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See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects


OpenFlow 0.2 released. OpenFlow is an ambitious project which is intended to handle all aspects of document management; its initial target user is the Italian government, but it could clearly be more widely used than that. Document management in its full glory involves a lot of separate tasks, from simple storage through to process management, authentication, digital signatures, etc. OpenFlow intends to handle all of that, but this release concentrates on getting the process repository going.

OpenFlow is basing its work on Zope, and it is all free software. More information can be found on the SourceForge project page, and, in Italian, the OpenFlow home page. An English-language page is under construction here, but is still missing most of the information.

Open source development study. A team at the University of Kiel (Germany) is conducting a research project on the open source development process. "The goal of our study is to scientifically analyze the processes involved in Linux development from a social science perspective. This includes, but is not limited to, the investigation of the motivation of contributors (e.g. fun, cognitive challenge, using worldwide resources for problem solving, development of new skills, etc.) and success factors of the project (e.g. mutual trust, norms in the cooperation, feedback processes, organization of the projects, decision procedures, etc.)."

They have put up a questionnaire, with the hopes that open source users and developers will provide them with some information. They have some goodies from SuSE to give away, and all of their results will be publicly available. If you've got a moment, please consider giving these folks a hand.

The Universal Source Package (Freshmeat). Here's a Freshmeat editorial claiming that current package managers are inadequate and proposing a way to fix things up. "The solution to the problem seems to be to extend the autoconf approach to package systems. This requires providing the necessary tools, standards, and guidelines to software and/or package authors to enable a single source package to produce a wide variety of binary packages for the various platforms and packaging systems."

Software Carpentry design competition news. Here's the latest news from the Software Carpentry design competition. Among other things, the winners of the competition will be invited to speak at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Monterey this summer, more prizes have been donated, and the web site has been reworked.

Browsers

Mozilla Dreams (Salon). Here's an article in Salon that looks forward - with excitement - to the upcoming Mozilla releases. "The buzz about the increasing applicability of the Mozilla modules may also be one reason why, according to Mozilla staffers, a rising tide of outside developers is beginning to contribute significantly to the project."

Mozilla Status. Here is this week's Mozilla Status.

Databases

InterBase proves its mettle (ZDNet). ZDNet compares InterBase and PostreSQL. "...PostgreSQL's shared cache-something InterBase lacks in its Linux version-really paid off for it in tests where we had a high number of concurrent users, as is common in client/server environments. In this test, PostgreSQL's maximum throughput was almost three times faster than InterBase's."

Education

SEUL/edu Linux in Education report. The SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report for this week is out. It includes discussion of the Consolidated Gradebook Project and "Debian Jr." - an effort to make a child-friendly version of the Debian distribution.

Linux For Kids. A review of the Gutenberg Project was posted this week, along with a link to Bill Kendrick's CircusLinux game.

Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News. This week's edition of the AbiWord Weekly News has a new editor, Sam TH. This new, more formal edition covers the latest development news, burgeoning mailling lists and a new Project of the Week.

Lyx Development News. Lyx Development News came in for the first time this week. Lyx is an advanced open-source document processor based on LaTex. "It is called a "document processor" because, unlike standard word processors, LyX encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents not their appearance." The news this week indicates that they are in the process of changing their development model and plan on releasing frequent, stable releases in the future, rather than maintaining a separate development and stable tree.

On the Desktop

GNOME Summary for February 2-10. Here is Havoc Pennington's GNOME Summary for February 2-10. It looks like both Pango and Nautilus are making great progress. Pango provides an infrastructure for "dealing with and displaying the full range of languages supported by Unicode". Nautilus is the new graphical shell and file manager under development.

Gnome Users And Developers Conference (GUADEC). We have been sent some information about the upcoming Gnome Users And Developers Conference (GUADEC), March 16, 17, 18 in Paris, France.

KDE Component Model demonstation. Mosfet has posted a picture of Kword being used to display a document within Konqueror, the KDE2 browser, as an example of the functionality of the portions of KDE that have been ported to the new component model system.

Website Development

Zope Weekly News (Feb 16th). This week's edition of the Zope Weekly Newsis out. Top items this week include a new Zope tutorial in Portuguese plus a variety of new products and HOW-TOs.

Midgard Weekly Summary (Feb. 16th). This week's Midgard Weekly Summarytracks the progress of the latest beta release and discusses the need to add a good calendaring system to Midgard.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh


February 17, 2000


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Development tools


IBM DeveloperWorks on Ruby. IBM's DeveloperWorks site has put up a lengthy article about the Ruby programming language, which compares it with Python and Perl. There is also an interview with Ruby's creator. "Ruby has been gaining popularity over the past few years, especially in Japan, where it was born and conceived. Its features, like Perl's, are designed to process text files and complete systems management tasks. Ruby is highly portable and easily customized, but primarily draws users because of its purity and readability." (Thanks to Dave Finton).

A Perl Hacker in the Land of Python (Byte). Here is a lengthy article by Byte's Jon Udell comparing Perl and Python. As such comparisons go, this one seems relatively fair and complete - recommended reading. "For Perl, OOP was a bolt-on, not a built-in. Objects didn't arrive until the fifth incarnation of Perl. By contrast, OOP was built in to Python, not bolted on. That said, I'm not inclined to make as much of this point as some people do. Perl's object-orientation, though it has more of a blue-collar feel to it than Python's, can certainly get the job done." (Found in Portalux News).

Java

Java 2 SDK production release from Sun. The "production release" of the Java 2 SDK for Linux has been released by Sun. It is freely downloadable, but not redistributable or in any other way "free." Sun has at least gotten one thing right this time around: "Significant contributions were made to J2SE for Linux by the Blackdown Java-Linux porting team. The Blackdown Java-Linux porting team is a non-profit group of enthusiastic Java technology and Linux developers who have led the efforts to port various JDKs and J2SE releases to Linux. Sun continues to support the efforts of the Blackdown team."

The page also notes that Caldera Systems will be distributing this product with the OpenLinux distribution.

"Javascript Event Handlers" is the title of an article on event handlers are and how to utilize them.

Perl

Perlbugtron gets a facelift. The Perl bug database has been updated and improved by Richard Foley, and the source code for it has been made available.

Perlmonth #9 available. The ninth issue of Perlmonth is now available, with six articles on a range of Perl programming topics.

Perl survey by O'Reilly. Apparently, someone declared this survey week and didn't tell us. Here's a link to O'Reilly's perl survey.

Python

Proceedings. Proceedings from the January Python Conference are now available.

This week's Python-URL. Here is this week's Dr. Dobb's Python-URL. It contains pointers to more coverage of last month's Python conference, and a lot of other good stuff.

PySol 3.4. A new version of PySol, a collection of over 163 solitaire card games, has been announced.

IDLE 0.5 released. Version 0.5 of Guido's IDLE Python development environment has been released. This is the first release in some months, and it contains a number of interesting new features.

Tcl/tk

Tcl-URL!. This week's Tcl-URL! announces Tcl/Tk 8.3.0 and the debut of the Tcl Developer Xchange, providing read access to several of the bug databases.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

 
 

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