See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

Browsers

Standardizing a BROWSER environment variable. Eric Raymond is promoting the use of a new environment variable, BROWSER, to complement the existing PAGER, MAILER, and EDITOR variables. This effort is being tested as an experiment in hacking social systems.

The Browser War: Nobody's fault but yours. Scott Andrew presents some interesting ideas on web applications versus web pages and how to avoid domination of new web standards by a single corporation: "Netscape 6, Mozilla, Opera -- any browser that supports DOM/CSS -- should be regarded as application browsers. This is different than a web browser. A web browser is designed to view pages on the Web. An application browser is specialized. It's made for working with web applications."

Galeon 0.9 pre3 available. Version 0.9 pre3 of the Galeon Browser is available on Sourceforge. Enhancements in this version include open url dialog autocompletion support, customization options for tabbed browsing, session saving, and a lot of bugfixes

Education

GGradebook 0.91 (Ofset). Version 0.91 of GGradebook, a gradebook program that runs under GNOME, is now available.

Electronics

Xcircuit 2.2.0. Version 2.2.0 of the Xcircuit schematic drawing program is available as a stable release. This version has pcb compatible netlist file outputs, a whole new set of menus, circuit elements with electrical parameters, and more.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter for Jan. 25, 2001 (LinuxDevices.com). Rick Lehrbaum has posted the latest edition of the Embedded Linux Newsletter to the LinuxDevices.com site. Highlights include a review of the results from last year Embedded Linux Survey and Lineo's trio of Embedix SDK advancements.

Games

Atlas C++ 0.40 released. A new, stable release of Atlas C++, version 0.40, has been released. Atlas C++ is a library that implements the Atlas object-oriented protocol for interprocess communications, it is a key component of the WorldForge game architecture. See the Atlas Tutorial for more information on the Atlas protocol.

Interoperability

Wine Weekly News for January 29, 2001. Issue 80 of the Wine Weekly News is available. Check it out for the latest developments in the Wine world.

Office Applications

Eazel releases Nautilus Preview 3. As seen on the GNOME news site: Eazel has released the third and final preview version of its Nautilus desktop. Warning, the installation takes a 32MB bite out of your hard drive and may take a small eternity to download on a slow link.

GNOME Office page gets a facelift. The GNOME Office meta-project's web page has had a face lift. The new page offers a quick description of the various GNOME Office components as well as links to the project web pages. (Thanks to David Wheeler)

The Gmail email client. Robert Bernstein writes about Gmail in an Earthweb article. " An MUA (Mail User Agent) featuring an innovative approach to email message storage is now under development, and it bodes well for those email users who number their messages in the thousands. Gmail (http://gmail.linuxpower.org/), the brainchild of Wayne Schuller, a young Australian programmer, uses the MySQL database server, and retrieves, sorts and displays messages via SQL, the well known 'Structured Query Language.'"

ANNOUNCE: Mr Project (Gnotices). A new project management application known as Mr Project has been announced. "Mr Project is a project management program that can help build project plans, and track the progress of a project."

On the Desktop

The People behind KDE: Wolfram Diestel. This week's People Behind KDE features an interview of Wolfram Diestel, a rather humorous picture is included.

New KDE Tutorials. Several new and/or improved KDE tutorials have been published, Richard Moore has written one on Kpart Plugins for KDE2, and Antonio Larrosa Jimènez has updated his info on developing KDE2 applications.

A developer's perspective on the GPLing of Qt (LinuxDevices.com). LinuxDevices.com reopens the whole Qt licensing debate. "Regardless of whether you accept this 'infant industry' justification for initially releasing software under proprietary licenses, from a software developer's point of view it now seems hard to improve upon Trolltech's licensing."

Berlin: A replacement for X? (LinuxToday). LinuxToday has posted a discussion by "Hawkeyes" that discusses Berlin, an alternative to the X window system. "Many people complain about the X-windows standard. It's clearly not the perfect way to bring a graphical user interface to Linux, and it's been around for such a long time. Recently XFree86 has become hardware accelerated, in version 4.0.x, but in many ways it is still dragging user interface designers down. The lack of a single uniform toolkit, lack of support for alpha transparency and sluggish/heavy network transparency have always been problems in X." Check out the Berlin web site as well.

Talking with John Heard of Sun about GNOME. LinuxPower talks with John Heard about Sun's membership in the GNOME Foundation.

Christian: I would guess that partaking in free software development needs a different workform than in-house development. What measures are being put in place to ensure real engagement with the community on issues instead of needing to wait for slow bureaucratic wrangling before announcing contributions ?

John Heard: This is an extremely important consideration for us at Sun. We have been particularly focused upon considering our normal "workform" and seeing how it needs to be modified to achieve the right interactions with the communities we have become involved with. I personally believe that this is a very valuable path upon which we in Sun are able to evolve our software development practices, but just as importantly to also bring valuable contributions towards the onwards co-evolving of the open source community development "workform". The core principle which is starting to develop between Sun and community is that of communication. I think you can already see that numerous members of Sun's technical and marketing staff are beginning to participate more freely. We have encouraged our teams to "lurk" for a while on the lists to gain familiarity with the practices and then to participate where they can add value. I am sure you are aware that Sun has been a consistent contributer of code to open systems, and we are continuing this same strategy, aligned to the trends of current open source practices.

Gnome Installation Guide. Karsten Reincke has recently published a Gnome Installation Guide that presents lots of useful information to those who wish to install development versions of GNOME from source code.

Printing Systems

CUPS v1.16 is available. Version 1.16 of CUPS, the Common Unix Print System, is available. Lots of bugs have been fixed in this release.

Web-site Development

Getting to know Midgard (IBM developerWorks). IBM's developerWorks site has put up a detailed article on getting started with the Midgard application server.

On a very basic technical level, Midgard provides a content management API for PHP that makes managing such articles a whole lot easier and administering them a snap. It introduces some of its own content management concepts to help you organize articles more logically and deal with them easily. It can implement security, allowing only authorized users to update or view content, and recording personal information about users.

(Thanks to Henri Bergius).

Midgard Weekly Summary. The Midgard Weekly Summary for January 26 is out. Among other things, it includes an interview with Midgard founder Henri Bergius.

Zope 2.3.0 released. Zope 2.3.0 final has been released. There is quite a bit of new stuff in this release; see the announcement for details.

Perl scripting available for Zope. Digital Creations and ActiveState have announced the first release from the "Perl for Zope" project. Zope scripting is no longer limited to the Python language.

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

ERLANG

New Erlang User Contributions. The Erlang.org site lists several new user contributions including an improved Unicode support module and a package for working with skew-binary random-access lists.

Markup Languages

XML-RPC Howto. An XML-RPC HOWTO has been posted to Sourceforge. "XML-RPC is a simple, portable way to make remote procedure calls over HTTP. It can be used with Perl, Java, Python, C, C++, PHP and many other programming languages. Implementations are available for Unix, Windows and the Macintosh."

The author of the XML-RPC HOWTO, Eric Kidd, has also announced the release of xmlrpc-c 0.9.6 - an XML-RPC implementation for Linux.

Processing XML with Perl (ISPworld). ISPworld has run an article by Michel Rodriguez that covers the use of Perl to process XML files. "Being the most popular CGI language, it should come as no surprise that Perl offers many ways to process XML. Actually, it offers lots of ways, no less than 14 different ways, implemented by 14 different modules, are available for XML transformation."

Perl

Perl 5 Porters for January 30, 2001. The January 30 edition of Perl 5 Porters is out. Topics include Test::Harness, the Perl hashing function, examples using chop, PerlIO programming documentation, and more.

Perl 5.6.1 available (use Perl). According to use Perl, the second trial version of Perl 5.6.1 has been released and needs testing.

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for January 29, 2001. Issue 22 of the PHP Weekly Summary is available. Topics covered this week are DOMXML docs, PDFLib support, Chora, a tiny PHP for embedded systems, and more.

Python

What's new in Python 2.1. For those of you who are curious about the upcoming Python 2.1 release, we recommend a look at A.M. Kuchling's What's new in Python 2.1 document. It presents the significant changes in this release in a clear and useful manner.

This week's Python-URL. Here is Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for January 30 with the latest from the Python development community. One interesting item is that Python 2.1a1 has been released.

Dive Into Python. A new python book by Mark Pilgrim, Dive Into Python, is available online in numerous file formats. "This book is still being written. What's here already is a solid overview of Python programming. In future chapters, I plan to cover specific topics, like XML processing, in more depth. This is not a teaser site for some larger work for sale; all new content will be published here, for free, as soon as it's ready."

Highlight Project: VPython (Linux Programming). Linux Programming takes a look at takes a look at VPython, a 3D graphical programming module. Also, take a look at the VPython project's home page.

Python 2.0 RPMs available. Sean Reifschneider has announced the availability of Python 2.0 and Python 2.1a1 source RPM files.

Advanced Encryption Suite for Python. Bryan Mongeau has released pyaes, the Advanced Encryption Suite for Python.

Snack Sound Toolkit v2.0.6. Kare Sjolander announced the Snack Sound Toolkit v2.0.6 for Python. This version has bug fixes and updated demos.

Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL. Here is Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for January 29, 2001 with the latest goodies from the Tcl/Tk development world. There are links to articles on the Tcl/Tk user meeting in Hamburg in June of 2001, the Tcl'ers Wiki, using canvas coordinates, and using C++ to manipulate pointers.

TclTidy: convert HTML to XHTML. Scott Redman announced TclTidy, a program that helps to convert HTML to XHTML.

Software Development Tools

Linux Development Platform Specification 1.1beta. The Free Standards Group has released version 1.1-beta of the Linux Development Platform Specification. This document describes programming and software support standards intended to make Linux applications portable across distributions. It's a sort of stopgap effort on the way toward the Linux Standard Base. 1.1-beta will be in a public review period for two weeks, after which the official 1.1 release will come out. If you have suggestions for improvement, now is the time to get them in.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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