See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

Browsers

New Mozilla roadmap posted (Mozilla.org). A new Mozilla Roadmap has been posted by Brendan Eich on Mozilla.org. This document gives a good idea of where the Mozilla project is headed in 2001.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter for December 21, 2000. The weekly Embedded Linux Newsletter from LinuxDevices.com has been published. Stories covered this past week included the fundamentals of real-time linux software design, an update on Indrema's linux-based set-top game console, and the launch of several embedded Linux training programs.

Hacking the iPAQ with Linux, for fun and profit (LinuxDevices). This article is the second in a LinuxDevices.com series by Jerry Epplin that explores Linux on PDAs and handheld devices. This installment looks at the contribution made by handhelds.org. "Before you attempt to use any of the add-on development toolkits, I recommend that you first install the handhelds.org environment, and become familiar with its resources. That's because the add-ons rely heavily on the handhelds.org environment as a base for many of their services. "

Office Applications

AbiWord 0.7.12 released. AbiWord 0.7.12 has been released. From the announcement: "This release represents a huge step forward for the AbiWord team. The new features, Gnome-integration, and bugfixes are too numerous to list here. If you've held off on using AbiWord because you felt that it was 'too unstable' or not well integrated with Gnome, this release might be right for you."

Bluefish 0.6 released. Version 0.6 of the Bluefish html editor is now available. This version has lots of bug fixes and new features.

Gnumeric 0.61 released. Gnumeric 0.61, aka the "your mother was a hamster" release, is now available. This version is released as a high priority upgrade with fixes for some problems with Cell Comments and Sheet Objects.

On the Desktop

People of KDE: Stefan Taferner. Stefan Taferner, co-author of KMail and a main contributor to central technologies in the KDE project, was the latest contributor profiled in the People Behind KDE series. "In the last edition for the Year 2000 of the People Behind KDE series, Tink introduces us to Stefan Taferner, co-author of KMail and a main contributor to central technologies in the KDE project. The new, festive appearance of Tink's site greets us with the photo of a happy Konqi".

Embedding external parts into KDE. The KPart component model is extended to allow embedding of any process within a KDE window, including GTK+ based applications like Mozilla, in this white paper.

KDE and GNOME Interoperability Advances (KDE dot News). KDE dot News discusses the release of the QGtkWidget and QGtkApplications classes, which facilitate the interoperability of KDE and Gnome applications. "QGtkWidget and QGtkApplications are classes for combining Qt and Gtk widgets in a single application. While this sort of thing doesn't make much sense under normal circumstances, it can be used to help KDE and GNOME applications interact better (think of adding GNOME control-center plugins to KControl and vice versa)."

Wei Zhong Oriental Language Environment. WZOLE, the Wei Zhong Oriental Language Environment, is available free of charge for non-commercial use. This is a package that renders Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text on a VGA screen (not running the X window system). WZOLE supports large character sets.

Printing Systems

LPR. Patrick Powell, developer of the LPRng Unix printing system has sent us an article entitled LPD is Dead that discusses Gerald Carter's article, LPD Must Die! Mr. Powell discusses the use of LPRng to achieve Mr. Carter's goals of featherweight printing, simple filters, security, and print status reporting.

Web-site Development

Zope Weekly News for December 21, 2000. The December 21, 2000 edition of the Zope Weekly News is available. Upcoming releases of Zope 2.2.5 and Zope 2.3 alpha are discussed. The Zope team will also have a presence at the Linux World Expo in New York on January 31 through February 2, 2001.

Le choix de Zope comme plateforme d'enseignement à distance. Jérôme Alet of the Faculté de Médecine de Nice has posted a lengthy study (in French) on the use of Zope in remote teaching applications. It is an extensive work, looking at Zope's capabilities and disadvantages (the main one being the well-known difficulty of mastering the system). Here's a Babelfish link to translate the front page into English, but using Babelfish on a document of this length is an unrewarding activity. (Thanks to Stéfane Fermigier).

Midgard 1.4 "Bifrost" released. A new release of the Midgard content management system has been announced. Midgard 1.4 "Bifrost" provides object-oriented handling for all data, introduces Repligard, a powerful XML-based replication system, and now sports multiple virtual database support, a new administration interface (Asgard) and more.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

Application Links
GIMP
Mozilla
Galeon
High Availability
ht://Dig
mnoGoSearch
MagicPoint
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

Open Source Code Collections
Berlios
Freshmeat
OpenSourceDirectory
Savannah
Le Serveur Libre
SourceForge
Sweetcode

Programming Languages

Java

JavaScript&DOM Factory Version 0.9. Version 0.9 of the JavaScript&DOM Factory is available. This is a tool that aids in the debugging of JavaScript and DOM code by providing object reference materials. The information is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Markup Languages

XHTML 1.0 reference with examples. Miloslav Nic has provided this XHTML 1.0 reference on zvon.org, the document describes the reformulation of HTML 4.0 as an XML 1.0 application.

Perl

Inline 0.30 released. Version 0.30 of Inline has been released. "Inline lets you write Perl subroutines in other programming languages like C. You don't need to compile anything. All the details are handled transparently so you can just run your Perl script like normal."

Python

Python-dev summary. Here is A.M. Kuchling's Python-dev summary for December 15. It covers a number of development topics, including unit testing, the proposed (and rejected) __findattr__ extension, and the progress of several enhancement proposals.

Jython 2.0 Alpha 3 released. A new release of Jython, the Java implementation of Python, has been announced. Numerous bugs have been fixed with this release.

High Profile Python Projects. Jerry Spicklemire posted this list of high-profile Python projects to the comp.language.python newsgroup. If you want to convince your boss that Python is good for serious projects, this list will certainly help.

Tcl/tk

Dr. Dobbs' Tcl-URL (Dec. 26th). The latest issue of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL is now available. Recent links of interest include a Tcl binding for the gdk-pixbuf image manipulation library and a new mailing list for TclPro contributors.

Tk: The Forgotten Language (Linux.com). Linux.com's Mark Stone discusses Tcl/Tk and discusses the process of writing a graphical network configuration utility.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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