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See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects


Build a mystery Linux application in one day. Vic Metcalf is putting together a demonstration project set to happen at the Network World Live conference on October 26 and 27. Essentially, a group of hackers will get locked into a booth and will have a day to bash out an interesting Linux application - the nature of which will remain unknown until the project starts. "We'll be building something for non-technical people, it will have a GUI, and it will use a database. Other than that participants won't know what the project is until the day of the show. By the end of the day we hope to have RPMs, DEBs and tar-balls available for download." Interested hackers are being sought to participate; signups can be done from the web site.

Linux development survey. Some folks at the University of Michigan are doing a study of how open source software development works, with particular attention to communications patterns. They have put up a survey that they would like for people - especially those involved in development - to fill out. If you feel like helping them out, please head on over and answer a few questions.

Embedded Linux

Another site on embedded linux, which we haven't mentioned in a while, is linux-embedded.com, supported by Linux-Mandrake and hosting the LEM distribution.

Gnome

The Gnome Summary for October 20th has been published, courtesy of Havoc Pennington. Apparently it has been a busy week, with over forty new or updated applications.

Elliot Lee is interviewed by linux.com. Elliot is best known for his CORBA expertise and his work on the ORBit CORBA implementation. The interview focuses in on the features of Gnome October, mentioning both user and developer related goodies, but also touches on some issues for later releases, like Bonobo.

Speaking of October Gnome, availability for it has been announced for FreeBSD as well.

Midgard

Here is the latest summary of developments with the Midgard web application server, by Henri Bergius. A beta of Midgard 2.0 is apparently expected out in early November.

The Midgard Workshop was held and had eleven participants. It included training, for which the slides have been made available.

Mozilla

ComputerWorld on Mozilla problems. ComputerWorld has run a negative article about the Mozilla project. "Open-source development hasn't helped Netscape keep the Navigator browser alive, and it may not be an effective way for any commercial company to manage product development. It is similar to a free lunch, and we know what those are worth."

As might be expected, the article didn't go down very well with the Mozilla developer community. Mike Shaver, Mozilla "developer and evangelist", wrote this response. "It is a source of some considerable pride that Mozilla -- and Netscape along with it, make no mistake -- is taking the time to Do It Right (we hope!). We could surely have released a Mozilla 5.0 based on the Classic code by now, but it wouldn't have met our users' needs, and wouldn't have satisfied our developers' goals for a modular, standards-compliant, performant and portable browser and ``application platform''."

Mozilla Status. The Mozilla status page is unexciting this week, containing fairly normal status reports on various projects such as Mail/News.

Wine

The Wine Weekly News for this week records primarily bug fixes over the past week, plus some improvements in the area of internationalisation. Development discussions focused on mouse wheel support and automatic detection of the Windows version required to run a specific binary.

YAMS

YAMS (Yet Another Merchant System) is a GPL'd e-commerce package from screamdesign.com. They've announced version 0.5.2 of their package this week which includes improved international shipping suppport and better ability to tie parcel tracking to orders.

Zope

The Zope Weekly News for October 20th is out. It mentions that Martijn Pieters will be giving a talk on Zope in the Netherlands at the Dutch Unix Users Group (NLUUG).

An experimental Banner Ad product by Lalo Martins was also announced.

The ZBook project issued a status report this week. The project is moving along, but is very activly searching for collaborators to help out. Writers, graphic designers, programmers, and readers are all very much in demand. Please have a look if you think you might be able to help them out.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh


October 21, 1999


Project Links
EmbedLinux.net
EMLAB
linux-embedded.com
Gnome
High Availability
ht://Dig
KDE
MagicPoint
Midgard
Mozilla
PHP
YAMS
Wine
Zope

More Information
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

   

 

Development tools


Java

InfoWorld reports on IBM, Sun's Java plans. Infoworld gave some very optimistic reports on upcoming Java support:
At the Java Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif., IBM will announce the free general availability of a Java Software Developer's Kit 1.18-compliant Java virtual machine (JVM) for the Linux operating system, with performance that exceeds that of JVMs running on Windows NT, IBM officials said.

Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems is preparing to release in early 2000 a Java2-compliant JVM for Linux that brings the performance, functions, and Java HotSpot features of the latest Java specifications to the Linux community, according to sources close to Sun Microsystems.

Questions were brought up on Slashdot regarding the Blackdown team's involvement in the upcoming official Sun JVM. Only time will tell, but the article mentions, "Sun is also working with the Blackdown Porting Group to bring Java2 to Linux. "

IBM releases Java Development Kit 1.1.8. IBM has announced the release of version 1.1.8 of its Java Development Kit for Linux. This version features improved performance, "as fast as Windows." It is freely downloadable from IBM's site.

Perl

Perl 5.6 beta on the way. Perl News reports on progress towards the Perl 5.6 beta, starting with the latest 5.005_62 release.

Python

This week's Python-URL. This week's Dr. Dobb's Python-URL is out, full of good Python development information, as always.

Also, for Python folks, David Beazley's Essential Python Reference, published by New Riders, was scheduled for released October 19th.

Tcl/tk

Tcl-URL!. Dr. Dobbs' Tcl-URL! for this week is available.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

 
 

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