See also: last week's Development page.

Development tools

People into the whole "Perl vs. Python" thing might want to have a look at Python to Perl Conversions and More random Python observations from a Perl programmer, both posted by Tom Christiansen. Tom is, of course, a strong Perl proponent, but these documents make it clear that he has looked at Python in a serious way.

Java

Perl

"Algorithms with Perl" is a new book out from O'Reilly by Jon Orwant, Jarkko Hietaniemi & John Macdonald. For information on it, you can check out the press release, table of contents, bios, etc., or the cover graphic.

Python

Here's the latest Python-URL! with coverage of happenings in the Python community.

Also of interest: The Most Elegant Scripting Language You'll Probably Never Use by Dan Shafer on CNet's Builder.com. "Interestingly enough, when I started researching Python, one of the questions I had was related to its near-invisibility. Turns out I was only half right. It is largely invisible, but that's not because it isn't being used. Rather, it's because those who are using it aren't making a lot of noise about it."

Tcl/tk

Tcl/Tk 8.2 Final was announced on August 18th.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

Development projects

"Based on the intellectual-property climate of the world at the time the work began -- long before the virtues of Open Source were widely appreciated -- keeping this work under trade secret seemed both standard and prudent. Today the world is very different. In celebration of the success and vast human benefit of the Open Source movement, we are proud at last to be able to present to the world the technical ideas and methods on which we worked so hard for so long. "

Articles about the Xanadu release can be found on DaveNet and Byte's site.

Information on Electronic Design Automation for Linux has been updated on the LinuxEDA.com advocacy page. They've linked into portions of the Scientific Applications on Linux (SAL) page as well as starting a list of free software EDA projects. In addition, you can find information there about the linux-eda mailing list. Perhaps most interesting is their comprehensive set of links to press articles about Linux and EDA.

Promotion of open source Voice over IP (VoIP) internet telephony software is the goal of the http://www.openphone.org website. "We aim to phone-enable every computer on the planet. There is low-cost telephony hardware available that makes low-bandwidth, real telephone service possible over IP networks... we just need software!"

Apache

Gimp

Meanwhile, Gimp development news is a bit thin, since the gimp-user and gimp-devel mailing lists were recently "nuked" as a result of an upgrade on the server at the Experimental Computing Facility at UC Berkeley. No estimated time is known for their restoration. The Gimp Kernel Cousin still published on August 20th, but simply reports on changes to CVS. The Gimp News for August 24th still seems robust. It mentions Jon Peterson's review of the Gimp user interface, the addition of JPEG previewing and a couple of other items. It does also mention the damage to the mailing lists. Apparently no freeze date for Gimp will be set until after the lists are restored.

Gnome

Also, the announcement for the GNOME-ES web pages has gone out. GNOME-ES is a group which has set out to translate the gnome documentation into Spanish.

Havoc Pennington's Gnome Summary for August 15th-22nd can now be found nicely formatted on the web. From it, we learned of the Gnome Status Page, which tracks the status of major release goals. Note that it does not try to perform comprehensive tracking for all Gnome components, just the portion being worked on by the core team.

A File Manager Status Report has been issued by Ettore Perazzoli and more candidate window managers are showing up. "We'll see how it goes; you can never have too many window managers. :-)"

High Availability

Meanwhile, the links on the High Availability website have also been updated to include other commercial products. A Phase I TO-DO list has also been added, for anyone interested in a project to work on.

KDE

One good piece of news announced this week: Daniel M. Duley (aka Mosfet) has been hired by MandrakeSoft to work on KDE. He's also started a news site to cover the work he'll be doing. For more information, check out this interview with him done by Linux.com on August 18th. The interview covers the KDE 1.1.2 and 2.0 releases, plus some comments on Mandrake's new open development process.

Midgard

Mozilla

And Mozilla: success or failure? looks at whether Mozilla has been worthwhile or not. "There are certainly many more contributors outside of Netscape working on Mozilla today than there were in the first six months of the project. This phenomenon was largely due to the state of the Mozilla code at the time, and the lack of a clear architectural direction."

PHP

Slides from LinuxWorld tutorials on PHP given on August 21st at the O'Reilly Open Source conference by Jim Winstead and Rasmus Lerdorf have been made available.

Wine

Wine is an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix.

WorldForge

From this issue, we glean that WorldForge 0.2.0: The Demo has been released, which everyone is encouraged to try.

"The WorldForge Project is developing a complete system for massively multiplayer worlds."

xmms

Zope

"Zope is a free, Open Source application server and portal toolkit used for building high-performance, dynamic web sites."

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

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