See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

The LI18NUX2000 Globalization Specification has been released by the Free Standards Group. This specification is aimed toward standardizing the internationalization features of Linux distributions; it "includes the best of globalization functionality that commercial UNIX systems have successfully implemented and compliments the functionality with extensions that will make Linux Internationalization comprehensive for all national and local requirements." The standard also prescribes practices for programmers who want to write truly portable, internationalized code.

The standard itself can be found on the LI18NUX site. A quick glance reveals an immediate obstacle to adoption: it looks like the output of standards committees everywhere. It will take a dedicated programmer, well equipped with caffeine, to get through it.

But that is the nature of the beast. Linux is very much an international system, and it is good practice to code with a whole world full of users in mind. LI18NUX has taken a step toward showing how best to support the world, and that is a good and useful thing.

Case study: Porting DB2 to Linux. IBM has put up an article on its DeveloperWorks site detailing how the port of the DB2 database to Linux was done. "As is the case with many Linux projects, the original DB2 port was done when no one was looking. Way back at the end of 1997, two Linux fans on the IBM DB2 project team, Leo Comitale and Peeter Joot, copied the DB2 source code tree to their desktop Linux boxes and worked on compiling it in their spare time." Worth a read.

Browsers

Mozilla Developer Meeting and Dinner, Aug 18, 2000. Alphanumerica is sponsoring the second Mozilla Developer Meeting at the Netscape campus in Mountain View, California on August 18, 2000. The Mozilla Developer Day Dinner 2000 is being held afterwards in Mountain View. An RSVP is requested.

Databases

PostgreSQL benchmark results. Great Bridge LLC has issued this press release claiming that PostgreSQL has not only beat two commercial databases in a set of benchmark tests, but that it stomped MySQL and InterBase as well. "The two industry leaders cannot be mentioned by name because their restrictive licensing agreements prohibit anyone who buys their closed source products from publishing their company names in benchmark testing results without the companies' prior approval."

Games

Red Hat and Indrema establish Linux distribution for gaming. Indrema and Red Hat have announced an alliance to jointly manage a distribution called "DV Linux", which will be oriented toward gaming and home entertainment applications. "The Red Hat and Indrema partnership will ensure that a universal standard for next-generation video game development emerges to avoid fragmentation in the various Open Source multimedia initiatives."

Indrema has also announced a deal with Collab.Net to build the "Indrema Developer Network." And if that weren't enough, there is also a deal with Linuxcare to provide support for game developers.

bombermaze 0.5.1 released. Bombermaze is a Bomberman clone for Gnome that involves running around in a square grid maze, dropping bombs, and collecting power-ups.

Interoperability

Wine Weekly News for Aug 14, 2000. This week's Wine Weekly News is out. Topics include numerous bug fixes and dealing with wininit.ini.

Office Applications

Sketch 0.6.8 released. Sketch 0.6.8 is a general purpose vector drawing program written in Python. Sketch can import and export EPS format files. Sketch is released under the GPL license.

VINE integrates mail and news into VI. If you are tired of the VI editor's small memory footprint and fast execution speed, check out VINE, the Vim Integrated News and Email project. Kidding aside, this might be a useful addition for the VI die-hards. (Found on NTKnow - where else do you look for that sort of thing?).

On the Desktop

Selecting GTK+ Widgets for a Simple Application (Linux Programming). Linux Programming has run this article by Donna S. Martin on selecting GTK+ widgets. The article takes you through the process of finding the right GTK widgets and assembling them into a working program.

QTCUPS-0.2 released. A new release of QTCUPS has been released. QTCUPS gives Qt applications a common printer interface GUI to the CUPS (Common Unix Print System) package. CUPS is an improved Unix network printing system and version 1.1.2 has recently been released.

The Quanta HTML Editor (Linux Gazette). The Linux Gazette takes a look at the Quanta HTML editor for KDE. "There has been some time since I looked at Quanta and I must admit to being a bit impressed at the progress of the editor.All in all Quanta is a very nice HTML editor, very powerfull but with a major bug for non-English users that rely on extended ASCII for their webpages. I've also found somewhat more minor irritants in Quanta than when using Bluefish."

Web-site Development

ZopeLDAP 1.0b4 / 1.0b4.1 patch. A new patch is available for ZopeLDAP that improves LDAP methods with Zope 2.2.

Zope EventFolder 1.0 (final) release. A final release of the Zope EventFolder has been announced. EventFolder implements a calendar of events for Zope based web sites.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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

More Information
AppWatch
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

Development tools

Java

IBM releases Jikes Compiler as open-source. IBM has announced that the Jikes Java compiler project is now available as an open-source project. It's now licensed under the OSI-approved IBM Public License.

JavaML A markup language for Java source code (IBM). IBM's developer works has run this article on JavaML. "The classical plain-text representation of source code is convenient for programmers but requires parsing to uncover the deep structure of the program. While sophisticated software tools parse source code to gain access to the program's structure, many lightweight programming aids such as grep rely instead on only the lexical structure of source code. I describe a new XML application that provides an alternative representation of Java source code. This XML-based representation, called JavaML, is more natural for tools and permits easy specification of numerous software-engineering analyses by leveraging the abundance of XML tools and techniques. A robust converter built with the Jikes Java compiler framework translates from the classical Java source code representation to JavaML, and an XSLT stylesheet converts from JavaML back into the classical textual form."

Perl

Perl 5.7.0 Release Imminent (Use Perl). Perl pumpking Jarkko Hietaniemi will be releasing Perl 5.7.0 (a development release) in the next few days.

Python

Python-URL for August 15. Here is Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for August 14. Check it out for the latest in Python development activity, including the release of Quixote 0.002 and the new location of the Daily Python-URL.

Python 1.6b1 released under a new license (O'Reilly). The latest release of Python has been released under a new license. "So negotiations began with Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, and Richard Stallman in attendance. The negotiations were successful, and Python 1.6b1 was released with the new and improved CNRI license on August 4th."

Latest additions to Python FAQTS. The latest additions to the Python FAQTS have been released. Integrating Python into a FORTRAN program is discussed among other things.

Call for participation - IDLE. There has been a call for participation for the IDLE project. A separate fork has been created at sourceforge.net.

Smalltalk

Newsgroup comp.lang.smalltalk.advocacy created. A new newsgroup, comp.lang.smalltalk.advocacy has passed the vote and will be created.

IBM announces VisualAge Smalltalk 5.5. IBM has announced the new version 5.5 release of VisualAge Smalltalk. New features include XML support and enhanced Java integration.

Tcl/tk

This week's Tcl-URL. Here is the Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for August 14 with the latest in Tcl/Tk development news.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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