See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

Use Perl reports on the release of Version 0.0.4 of the Parrot compiler, which is at the heart of the new Perl 6 language.

We now have a working JIT compiler, thanks primarily to Daniel Grunblatt. Gregor Purdy produced something he calls 'predereferencing', which rearranges Parrot bytecode in memory to give a 22% speedup over the normal Parrot run. Dan Sugalski himself has provided a fast arena-based memory allocation system, and a copying garbage collector to match. We're starting to look like a real interpreter, and to prove it, Clinton Pierce has written an XML parser in Parrot bytecode.

Also included in Parrot 0.0.4 is Alex Gough's bignum library, code cleanup by Jason Gloudon, and "rudimentary regular expression support" contributed by Brent Dax.

Here is the full list of changes for the new Parrot.

The latest version of Parrot may be downloaded here. See the Parrot 0.0.4 readme file for the necessary build instructions.

Additionally, Simon Cozens has handed off the duties of Parrot project leader, or "Parrot Pumpking" to Jeff Goff.

Electronics

New Icarus Verilog simulator (gEDA). The gEDA site lists a new development version of the Icarus Verilog electronic simulation language compiler. In addition, a new stable version 0.6 was also released recently.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter (LinuxDevices). The LinuxDevices.com Embedded Linux Newsletter for March 21 is available, with the usual roundup of events from the embedded Linux community.

The preempt patch vs the low-latency patch (LinuxDevices). LinuxDevices has posted a white paper that compares two methods for achieving low kernel latency. "In this whitepaper on Linux Scheduler Latency, Clark Williams of Red Hat Inc. compares the performance of two popular ways to improve kernel Linux preemption latency -- the preemption patch pioneered by MontaVista and the low-latency patch pioneered by Ingo Molnar -- and discovers that the best approach might be a combination of both."

Opening Up the PlayStation 2 with Linux (O'Reilly). Howard Wen reviews the Sony PlayStation 2 Linux development environment on O'Reilly. "Besides the sheer geek thrill of being able to do it, there's a practical reason for running Linux on a PlayStation 2. A lot of people expressing interest in this kit are hobbyists looking to gain experience in developing for a major game console."

Printing Software

HPIJS 1.0.4 released (Linux Printing). Linux Printing mentions the new release of the HPIJS inkjet printer drivers. Version 1.0.4 includes a new high resolution mode, support for A3 and A5 paper, and bug fixes.

Web-site Development

Apache 1.3.24 Released. Apache version 1.3.24 has been released. "This version of Apache is principally a security and bug fix release." (Thanks to Jonas Eriksson.)

mnoGoSearch-php-3.2.0.beta2 available. A new version of mnoGoSearch-php, a PHP interface to the mnoGoSearch search engine is available. The Change Log file lists all of the changes.

Zope Members' News. This week's Zope Members' News items include a look at the MailBoxer mailing list manager, the QuotaFolder 0.1 quota system, the ZFireBirdDA database adapter, the Logger 1-0-2 Zope logging system interface, and more.

Analog Security Hole. Version 5.22 of the Analog web log analyzer fixes a cross-site scripting security hole in which Javascript code can be arbitrarily inserted into web logs. The log entries can then be viewed by arbitrary browsers.

mod_perl in 30 minutes (O'Reilly). Stas Bekman gives a speedy introduction to mod_perl on O'Reilly. "In this article I'll show step-by-step installation and configuration scenarios, and chances are you will be able to run the basic statically compiled mod_perl setup without reading any other documents."

Documentation

LDP Weekly News. The March 26, 2002 LDP Weekly News mentions a new "documents" category. New documents cover creating high quality Linux applications, backing up and restoring data, intrusion protection, physical security, securing data in transit, and an introduction to viruses and virus hoaxes.

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

mpg321 version 0.2.10 released. A new version of mpg321, the free MP3 player, has been released. Version 0.2.10 features a number of bug fixes and useability improvements.

Ardour progress continues. Work continues on the Ardour multi-track audio recording package. Generalized undo/redo operations have been added, stability and usability enhancements have been added, and Ardour now works as a Jack client.

Web Browsers

Mozilla Independent Status Reports. The latest Mozilla Independent Status Reports feature new releases of LiveSidebar, SVG Graphs, the Mozilla Translator, mozCalc, Annozilla, Mozblog, and BrowserG!.

Desktop Environments

Ximian GNOME on a low-resources machine. Linux and Main looks at software bloat and its effects on running Gnome on a Pentium-166. "Hear me out. It's true that we have all kinds of nifty desktops and applications. This is great. It is also, sadly, true that as the capacity of hardware has increased -- bigger drives, more memory, faster processors, an actual reduction in price -- coding has fallen slack. We do just about the same stuff at just about the same speed, even though our machines should, if the coding standard of even two or three years ago were in place, literally scream with speed."

Kernel Cousin KDE number 36. Kernel Cousin KDE Issue #36 is available. Topics include advanced media streaming, KParts and Streaming Data, Moving Day for Wallpapers, KOffice publicity, KDE 3.0 status, KOffice graphics, Addressbook transitioning, and more.

KDE 3.0RC3: Prepare to Fall in Love (KDE.News). KDE.News reports on the newly released KDE 3.0 RC3 with much enthusiasm: "...yesterday morning I installed KDE 3.0rc3 and, to be honest, it is truly magnificent! Konqueror is fast, fast, fast! Never seen anything like it (except maybe Lynx) in the main browsers - even long pages in my Most Often Visited list all but instantly popped into place.

The rest of KDE 3 is simply spectacular, too. Everything is snappier, from menus (despite the addition of cool menu icons) and dialogs (these pop up much faster) to applications, and the look is even more professional than KDE 2. Wowwww, I am in total awe. Superb, excellent, amazing job, guys, KDE 3 absolutely rules!"

People of KDE: Eva Brucherseifer. This week's People of KDE features Eva Brucherseifer, one of the founders of KDE-Women, KDE-Edu, and the KDE-Solaris mailing list.

Games

Net Hack Version 3.4.0. Version 3.4.0 of the classic NetHack game has been announced. This release features bug fixes, better portability, enhanced configuration file processing, and lots more.

Pygame updates. This week, the Pygame site features SCAM, the Sprite Collision and Mechanics Library. "SCAM is a library that provides easy to use pixel-perfect collision detection. It is a C extension module and has support for python and pygame."

GUI Packages

FLTK 1.1.0b12 Available. Version 1.1.0b12 of the Fast Light ToolKit (FLTK) has been announced. This release features bug fixes and working drag-n-drop support, among other things.

Office Applications

Ximian releases Evolution 1.0.3. "Ximian Evolution version 1.0.3 is now available. Evolution 1.0.3 resolves a number of smaller issues discovered in the previous release, and includes enhanced compatibility with the forthcoming Ximian Connector for Microsoft Exchange. You can expect to see improved performance and stability in this release, especially for addressbook functions over LDAP."

Advance 0.7.2 released. Version 0.7.2. of the Advance Personal Information Manager (PIM) is available. This version is a functional beta release. (Thanks to Bryan Brunton.)

Kernel Cousin GNUe #21. Issue #21 of Kernel Cousin GNUe looks at analytical processing, web browser compatibility, international support, GNUe for Red Hat and Debian, and more.

AbiWord Weekly News. The March 26, 2002 AbiWord Weekly News covers the new AbiWord 0.99.3 release as well as other progress in AbiWord development.

Programming Languages

Caml

The Caml Hump. The "latest adds" on The Caml Hump include lox, a library framework for concurrent, single-threaded Internet application services, and Ant, which aims to be a Caml replacement for the TeX typesetting system.

The Caml Weekly News. The March 26, 2002 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out. Topics include weak hash tables, Ensemble 1.35, and ant V0.3pre.

Haskell

The Gtk2Hs Haskell binding for Gtk2. Axel Simon has announced Gtk2Hs, a rewrite of the gtk+hs Haskell binding for Gtk. Improvements include automatic memory management, nearly complete coverage of widget functions and signals, Unicode support, Object-oriented calling conventions, and more. (Thanks to Jens Petersen.)

Java

Tetris meets the Java bean (IBM developerWorks). Scott Clee uses Java beans to implement the Tetris game. "IBM Software Engineer -- and gamer at heart -- Scott Clee provides a simple way to take the Tetris game model and wrap it up as a reusable Java bean component. Once the game elements have been broken down into Java objects, they can be reassembled to form the complete game model bean, enabling it to be plugged into virtually any Tetris GUI."

Micro-Tuning Step-by-Step (O'Reilly). Jack Shirazi gives some tips on optimizing Java performance. "Micro-tuning is a term often used to mean speeding up small sections of code out of context, by profiling and analyzing that code and using some of the many techniques available to make code run faster. In contrast, macro-tuning looks at the program in context, and tries to improve performance by altering the algorithms, data structures, or interactions between components or subsystems."

Lisp

mod_lisp 2.2 released. Version 2.2 of the mod_lisp Apache web server module, has been released. "This version allows more than one Set-Cookie".

CLSQL initial public version released. The first public version of CLSQL, a Common Lisp interface to the PostgreSQL and AODBC database engines, has been released.

Perl

CPANPLUS 0.01 Released (use Perl). Version 0.1 of the CPANPLUS Perl module management system has been released.

PHP

PHP 4.2.0 rc 1 (PHP News). PHP News looks at the new PHP 4.2.0 rc1 release. Testers are being solicited, the official PHP 4.2.0 is scheduled for release on April 22, 2002.

PHP Weekly Summary for March 25, 2002. The March 25, 2002 PHP Weekly Summary features a preview of Zend Engine 2, PHP 4.2.0 rc 1, removal of PAM code from PHP, bug fixes, Java serialization, and Crypto++.

Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!. Here's the Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! for March 26, 2002. Topics include exception handling, serving MS SQL with Python, the Python-bz2 compression library, and more.

PyKDE2: KDE Bindings for Python (O'Reilly). Stephen Figgins talks about a project that was built with PyKDE2, the KDE bindings for Python.

The Daily Python-URL. The latest entries on the Daily Python-URL include articles on Reportlab Toolkit version 1.13, an Introduction to Jython, NormalDate, python-bz2, and more.

Python 2.2.1c2. A second release candidate for the next Python bugfix release has been announced. "There haven't been many changes since 2.2.1c1, just a few fixes."

Ruby

The Ruby Garden. This week's Ruby Garden looks at modifying mkmf.rb to support frameworks, and mentions a Linux Journal article on Ruby.

Meanwhile, the Ruby Garden's Ruby Weekly News has announcements for ByteCodeRuby 0.1.1, vimRubyX, RubyMail 0.8, RubyFilter 0.8, rpkg 0.3.2, REXML 2.0.2, RUDL 0.6, FXRuby-1.0.3, and Rubyzip 0.4.1.

Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL!. The March 25, 2002 Tcl-URL! features a number of Tcl tips, obtaining #include capability, paths and package loading, supergrid, an Icon library, the Toucan IDE for the Palm platform, the State Machine Compiler, and more.

XML

Exploring XML Encryption, Part 1 (IBM developerWorks). Bilal Siddiqui introduces XML encryption on IBM's developerWorks. "XML Encryption provides end-to-end security for applications that require secure exchange of structured data. XML itself is the most popular technology for structuring data, and therefore XML-based encryption is the natural way to handle complex requirements for security in data interchange applications."

What's New in XPath 2.0 (O'Reilly). Evan Lenz compares XPath 2.0 to XPath 1.0. "A better way of describing XPath 2.0 is as an expression language for processing sequences, with built-in support for querying XML documents."

Web Service Sublimation (O'Reilly). Martin Gudgin and Timothy Ewald talk about the current state of Web Services on O'Reilly. "In the broadest possible sense, Web Services are an attempt to use XML to build distributed information processing systems that work across the Internet without necessarily requiring a browser as the client. Many present Web Services as a silver bullet that makes building this sort of system easy, but this view is naive. "

Integrated Development Environments

GNUstep Weekly Editorial. The March 22, 2002 GNUstep Weekly Editorial looks at the initial launch of the GNUstep developers' release, which splits the project into stable and an unstable trees.

Miscellaneous

Jext 3.1 pre2. A new version of the Jext programmer's editor has been released. This version replaces the stable version and features an updated ProjectMaster plugin.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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