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See also: last week's Development page.

Development tools


Java

A review of the "Java Language Reference", by Mark Grand has been written by Rob Slade. While agreeing that the book might have shortcomings for those inexperienced in object-oriented programming, he finishes by commenting, For the serious programmer, an essential tool.

Perl

O'Reilly has announced the release, at last, of "Perl in a Nutshell", by Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour, and Nathan Patwardhan.

Rob Slade has posted his review of the book "Learning Perl", by Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Christiansen. There are some good reports, but also some specific criticisms, particularly directed at the lack of examples of "quick and dirty" perl scripts, something for which the language is well reputed.

Python

Mike Orr appears to have been the editor for this week's Python-URL!. He comments that it has been a quiet week. He goes on, though, to provide pointers to a couple of new updated python packages, including PyMat 1.0 and pyslang 0.1.0. There are also pointers to some useful websites and to some humorous postings that improved this editor's mood.

Smalltalk

Travis Griggs dropped us a note in December with some pointers to some interesting Smalltalk-related items, including The Land of Smapplets which he promises is totally cool, as well as Kai Boellert's work on Aspect Oriented Programming in Smalltalk, available here, and John Brant and Dan Roberts latest version of their Refactoring Browser. Many thanks, Travis, for the excellent pointers.

Tcl/tk

  • Tuba 2.5.b1, a visual Tcl/Tk/Itcl debugger, now with preliminary Itcl support

January 7, 1999

   

 

Development projects


Barry Kwok wrote to let us know that many Chinese Linux fans in Taiwan and Hong Kong are working to localize Linux in Chinese and to provide a pointer to one project he recommends highly, the Chinese Linux Extension (CLE). An English version of the site has also been started as well.

GNOME

Miguel de Icaza announced version 0.99.1 of GNOME on December 31st. Elliot Lee has provided some 0.99.1 rpms.

The above announcement was followed by announcements of 0.99.1 versions of gnome-admin, gnome-games, gnome-media, gnome-objc, gnome-utils, and LibGTop.

Since then, althought a full 0.99.2 release has not been announced, 0.99.2 versions of several packages have appeared, including the GNOME core, gnome-libs, and LibGTop and Gtop.

New versions of the Gnumeric spreadsheet, the Midnight Commander file manager and the gwp word processor have all been announced. All of them include some new features and a variety of bug fixes.

A new version of gnome-ppp fixes the mysterious segfaults.

A web site has been set up to support gtk/GNOME development; you can find it at http://gdev.net.

GGI

The GGI project has resurfaced with a new libGGI release. GGI, of course, is trying to produce a better graphics subsystem. The libGGI release, the first in some time, brings the library up to version 2.0 beta1. This is an entirely user space library, no kernel patches needed.

Ghostscript

Ghostscript 5.10 has finally been released under the GPL; here is the announcement for this release. The next GPL release will be 5.50, due out in September, 1999. (Those interested in free software politics may want to check out this note from Richard Stallman which mentions the ghostscript announcement. Evidently he called up the gnu.announce moderator to complain, since the announcement makes mention of the less-free version, a no-no).

Mozilla/Netscape

Andy Tripp reports that he has made the ICEBrowserLite renderer available in Jazilla and gives details on how to get around the fact that the Jazilla broke as a result.

Andy Noble wrote up a little history on his process of doing a complete, and successful, install of jazilla, finding one bug in the process. He's extremely happy with the result.

For more news on the Mozilla front, remember to check out the latest MozillaZine.

Postfix/Secure Mailer

IBM's alphaworks issued a press release announcing an update for Secure Mailer (also known as postfix) which repairs a directory permission mistake and "several other defects". It is interesting to hear about open source software updates in this type of forum ... as you might expect, real hard facts tend to be missing.

From following postings to Bugtraq, it is clear that Wietse Venema reconsidered his design and will no longer be using a world-writable directory. Check the Bugtraq archives or the postfix mailing lists if you are interested in the details.

Wine

Adam the Jazz Guy posted a note warning that as of January 3rd, compiles of Wine will not work for people running old versions of ncurses. From the note, it appears to be a temporary problem.
 
 

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