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 An updated Java 1.2 Status Page is now available at http://www.blackdown.org/java-linux/jdk1.2-status/. The new page is "a one-stop collection of all of the information about what's going on with the Blackdown Java 2 ports." Spartan in nature, more updates are promised. Links from the new page include one to a list of known bugs and workarounds. The JCK Status page shows no new information on the x86 port, but clear progress is being reported for the PowerPC and 68K ports. In addition, the page has been extended to report on progress working with or without the JIT and with green or native threads, presumably in preparation for updating us on those areas as success is reported. The Blackdown team has been licensed to have access to the Java Advanged Imaging source code according to the Java Advanced Imaging Port Status, but they have not yet received the source code. Perl The Perl Journal on-line, available at http://www.tpj.com, is now controlled by EarthWeb, a company that calls itself the "business-to-business IT hub of the IT industry". A press release to explain the site transition was promised for this week but has not yet been seen. Meanwhile, the new site provides access articles from the Perl Journal only to subscribers. Other information previously available from the site, such as back issues, the jobs board, contributor information, and sample code, are, at least currently, not available. A comment on the closure of the Perl Institute has come from Brian D. Foy, representing the Perl Mongers, to whom the Perl Institute has left their legacy of projects and the perl.org domain. No major changes are planned in the near future and comments and concerns are being requested. The posting drew little comment on comp.lang.perl.misc, other than this note from Uri Guttman, which encourages the Perl Mongers to make the perl.org site a dynamic portal for the Perl community. The Perl-XML FAQ version 1.1 contains information on using and manipulating XML with Perl and is available at this address. The Perl Index Project seeks to provide a place where someone can look up a language construct or concept and get references linked to many different resources across the Internet. This announcement provides a large amount of detailed information and a link to the Perl Index homepage. Python The JPython Website has been redesigned and is now located at http://www.jpython.org, using the newly registered domain name. Here is the official announcement for the new domain and page. It also contains a collection of other tidbits about JPython. From this new page, we also heard about JPython's new license, which they believe is Open Source Definition compliant, though it is not officially certified as such. There are actually two new JPython distributions, one of which is released under the above-mentioned free license, and the other, containing a proprietary regular expression library, under a restricted license. Tcl/tk Tcl 8.1 has been released. The announcement mentions three key new features in 8.1: full unicode support and a message catalog for internationalization, thread-safety for Tcl and Tk and a new regular expression package from Henry Spencer. This week's Tcl-URL! is now available. This is the first edition from their new team member, Matt Newman. It looks like an excellent start! Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh	May 6, 1999

	Development projects Qt, Harmony or wxWindows? If you've been debating the relative merits of these cross-platform development libraries, you might want to take a gander at this analysis from Matt Heck. He provides insight on the process his company went through as they looked first at Qt, then Harmony and finally wxWindows, on which they've happily settled. "The reality is that if you are choosing between Qt and wxWindows, I don't see how you can make a bad choice if you don't care about the license and you're only working under Linux. They're both wonderful libraries with hundreds-- maybe thousands-- of enthusiastic supporters. If you have the time, you should try looking at some of the sample applications of both. wxWindows probably has a steeper learning curve than Qt, but it's pretty short once you get used to the event system. Both of them will get you a professional looking application on at least two platforms. With wxWindows, though, I always know exactly what I can do: whatever I want to." (Thanks to Alexander V. Voinov). AbiSuite AbiSource is developing an open-source office suite called AbiSuite, which will run on Linux systems, as well as Windows and other platforms. GNU Libtool 1.3 has been released (at long last). The Libtool team announced the new version on Thursday, April 29th. ht://Dig Version 3.1.2 of ht://Dig was released last week. It apparently fixes a number of bugs and is highly recommended for production servers. KDE The KDE folks have put out a press release announcing their 1.1.1 release. Navindra Umanee kindly provided us with the following KDE development reports: An exciting development this week came when Preston Brown reinitiateddiscussions on standardizing desktop entry files between the KDE and GNOME projects. A preliminary draft of the proposed standard is available. Now that KDE 1.1.1 has been released, many discussions are under way for what's in store for KDE 2.0. Waldo Bastian has drafted a new KDE roadmap and release schedule, whilst others are busy discussing current flaws and future improvements. Many core applications such as KWM, KFM and kpanel are being redesigned and rewritten based on the experience gained from the previous versions. Kurt Granroth pointed out that KDE is not multiple-session friendly for a single user and proposed a solution. Preston Brown announcedhis future plans for the next generation of KOrganizer and includes a call for developers. Preston also voiced concern on memory consumption in KDE 2.0 with the ensuing discussion leading to many ideas for improvements. Another thread concerning which mp3 player to include in kde-multimedia has lead to discussions of more generic ways of handling multimedia such as better use of kmedia and multimedia APIs. Wine The Wine HOWTO has been updated to version 0.7. It contains information on the new dll loading structure, changes to the wine.conf file and some more installation hints and tips. x86emu The x86emu project has been revived. Leadership of the project has changed hands, according to Kendall Bennett, the new project leader. David Mosberger-Tang, the former project leader, will continue to be involved. The x86emu project is developing a GPL'ed x86 real mode emulator that can be compiled and used with the Linux MILO loader for DEC Alpha systems. Zope A preview release of Zope-1.11 has been announced. Lots of new features have been added to the Zope platform, including WebDAV support, a new class extension structure, and the bundling of ZServer. The Zope Weekly News contains additional links to information about the new release. In addition, it points out a mention of Zope in an InfoWorld article about WebDAV. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh
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