LWN - Development

Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page All in one big page See also: last week's Development page.	Development tools Java The first public pre-release of the JDK1.2 for Linux was announced on Thursday, March 4th. The release notes comment in big, black letters that this release is only for the very brave. It is good, though, that they've gotten far enough to allow the rest of the community to help out with finding and dispatching the remaining bugs. Now all of those of you who have been bugging them to do a pre-release, so you could help, need to step up and match your words. From the JDK 1.2 Status Page, it appears the only hold-up left on the Intel platform is caused by a bug in the 2.0.3X kernel series. The PowerPC platform is coming along, as well. No information is yet available for the other ports. From this note, it appears that the problem is fixed as of kernel 2.2.1. It may be up to Sun to decide whether this constitutes "passing behavior". In addition, Alan Cox's release notes for Linux kernel 2.0.37pre8 indicate that he's included the fix for that problem, specifically to support the JDK 1.2 porting team. 2.0.37 is due out by the end of the month, barring any major disasters. Some initial impressions of Java 2 (a.k.a. JDK 1.2) were posted by Russ Pridemore. The JDK 1.2 pre-release for the PowerPC platform was announced on Monday. Perl Perl, the first postmodern computer language was the topic of Larry Wall's talk at LinuxWorld. It is now also available on-line, for those of us that missed it. Warning: the talk was long. However, it makes Larry Wall's comments in the panel with Linus, Richard, Guido and Eric a lot more understandable ... A demo of PerlPoint, Tom Christiansen's perl-based (of course) presentation software, was announced on March 9th, with the goal of reducing the number of people making presentations with PowerPoint. The Maintenance Trial 6 for 5.005_03 has been made available in Graham Barr's CPAN directory. Python "Instant Hacking" is the title of Magnus L. Hetland's small programming tutorial which uses Python for its examples. It is available from his web site and considered a Work-In-Progress. SmallTalk Gemstone is rumored to have a non-commercial Linux version of its flagship Smalltalk client AND server. Check out this note from Joseph Bacanskas for a few more details. Tcl/tk Our normal pointer to TCL-URL! did not make it in last week. As a result, here is last week's edition and this week's edition. A HOWTO for writing multi-threaded extensions for Tcl was announced by David Gravereaux. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh	March 11, 1999

	Development projects KDE Linux-Magazin wrote an article on K-Office, the text of which has been made available in German, thanks to the efforts of Tom Schwaller. They are looking for people willing to translate the article into other languages, particularly French and English. Contact Martin Konold if you are interested in helping out. If you are looking for books on KDE, you'll want to check out Robert Williams' web-site on the topic. The first release of KCdCD, a simple CD player, was announced by Roberto Alsina. Over thirty different updates to various KDE utilities and programs came out over the past two weeks, so we won't attempt to list them all here. Check out the kde-announce list for all the announcements. Linux Games The Crystal Space 3D engine is a "work-in-progress" with a goal of developing a good, general 3D game engine. They announced their latest version last week, version 0.12, describing the features they have so far, warning of potential bugs, and providing pointers to more information. Hopkins FBI is the name of a commercial game which will be released for Linux on March 29th. A downloadable demo is already available and patches for some known problems should be out in a couple of days. For more information, check out the Hopkins FBI site, complete with screen shots [tip courtesy of Wari Wahab]. Linux Wordprocessors, etc. The LyX Development Team proudly announced Lyx 1.0.1 on March 4th. They refute the contention that there is no open source word processor for Linux. Originally conceived of as a "GUI front-end" to LaTeX (Lyx still produces LaTeX files for its output format), they state that it now has a phenomenal math editor, figures, tables and more, with support for over a dozen languages. LaTeX (and its predecessor, TeX) has long been a favorite in scientific communities and LyX has many devoted users. Mozilla/Netscape Netscape Communicator 4.51 is reportedly available on the Netscape FTP site. Wine The First World Wine Developer's Conference? That's what Doug Ridgway's report from LinuxWorld dubbed the event. This is recommended reading for anyone interested in Wine ... it is chock full of information, excitement and more. Codeweaver's plans to merge TWIN and WINE into "TWINE" are mentioned in the report, but were covered in more detail on Slashdot on Monday. It is good news to see efforts in the two development areas coming closer together. The different licenses of the two efforts (LGPL for TWIN, BSD for WINE) mean that a lot of tip-toeing will be going on, trying to keep the work and the cooperation going, but both sides seem to have a very good attitude about it. CodeWeavers, from their web site, appears to have gone out of their way to anticipate possible problems and avoid them. Zope This week's Zope news (courtesy of Amos Latteier) includes a pointer to an article on Zope by Web Review. The article itself is introductory, and contains material with which most LWN readers should be familiar. However, at the bottom of the article, they include pointers to pages with more details on the Web Object system and more, making it an excellent technical introduction to Zope as well. The Zope Documentation Project now has its mailing list up and running and is actively maintaining the Zope FAQ. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh
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