See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

Netscape and ActiveState sign deal. Netscape and ActiveState have announced a deal where they will cooperate on their development projects. ActiveState gets Javascript, while ActiveState will donate its Python and Perl work to the Mozilla project. Soon you'll be able to script your browser in Python.

Add to that ActiveState's choice of Mozilla as a cross platform development framework for Komodo, its Perl and Python integrated development environment (IDE). This endorsement has made a lot of Mozilla supporters happy. The benefits that led ActiveState to choose Mozilla were the facts that it is open source, cross platform , standards compliant and exemplifies a next generation, component architecture.

MDC-XSL version 0.1. Minoru Development Corporation has announced the release of MDC-XSL, an XML to HTML converter, under the GPL v2. "MDC-XSL is written in C++ making it highly portable and easily linked directly into other applications. It is the first implementation of XSL technology to be designed specifically as an add-in to other applications."

O'Reilly to open source X books?. Bruce Perens reports on a conversation with Tim O'Reilly wherein Tim says that he would be willing to open-source the classic series of X Window System books. What's needed is somebody to put some effort into updating and preparing them for distribution. "Suppose some knowledgeable author wrote a grant proposal to pay enough to maintain the documents for another 5 or 10 years and keep them online?"

Browsers

Creating a Mozilla Skin, Pt. 1 (MozillaZine ChromeZone). Chris Nelson, MozillaZine editor, has published the first installment of a nine-part series on building your own Mozilla skin.

O'Reilly's Mozilla DevCenter. O'Reilly opened their Mozilla DevCenter on May 19th.

Databases

Interbase 6.0beta news. Interbase is keeping an active list of development tidbits for its upcoming 6.0beta release (under an open source license).

Education

SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report. This week's SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report is out. It includes a quick report from LinuxCanada and a bunch of other education-related stuff.

Games

Installation test of Linux games. zocks.de has an article (in German) on installing Linux games. Here's a Babelfish translation.

Merchant Empires beta test. Merchant Empires is setting up a beta test for June 10th and is looking for players. Contact Bryan Willett if you are interested.

Interoperability

Kernel Cousin: Samba (May 18th). The latest Kernel Cousin: Samba is out. It discusses the Microsoft Kerberos issue and its impact on Samba development, finishing up with this editor note: "[If any of you are like us and a lot of that was a bit over your heads, just nod quietly and agree with Chris Hertel: "What pleases me most about this conversation is that we seem to have some very knowledgeable folks on the list and that there is progress being made. Time for me to go into learn mode. Thanks everyone!"]"

Wine Weekly News (May 23). This week's Wine Weekly News reports on the latest Wine development and discussions on the Wine mailing list, including OpenGL optimization and MFC compilation (and license change).

Networking

OpenNMS Update (May 23). The latest update from the OpenNMS network management project is now available. It seems they've finally decided to work with a relational database system (RDBMS).

Bind 9.0 b3 released. Developers working with IPv6 or DNSSEC may want to check out the latest beta release of bind. At least one more beta release is expected before a release candidate for bind 9.0 is seen.

OpenNMS and North Carolina State University announce collaboration. On May 2nd, OpenNMS and North Carolina State University (NCSU) announced a collaboration. NCSU will be deploying the OpenNMS open source network management software on their campus network across several different platforms. "'We have spent months configuring our legacy management systems -- and we still are unable to generate many of the reports we need to satisfy our service level agreements. With OpenNMS, we can get customizable shareware and focus our limited resources on providing the responsiveness and service that our customers want,' said Emer."

Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News. This week's AbiWord Weekly News is out.

Siag Office 3.3.6. Colour printing for European users and updated German and Danish translations are the major points in this minor release.

On the Desktop

Helix GNOME packages for Debian. The long wait is over: a set of Helix GNOME packages for the Debian distribution has been released.

Writing Gnome Panel Applets (LinuxDev.Net). Part I and Part II of the LinuxDev.net series on writing GNOME panel applets are now available.

Web site Development

Midgard Weekly Summary (#39). The Midgard Weekly Summary provides news and information from the Midgard web development platform project. Midgard is a PHP-based open source project. This week, CodeSnippet has been added to the CVS archive, mail archives have been added to the web site and the two-day Midgard Developers Meeting has been scheduled for June 18-19th, 2000 in Karlskrona, Sweden.

Zope Weekly News (May 23). This week's Zope Weekly Newscovers the new Zope 2.2 alpha release and links to discussions about Zope and Law Office information, Pyro and security issues.

DocBook V4.0 released. DocBook V4.0 and DocBook XML 4.0 have been released. "DocBook is an SGML DTD maintained by the DocBook Technical Committee of OASIS. It is particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software (though it is by no means limited to these applications)." For more information on DocBook, check their description page, which also contains a brief history of DocBook.

May Netcraft Survey. According to the May Netcraft survey, Apache is still the predominant web server at 60.4% of the market, but has lost approximately 1% of its lead. Microsoft was also down, but only slightly. (Thanks to Fabian Wauthier).

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

Project Links
Gnome
High Availability
ht://Dig
KDE
MagicPoint
Midgard
Mozilla
YAMS
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

More Information
AppWatch
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

Development tools

C

GDB 5.0 and Insight 5.0 released. GDB 5.0, a new release of the GNU debugger, and Insight 5.0, a graphical interface to GDB, have been announced. C++ support has been enhanced in the new GDB and new configurations have been added for the ARM and PowerPC platforms.

[Editor note: the link to the Insight announcement on Appwatch is unstable. In case it does not work when you try it, here is the Insight homepage].

Java

Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition is Linux Ready. Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition is Linux Ready, announces this java.sun.com article. "'In reality, it was very easy to make the port,' says Ken Saks, a member of Sun's J2EE technology team. 'It was surprising just how trivial it was to get J2EE technology-based applications to run in the Linux environment.'"

Perl

perl5-porters (15-21 May 2000). The latest summary from the perl5-porters mailing list is now available. Check it out for hints as to future perl development directions, including a couple of slightly different efforts to support perl on the Palm Pilot.

The Perl Journal Vol. 5, No. 1. Perl News reports on the latest issue of The Perl Journal.

PHP

PHP 4.0 released. Here is the announcement for the long-awaited PHP 4.0 release. Source for PHP 4 for Linux is now available from the PHP web-site. For more information on this release, check our front page coverage.

Python

This week's Python-URL. Here is this week's Dr. Dobb's Python-URL, with the latest from the Python development world. Among other things, Python has now moved to SourceForge.

What They're Saying About...The Python Open-Source Language (Software Development). Software Development has collected together opinions from authors, developers and the media on Python and put them together in this short feature article. "'Python is almost bearable (in comparison to either C++ or Java).' -Kent Beck, Smalltalk enthusiast, quoted by Larry Constantine at SD 2000." (From Daily Python-URL).

Phil Thompson puts Python and Qt together (SunWorld). Cameron Laird and Boudewijn Rempt profile Phil Thompson, author of PyQt, in this article. "Perhaps it wasn't so surprising. Thompson's career suggests he's comfortable taking technologies to places neither he nor they have been before. In that earlier case, his original intent was to freshen a small application he wrote to manage his household finances. Having written it in C for GEM and DOS, by the late '90s he wanted a Qt-based graphical user interface (GUI) for it. "

Tcl/tk

Dr Dobbs' Tcl-URL (May 23). This week's edition addresses nesting instincts and who should take out the garbage.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

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