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 Cobol Many people wrote in to very kindly point out errors in our Cobol coverage last week. For example, Pat Eyler mentioned that GNU Cobol has been under development for some time and the Cobol2C compiler has been available since 1997. He also mentioned the work being done to produce an ANSI 85 Cobol Compiler using the Sable Research Group's Compiler Compiler. More information on that product is available at http://acm.cs.umr.edu/~gnu-cobol/maillist/threads.html. You'll also see some letters to the editor that correct the inference in my last report that the only hope for Cobol was to translate the language into C. They do a better job than I of explaining why that inference is incorrect, so I'll encourage you to follow the postings there. Java The JDK 1.2.1 changes have been integrated into the primary code base, according to the JDK 1.2 status page. A release and corresponding diff files are expected out "in the near future". Humanoid 0.3.0 is an arcade game written entirely in Java and distributed as free software. An alternative desktop written in Java is something that Cliff Baeseman has started writing. It generated some interest on the java-linux list, along with this this followup with pointers to related projects. Perl A nice long report on yapc (Yet Another Perl Conference) is available at Perl News. Perl Poetry takes on a new meaning in Tom Christiansen's latest work, In Mountain View did Larry Wall. Thanks for brightening up this editor's late night work. Python The Friendly Snake is the title of this article (in Hungarian). Tcl/tk Two week's of TCL-URL! are available. Here is last week's edition and this week's edition. News about the forthcoming Tcl 8.2 release was posted by Paul Gardiner. The main thrust of the new release will be bug fixes, but it will contain several new major features (outlined in the posting). This year's Open Source Software Convention will be held in Monterey, California, from August 21st through 24th, with a specific Tcl/tk conference (along with Linux, Perl, Apache, Python and sendmail). Check this announcement for more details. A contest for the 1999 Open Source Convention Tcl Conference has been announced. They are looking for your best Tcl Tips and Tricks. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh	July 1, 1999

	Development projects The Open Source Writer's Group is calling for submissions for a mascot or logo to represent the project. Time for all you gimp gurus to fire up your systems and come up with something good. If that logo project doesn't inspire you, you can consider one for the Linux Counter project instead. They are also sponsoring a logo contest. Apache The Apache group has formed a corporation, called the "Apache Software Foundation," whose purpose is to "...provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Apache open-source software projects." Details may be found in their press release. Gnome Here is this week's GNOME summaryby Havoc Pennington. We're also pleased to report that Havoc Pennington has just announced the forthcoming publication of his book GTK+/Gnome Application Development. The book, to be published by New Riders, will be available under a free license that allows redistribution. Availability is set for around the beginning of September. Also reported this week, The Gnome Developer's Site is up and running. KDE According to the KDE news page, movement towards the release of KDE 1.1.2 is on schedule, with the libraries and core applications frozen as of June 27th. Michael Wilkinson at osOpinion.com has written an editorial on KDE and its graphical interface, which breaks down computer users into "Circles, Rectangles and Squares". From his descriptions, it is doubtful that any of the appellations will be appealing to the people so-named. Take a look, though; clearly he is trying to handle the issues in an even-handed manner. And for the rest of the KDE news, we turn you over to Navindra Umanee's KDE Development News for this week. Mozilla Will Netscape/Mozilla stay open source? It appears from this article that Sun is considering other possibilities. This is an issue to watch, particularly to see how licenses like the NPL and MPL really do at protecting the openness of developed source code compared to the GPL. Postfix Development snapshot 19990627 of postfix has been announced. Note that this release is planned to become the next official release of postfix, depending on how well it works for people. Qt Qt 2.0 was announced on June 25th. This is the long-promised version, with the Qt Free Edition released under the QPL Open Source license. It also includes over a year of development, many new features and substantial improvements. The document "Porting from Qt 1.x to Qt 2.0" in the Online Reference Documentation contains information on how to port an existing Qt 1.x-based program to Qt 2.0. Zope Here's this week's Zope summary from Amos Latteier. The big news this week, of course, was the release of ZCatalog, which provides a long-awaited and powerful searching capability to Zope sites. Those of you waiting for the Zope folks to get their "Portal Toolkit" out of the vaporware realm might want to check out the Zope Portal Toolkit Roadmap. It gives estimates as to when the various components will be released, with the last release happening sometime in the third quarter of the year. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh
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