgtk interface for Gecko, caml-info-look, and a Text Mode Kit.

The Caml Hump. This week, the Caml Hump looks at the TextMode Kit OCaml text mode widget system and caml-info-look, an automatic OCaml info file browser.

Java

JSP Standard Tag Libraries, Part 1 (O'Reilly). Sue Spielman introduces JSP Standard Tag Libraries on O'Reilly's OnJava site. "If a custom tag has been created, tested, and debugged, then it only is logical that, as a developer, you want to grab the golden ring of OOD: reusable components. Working with custom tags is one avenue to explore in the world of reuse. But wouldn't it be better, more efficient, and easier if there was a set of standard tags that solved common problems? Do we really need ten different ways to iterate, or to do conditional processing?"

A taste of 'Bitter Java' (IBM developerWorks). Bruce A. Tate explores Java antipatterns on IBM's developerWorks. "In this article, antipatterns expert and noted author of Bitter Java, Bruce Tate, demonstrates how and why antipatterns are a necessary and complementary companion to design patterns."

Lisp

CL-BibTeX alpha available. An alpha release of CL-BibTeX, a Common Lisp replacement of the BibTeX bibliograpy database tool, has been announced.

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary. The March 17, 2002 PHP Weekly Summary covers streams support, SapDB and PHP, a FastCGI update, fixes for the PHP audit project, interface extension, and Unix Mail, and more.

PHP Documentation Team Meeting. The notes from the PHP Documentation Team Meeting are available online.

Python

Python 2.2.1c1 released. A new candidate for the bugfix release of Python has been announced. No major new features are included, just bug fixes. Testers are being recruited.

This week's Python-URL!. This week's Python-URL! covers Enhanced Generators, NormalDate 1.2, a Python 2.2 bug encounter, an English thesaurus and dictionary thread, a proposed standard logging module, PIL v1.1.3, and more.

This week on the Daily Python-URL. New items on the Daily Python-URL include a list-comprehension syntax discussion, Python 2.2.1 RC 1, a Python Logging System, Python Imaging Library, version 1.1.3, Korean Codecs 2.0.2, and more.

Ruby

Ruby: Productive Programming Language (Linux Journal). The Linux Journal looks at Ruby. "Ruby has some distinct advantages over Python. It is a far cleaner OOP language with excellent features, and it supports Perl's regex type terse notation. It also scores high in enabling one to write short concise and maintainable code."

The Ruby Garden. This week, the Ruby Garden discusses programmer personalities, Dir.mkdirhier and Dir.rmdirhier, message parameters for abort, the Mutex object, dir methods, and more.

The Ruby Weekly News. The March 18, 2002 Ruby Weekly News features announcements for Ruby Dataquery Shell 0.3.3, rpkg 0.3.1, Ruby-Gnome 0.27, Ruby/SMB beta 2, Ruby/zlib 0.5.1, the Locana GUI and GUI builder 0.81, and more.

Tcl/Tk

Tcl-URL! for March 18, 2002. This week's Tcl-URL! covers try/catch exception handling, garbage collection, embedded TCL legalities, Tcl history, animated GIFs, the Tgdb debugger, and more.

XML

Processing Model Considered Essential (O'Reilly). Leigh Dodds looks at XML processing model issues on xml.com. "This week's XML-Deviant takes a step backwards in an attempt to foreground an issue that has been behind several recent debates in the XML community, namely, the lack of a processing model for XML."

Integrated Development Environments

GNUstep Weekly Editorial. The March 15, 2002 GNUstep Weekly Editorial covers testing on different Objective-C window managers, compatibility between Apple Objective-C++ and gcc, Chinese language support, converting a NeXTSTEP text to speech program to Linux, and GNUstep progress.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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