See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

Browsers

Mozilla Weekly Independent Status Report. A new Mozilla Weekly Independent Status Report is available. Topics include Hermes, Sherlock, Galeon, Jabberzilla, and Chameleon.

Databases

Controlling Data Display with ORDER BY (ONLamp.com). John Paul Ashenfelter writes about SQL's ORDER BY clause in this ONLamp article. This is one in a series of articles on SQL which introduce database concepts to software developers.

Education

SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report for February 12, 2001. The February 12, 2001 issue of the SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report is out. Topics include a new SEUL/edu wiki page, teaching Perl to 9th and 10th graders, building diskless Linux kiosks for school labs, embedded Linux robots, and more.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter for Feb. 8, 2001. The LinuxDevices Embedded Linux Journal for February 8, 2001 is available with the latest news from the world of embedded Linux.

Linux BIOS/bootloader for AMD Elan now released under GPL (Linux Devices). Telos announced the first public release of its alios Linux boot loader under the GPL license. "alios has been designed to completely eliminate the need for a BIOS and to load the Linux kernel image from solid state memory such as Flash ROM. Optionally, a RAM disk image may be loaded from ROM then as well."

Games

WorldForge releases Acorn 0.3. The WorldForge project has announced the release of Acorn 0.3. This release brings a great many improvements to this game, which is intended to be a demonstration of what the WorldForge framework can do at this point.

Pygame-0.9 available. A new version of the pygame package has been announced with a 1.0 release scheduled for the near future. "Pygame is a set of python modules written to help create games in Python."

Network Management

OpenNMS update for February 13. Here is the OpenNMS update for February 13, detailing the latest with the network management software project. Among other things, it talks about the 0.6 release, which was released on February 14, 2001. The new version may be obtained from the OpenNMS download page.

Office Applications

ZRadiale - a free contact manager. A free contact manager system called "ZRadiale" has just been released. The announcement is in French, but the the project's web site is in English. ZRadiale is based on Zope, is licensed under the GPL, and is available now.

Gimp's tools: selection and color correction (LinuxFocus). Yves Ceccone has put together a tutorial on the Gimp tools for selection and color correction. The tutorial is full of useful information.

New Gimp site: gimpforce.org. The Gimp User Group has put together Gimpforce, a web site that features Gimp related galleries, tutorials, news, and more.

On the Desktop

Planning GNOME 2.0. Miguel de Icaza has posted a document describing how he thinks the GNOME 2.0 development process should go. He is arguing for a relatively conservative approach to new features and such; apparently the switch to the Gtk 2.0 toolkit is going to present enough challenges as it is. "Besides, GNOME 2.0 is not the end of GNOME. GNOME 2.0 is just the next major release of GNOME. There is always a chance for us to redeem our pride as programmers, hackers and architects with GNOME 3.0 and GNOME 4.0." A new Goals for Gnome 2.0 document has also been released.

Anti-aliasing in GNOME. The Gnotices site reports on the availability of anti-aliasing code for GNOME, implemented with Keith Packard's Render extension by Jacob Berkman and Vladimir Vukicevic.

KDE 2.1 release schedule. The KDE 2.1 release schedule has been posted; it currently calls for a one-week delay, putting the final release on February 26.

The People Behind KDE: Jono Bacon. The People Behind KDE series continues with a look at Jono Baco, the maintainer of Kafka and the developer of KDE Developer Center and KCVSApplet.

Printing Systems

Updated Source distribution for CUPS. A new source distribution for the CUPS print system has been announced. A number of security fixes are included as well as some SuSE compatibility additions.

Web-site Development

The Apache-Tcl project launches. Here is the announcement of the launch of the Apache-Tcl project, which will be working toward the integration of the Apache web server and the Tcl scripting language.

And Then Came Zope ... (SD Times). SD Times looks at Zope. "SD Times is written for software development managers, not for hackers, and we columnists try to maintain a professional tone about technologies and products, but there's no accurate way to talk about Zope without liberal use of exclamation marks and hyperbole. Zope is sick insane!!!!! It's the greatest thing since Bind!!!!! It's the finest language innovation since Guido van Rossum decided to use indenting for scoping!!! And so forth."

PHP Weekly News for February 12, 2001. The February 12, 2001 issue of the PHP Weekly News is out. Topics include PAM support, a safe mode redesign, database abstraction extensions, tiny PHP support, 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

ERLANG

xmerl 0.12. A new release of xmerl, an ERLANG based XML toolkit is available. Other new Erlang contributions are also available on the same site.

Haskell

Haskell Language Developments. Several announcements have recently been posted concerning the Haskell language. Among them are:

• GHC, the Glorious Haskell Compiler on sourceforge
• ghc-4.08 patch level 2
• Haskell gtk binding
• hmake-2.02

Java

Struts, an open-source MVC implementation (IBM developerWorks). Malcolm Davis has written an IBM developerWorks article on the Struts Framework. "This article introduces Struts, a Model-View-Controller implementation that uses servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology. Struts can help you control change in your Web project and promote specialization. Even if you never implement a system with Struts, you may get some ideas for your future servlets and JSP page implementations."

Perl

Perl 5 Porters for February 12, 2001. The February 12, 2001 edition of the Perl 5 porters list is available. Topics include updates to the Perl FAQ, Namespace for IO Layers, Memory Leak Plumbing, Shared functions, Perl 6, and more.

Makerpm 0.200 released. A new version of makerpm has been announced. Makerpm is a utility that turns perl modules into RPM files.

Python

Python-dev summary for January 31. A.M. Kuchling's Python-dev summary for January 31 is out. It covers a number of development issues, including a pointer to his What's New in Python 2.1 document. It is also the last one he plans to write; he does not think that the Python-dev summary has had the effect he was after (making the Python development process more transparent). Python-dev has been a great resource; it will be missed.

The Python-crypto mailing list. A new mailing list for the development of cryptographic software in Python has been announced. It's hosted in the Netherlands, due to continued nervousness about what U.S. policy on crypto software really is.

Transforming Python performance data (IBM devloperWorks). Chimezie Thomas-Ogbuji discusses how to profile Python programs with XML and XSLT in an IBM developerWorks article. "This article covers how to use XML technologies to build a better profiling tool for Python programs. It also describes how to generate an XML call tree from collected profile data, including function call information, such as the number of calls and cumulative time spent in function calls. The article includes sample code for building a DOM tree, an XSLT style sheet that transforms the XML tree of profile data into an informative HTML page, and other sample code."

This week's Python-URL. Here is the February 14, 2001 edition of the Dr. Dobb's Python-URL. Discussions include a CPAN-like service for Python, pure-Python encryption tools, a Python powered QuakeWorld server, and boolean COM properties.

Python Books Online (O'Reilly). Stephen Figgins writes about online Python books in an O'Reilly Python Devcenter article. "The high quality of online tutorials for both beginning and experienced programmers is an extension of the supportive Python community. It's one more thing that sets Python apart from other scripting languages."

Python Megawidgets 0.8.5 released. A new version of Python Megawidgets has been announced. This version is mainly a bug-fix release. "Pmw is a toolkit for building high-level compound widgets in Python using the Tkinter module."

Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL. Here is the Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for February 14. Topics this week include a tcl binary scan, tclperl-2.1, moodss 13.1, an open-source interface builder, and more.

tclperl-2.1 released. A new version of tclperl has been announced. Tclperl allows the execution of Perl code from a Tcl interpreter.

Software Development Tools

Cervisia, a graphical frontend for the CVS client. A new version of Cervisia, version 1.1, has been announced. Cervisia gives CVS a graphical front end under KDE. Cervisia is distributed under the Q Public License.

Documentation

'The Art of Unix Programming' gets two new chapters. Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming is a slow-moving, open book that he is writing with input from folks on the net. Eric has just announced the addition of chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 covers the various programming languages available on Unix systems, while chapter 4 gets into other development tools. As always, he is looking for feedback and suggestions.

Linux Documentation Project News. Here is the latest news from the Linux Documentation Project. Included is a new document on securing Apache under RedHat Linux. Numerous other documents have also been updated. (Thanks to David Merrill).

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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