See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

Twisted is an event-based framework that has been released a "loosely-affiliated group of hackers" known as Twisted Matrix Laboratories. Twisted is written in Python.

The Twisted framework serves as a base for writing network applications. It includes "a web server, a telnet server, a chat server, a news server, a generic client and server for remote object access, and APIs for creating new protocols and services. Twisted supports integration of the Tk, GTK+, Qt or wxPython event loop with its main event loop". Here is the official list of protocols that are currently supported by Twisted.

A number of applications are included with Twisted, Instance Messenger is a multi-protocol chat program, and Twisted Web is a web server that is integrated into the twisted framework. Twisted components are divided into the dot products and plugins sections. Many of the Twisted components appear to be under construction, a number of interesting utilities appear to be in the planning stage.

The twisted developers offer these reasons for using the Twisted framework.

Twisted version 0.17.4 has been announced. The latest features include NNTP support, persistent connections and pipelining for the web server, a Zope-inspired component architecture, bug fixes, and feature enhancements.

Twisted is licensed under the LGPL license, it may be downloaded here.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter (LinuxDevices.com). Here's the LinuxDevices.com Embedded Linux Newsletter for April 18, with the usual collection of interesting stuff from the embedded Linux community.

Running Embedded Linux on SuperH (Linux Devices). Bhavana Nagendra writes about booting Linux on a Hitachi SuperH development board. "This article demonstrates running embedded Linux on the Hitachi SuperH target using Red Hat Linux and RedBoot as the boot loader. We discuss initial setup, related kernel details and copying the Linux kernel to Flash memory. We illustrate the appropriate use of JFFS2 and NFS filesystems and address some board-specific kernel issues with examples."

Graphics

Hot and Fresh Technology for the Enterprise (O'Reilly). Antoine Quint delves into SVG progress on O'Reilly's XML.com. "This month I'm taking a break from flooding you with heaps of technical SVG tricks in order to reflect on how SVG has been progressing."

Libraries

Gdk-pixbuf 0.17.0 is released. Version 0.17.0 of the Gdk-pixbuf library has been released. This version merges in a number of GTK+ 2.0 bug fixes.

Mail Software

Mailman 2.0.10 released. Version 2.0.10 of the Mailman mailing list manager has been released. This version includes a number of minor bug fixes.

Network Management

Network Management With OpenNMS (O'Reilly). Shane O'Donnell examines OpenNMS and network management on O'Reilly's OnLamp site. "Once everything is handily deployed, you suddenly find yourself thinking, 'Whew, that's a job well done.' But then it dawns on you: not only are you not done, but you are now stuck tending the monster you've just created. Dr. Frankenstein found himself in a similar situation at one point."

Printing Software

Foomatic adds support for Omni. According to LinuxPrinting.org, the Foomatic printer database now includes support for IBM's Omni printer driver. "OMNI does not reach the output quality of GIMP-Print, but it gives support to many printers which were not explicitly supported before, especially for dot-matrix printers, but also many inkjets and lasers."

ESP Ghostscript 7.05.1. A new version of ESP Ghostscript has been released. ESP Ghostscript is a patched version of GNU Ghostscript 7.05 that supports a number of non-PostScript printers.

Omni printer driver version 0.6.1. A new version of IBM's Omni printer driver software is available. The Changelog file mentions beta support for CUPS, the new tools OmniDevices and OmniDeviceOptions, libxml2 support, and more.

Science

Debian-Med: Project Status (LinuxMedNews). LinuxMedNews is carrying the latest project status for Debian-Med. News includes a German translation of the project's web site, and more.

Web-site Development

mod_python version 2.7.8 released. Version 2.7.8 of mod_python is available. This release fixes a 404 bug that was introduced in version 2.7.7. (Thanks to Giorgio Zoppi.)

Quixote 0.4.7 released. Version 0.4.7 of the Quixote Python-based web application framework has been released. New features include the addition of some testing code and a bug fix, among other things. See the CHANGES file for the details.

A couple of Zope releases. Zope Corporation has announced the release of Zope 2.4.4 (the stable branch) and Zope 2.5.1 (development). This version adds a fix for the DTML crashing bug as well as a number of other bug fixes. Note that both releases require Python 2.1.3. The folks at Zope Corp. have also let it slip that they have a couple of positions open.

Zope Newbies. The Zope Newbies site mentions the availability of a new Zope Magazine and two new Zope books.

Webalyzer 2.01-10 released. Version 2.01-10 of the Webalyzer web log analyzer has been released. This release fixes a number of bugs.

Building an Open Source J2EE Weblogger (O'Reilly). David Johnson writes about an open-source Weblogger application on O'Reilly's OnJava site. "In this article, I will introduce you to some of the most useful open source Java development tools by showing you how I used these tools to develop a complete database-driven Web application called Roller."

Apache and SSL (O'Reilly). Paul Weinstein covers Apache and SSL integration on O'Reilly. "Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), developed by Netscape Communications, and Transport Layer Security (TLS), the open-standard replacement for SSL from the Internet Engineering Task Force, are the two protocols that add encryption and authentication to TCP/IP. This article summarizes the basic concepts of how the two protocols work and how Apache implements these protocols so that one can transmit information securely over HTTP."

XSP, Taglibs and Pipelines (Perl.com). Barrie Slaymaker looks at XSP on Perl.com. "In the first article in this series, we saw how to install, configure and test AxKit, and we took a look at a simple processing pipeline. In this article, we will see how to write a simple 10-line XSP taglib and use it in a pipeline along with XSLT to build dynamic pages in such a way that gets the systems architects and coders out of the content maintenance business. Along the way, we'll discuss the pipeline processing model that makes AxKit so powerful."

Documentation

Linux Documentation Project Weekly News. The LDPWN for April 23, 2002 is available. A new Managing Accurate Date and Time HOWTO is available.

Miscellaneous

Porting MFC applications to Linux (IBM developerWorks). Markus Neifer shows how to port Windows applications to Linux on IBM's developerWorks. "Porting Windows applications to Linux doesn't have to involve a retraining nightmare. Markus Neifer shows how to port MFC using wxWindows, giving a user's guide to this open source GUI toolkit and providing a complete, step-by-step porting example."

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

Mozilla 1.0 rc 1. Release Candidate 1 for Mozilla version 1.0 has been announced. The developers are looking for testing and feedback. The release notes detail a long list of changes. Also, you can read about the new release on MozillaZine.

Galeon 1.2.1 released. Version 1.2.1 of the minimalist Galeon browser has been released. This version adds compatibility with Mozilla 1.0 rc 1, autoscroll, print preview capabilities, and bug fixes.

Opera 6.0 for Linux Beta 2 Released. Version 6.0 beta 2 of the Opera browser has been released for the Linux platform. "Opera 6.0 for Linux Beta 2 incorporates not only better features and faster rendering of pages, but also improves support for non-Roman alphabets. Opera is currently fine-tuning the Unicode and font support for Asian users and is preparing to shortly launch a final version of Opera 6.0 for Linux."

Desktop Environments

GNOME Summary for 2002-03-17 - 2002-04-22. Here's the GNOME Summary for March 17 through April 22, 2002. This issue looks at Abiword 1.0; the release of GTK#; reports from the Second Unix Accessibility Conference; and much more.

PerlBox desktop for Unix. PerlBox is a new desktop system written in Perl. PerlBox supports voice command input and works with the blackbox window manager.

Introduction to GConf and GnomeVFS Article. Mikael Hallendal and Richard Hult have published an introduction to GConf and GnomeVFS. GConf is the configuration utility for GNOME 2 and GnomeVFS is the Gnome Virtual File System library.

Xfce 3.8.16 released. Version 3.8.16 of the Xfce lightweight desktop environment is available for download.

Interoperability

Wine Weekly News. Issue #120 of the Wine Weekly News looks at wine-20020411, the X11 tree, WineX 2.0, Lindows, a CreateProcess test, C profiling, and more.

Multimedia

Gnome Media Media Related Utilities Package 1.520.2. Version 1.520.2 of the Gnome Media Media Related Utilities Package has been announced. Changed components include Gnome-CD, Gnome-Volume-Control, Gnome-Sound-Recorder, and CDDBSlave2.

Office Applications

Abiword v1.0. Abiword v1.0 has been released and is now available for download.

AbiWord Weekly News. Issue #88 of the AbiWord Weekly News covers the latest developments from that project. The bug fixing effort is still in full swing.

Pan 0.11.3 Released (Gnotices). Version 0.11.3 of the Pan news reader has been released. The main new feature is support for decoding yEnc formatted messages.

Kernel Cousin GNUe. Issue #25 of Kernel Cousin GNUe covers a number of Microsoft compatibility issues, documentation, and lots more.

Programming Languages

Caml

Caml Weekly News. The April 23, 2002 Caml Weekly News looks at OCamlSDl, and CamlTk/Windows, and features a discussion on a curses library.

The Caml Hump. This week's Caml Hump entries include Phox, Rogare utilities, OSP, netclient, Cameleon, Okey, Configwin, and OCamlSDL.

FORTRAN

G95 progress. Check out the latest developments on the G95 open-source FORTRAN compiler project. Progress is steadily moving forward.

Lisp

LISA 1.2 released. Version 1.2 of LISA, the Lisp-based Intelligent Software Agents has been released. "LISA is a platform for the development of Rete-based intelligent systems in Common Lisp." This version adds a new query language for retrieving CLOS instances from the knowledge base.

Perl

Larry Drops Apocalypse 5 Hints On List (use Perl). Use Perl mentions some preliminary hints that Larry Wall has made concerning the contents of the upcoming Apocalypse 5.

Perl and XML on the Command Line (O'Reilly). Kip Hampton explores Perl and XML on O'Reilly. "The truth is that putting Perl's XML processing facilities to work is no harder than using any other part of Perl; and if the applications that feature Perl/XML in a visible way are complex, it is because the problems that those applications are designed to solve are complex. To drive this point home, this month we will get back to our Perlish roots by examining how Perl can be used on the command line to perform a range of common XML tasks."

PHP

PHP 4.2.0 released. The release candidate phase of PHP 4.2.0 is done, the official 4.2.0 version has been announced. "The biggest change in PHP 4.2.0 concerns variable handling. External variables (from the environment, the HTTP request, cookies or the web server) are no longer registered in the global scope by default. The preferred method of accessing these external variables is by using the new Superglobal arrays, introduced in PHP 4.1.0." This version also adds experimental support for Apache 2.

Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!. The weekly Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is available for the week ending April 22, 2002.

The Daily Python-URL. New on the Daily Python-URL this week are several Python related events, Jython tips, ZEO 1.0 final, and more.

Ruby

The Ruby Garden. This week's Ruby Garden looks at autoincrement and decrement operators, Numeric#prev, proc expressions, alternate method return values, constructors, and more.

The Ruby Weekly News. This week's Ruby Weekly News covers Ruby/Google 0.2.0, Ruby-Poll 0.0.1, TaskMaster 0.1.2, and Imlib2-Ruby 0.4.0.

XML

Expand XSL with extensions (IBM developerWorks). Jared Jackson writes about XSL extensions on IBM's developerWorks. "Simply put, extensions are a way of calling a method written in some other programming language from within an XSL document. Usually, the extension methods are written in the same language as that of the XSL processor. There are exceptions to this rule: Java, for example, can be made to run programs in other languages such as Javascript or Perl."

Privacy and XML, Part I (O'Reilly). Paul Madsen and Carlisle Adams look at privacy issues from an XML perspective. "If access to information is part of the problem, it would seem that XML, with its logically identified and structured information objects, would only add fuel to the fire. Imagine how much easier a hacker's 'job' would be if she knew that all banks kept the credit card numbers of their customers in an XML Schema that specified a element."

Integrated Development Environments

GNUstep Weekly Editorial. The April 21, 2002 issue of the GNUstep Weekly Editorial looks at libffi support, work on gnustep-gui and gnustep-back, and more.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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