See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

• Support for Unix/Posix threads which allows Apache to run in a hybrid multiprocess/multithreaded mode.
• A New build system that is based on the popular autoconf and libtool packages.
• Multiprotocol Support Work to allow for the serving of protocols other than http.
• Better support for non-Unix platforms including BeOS, OS/2 and Windows.
• Platform Specific Multi-Processing Modules which allow for the isolation of platform specific code from the main server and can also be used to select threaded or forking operation.
• A New Apache API which addresses problems with the Version 1.3 module ordering and adds more capabilities from new modules.
• Native IPv6 support to support the next generation of Internet protocol.
• I/O Filtering by Apache modules which allows CGI script output to be filtered on the server side.

The list of Module Enhancements for Apache 2.0 includes:

• mod_auth_db with support for the Berkeley DB 3.0 database.
• mod_auth_digest with support for session caching across processes.
• mod_charset_lite a new module for character set translation.
• mod_dav a new module that supports HTTP Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV).
• mod_file_cache a new caching module that duplicates mod_mmap_static functionality and extends the caching abilities.

The Changes with Apache 2.0.16 document lists all of the changes in detail.

Overall, this is a fairly major release of Apache with some nice new capabilities, and no doubt, some new bugs. Apache 2.0 is not recommended for production servers, but it would be a good idea to try it out in an experimental mode and report any problems that you encounter back to the development team.

Databases

mSQL 3.0 pre 2 available. Hughes Technologies has announced the availability of mini SQL (mSQL) version 3.0 pre 2.

Documentation

LDP Weekly News - 2001-04-10. This week's updates to the Linux Documentation Project include new HOWTO's for 3D Modeling and LDAP use, and updates to the Linux Kernel HOWTO and Secure Programming HOWTO documents.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter for Apr. 5, 2001 (LinuxDevices). The summary for the past week in the embedded Linux marketplace has been published by LinuxDevices.com. The Embedded Linux Newsletter this week covers Rick Lehrbaum's "State of Embedded Linux" talk at the Colorado Linux Info Quest and Wind River's acquisition of BSDi, as well as other stories.

Developer interest in Embedded Linux skyrockets (LinuxDevices). According to this LinuxDevices.com report, interest in using Linux as an embedded system solution has surged since 1998, making it the #2 system of choice behind Wind River's VxWorks.

Filesystem Software

Learning Linux LVM, Part 2 (IBM developerWorks). IBM developerWorks shows how to add a logical volume to the root filesystem in order to add more disk space. "While the transition to LVM is a bit of an ordeal, once the transition is complete, managing filesystems becomes tremendously easier. As an example, I decided to resize my new /home logical volume, adding about 2 Gigabytes worth of space to the end of the filesystem. First, I added additional capacity to my "lv_home" logical volume, and then I used the resize_reiserfs utility to expand the filesystem so that it would use this additional capacity."

Interoperability

Wine Weekly News seeks a new editor. The Wine Weekly News is looking for a new editor, if you have talents in that area, there's a void to fill.

Network Management

Preventative DNS (kuro5hin). In this column on kuro5hin, Dylan Griffiths shows, in fairly complete detail, the process involved in moving from BIND to djbdns for DNS services.

OpenNMS Update v2.15. The latest edition of the OpenNMS Update is out and covers the release of OpenNMS 0.7.2, web UI authentication problems, and configuration issues.

Printing Systems

Open Source Omni Printer Driver version 0.0.8. A new version of the Omni Printer Driver has been released. "The Omni printer driver provides support for over 250 printers using the Ghostscript framework. In addition, it provides a model for dynamically loading printer drivers, creating new devices by editing device description files, and simplifies new printer driver development by allowing for the subclassing of previous device features." The list of supported printers contains quite a few printers, but HP models are noticeably absent. Omni is licensed under the Lesser Gnu Public License (LGPL). (Thanks to Kelli Wiginton.)

Science

Linux in Science report #8. The April 2, 2001 edition of the Linux in Science Report is out, covering the recent Linux World Expo. "Overall, there were a number of interesting displays. Among these were the dual-processor Athlon system demonstrated by ASL Labs at the MandrakeSoft booth, a very cool display by members of the Brookhaven National Laboratory demonstrating the use of Linux in physics research there, the Flight Gear flight simulator project with a running FlightGear demo, and also the Etherboot project which has made important strides in making booting x86 PCs over a network an easier proposition." A number of open source science projects are listed at the bottom of the report.

Medical software's free future (bmj.com). BMJ.com's letters section contains a discussion about open source software in medicine. "An obvious route forward for the public sector would be to state that all software developed at the public's expense be licensed as open source, although the General Public License may not be the optimum licence."

Molecular Biology related programs for Linux. The Bioinformatics site is now hosting Molecular Biology related programs for Linux, a repository for Linux based Molecular Biology software. Over 50 programs are featured on the site to help you with that penguin cloning project.

Scientific Python 2.2 released. Version 2.2 of Scientific Python is available. "ScientificPython is a collection of Python modules that are useful for scientific computing. In this collection you will find modules that cover basic geometry (vectors, tensors, transformations, vector and tensor fields), quaternions, automatic derivatives, (linear) interpolation, polynomials, elementary statistics, nonlinear least-squares fits, unit calculations, Fortran-compatible text formatting, 3D visualization via VRML, and two Tk widgets for simple line plots and 3D wireframe models." This release features a revised package structure and has built in support for the netCDF data format.

Telephonics

Kandy, a new KDE PIM program for telephones. A new KDE PIM program known as Kandy has been announced. "Say hello to Kandy. Kandy is an application which allows to you communicate with your mobile phone. It aims at providing synchronisation for phone book, appointments and other data stored on the mobile." The Kandy project is in its early stages and the developer is looking for help.

Web-site Development

Zope News. The latest news from the Zope site contains a number of new Zope related software updates. Included are LDAPLoginAdapter 1.2 and New Core Session Tracking 0.8 as well as info on browsing Zope source on line and a new Hong Kong Zope users group.

Zope Developer's Guide preview release. The first preview release of the Zope Developer's Guide has been announced. "The ZDG picks up where the Zope Book leaves off. Its main focus is teaching you how to develop Zope products."

PHP Weekly Summary for April 9, 2001. The April 9, 2001 edition of the PHP Weekly Summary is out. This week's topics include a patch that allows libc style argument swapping in printf, a recently opened XML-RPC extension with a PHP extension, from Epinions, Hebrew and Polish manual translations, and more.

Window Systems

Kernel Cousin KDE Issue #5 is Out. Topics covered in this week's KDE development mailing lists include Kaboodle, the light-weight embeddable media player, KDE DB connectivity issues, global KPrinter support, the new Gideo development branch and sending mail with KMail.

KDevelop 3.0 Now Developer-Ready. KDevelop contains Gideon, "which is very near to being usable and complete", according to Bernd Gehrmann. Gideon, the codename for KDevelop 3.0, can be thought of as a modular lego-like framework for an IDE.

GNUStep Weekly Update. The latest news from the GNUStep project is the announcement of the LaunchPad 1.0 release. LaunchPad is a collection of libraries for creating non-graphical tools and applications using an API based on OpenStep and the MacOS X API.

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

Build your own Java-based supercomputer (IBM developerWorks). Aashish Patil writes about building a Java based supercomputer in an IBM developerWorks article. "If you've ever wanted to build your own supercomputer but have been held back by the demands of parallel programming in C, Pseudo Remote Threads is for you. This prize-winning Java programming model greatly simplifies parallel programming on clusters, bringing supercomputing out of the laboratory and into the hands of everyday Java programmers." The examples are run on Windows boxes, but the concepts apply to Linux as well.

Lisp

LISA 0.7 released. Version 0.7 of LISA, the Lisp-based Intelligent Software Agents, has been announced. "LISA is approaching the middle stages of development and is now considered 'alpha' software. The inference engine itself is quite stable, and it should be possible to develop reasonably sophisticated knowledge bases for experimentation."

Perl

New stable and development versions of Perl. A new stable version of Perl, version 5.6.1, has been announced. This release includes a long list of bug fixes and compatibility improvements.

Also, for those who are interested in the latest development release of Perl, version 5.7.1 has been announced. Improved Unicode support seems to be the main area of work in this release, some new modules are also included.

The Perl Journal returns (Use Perl). The recently demised Perl Journal is coming back to life according to Jon Orowant. "It's been a very long winter, full of angst and attorneys. I'll write more later, but wanted to share the good news as soon as possible."

Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!, Apr 9. This week's retrospective on the python world includes PEP 245 and 246 updates, PyTalk - a natural language program, a 2.0 port to OS/2 and installation help for Windows users (who apparently tend to cry a lot).

Pygame 1.0 released. Version 1.0 of Pygame has been released. Changes since the 0.9 release include a finished surfarray module, module exit cleanups, bug fixes, and cleaner code for different platforms.

Also included on the site is a new Pygame Code Repository with some example programs.

PyChecker - a Python source code bug finder. Neal Norwitz has announced PyChecker, a bug finder for Python.

The announcement claims that pychecker can find the following problems:

• No doc strings in modules, classes, functions, and methods
• self not the first parameter to a method
• Wrong number of parameters passed to functions/methods
• No global found (e.g., using a module without importing it)
• Global not used (module or variable)

Ruby

Ruby Cookbook Web site launched. A new web site dedicated to the Ruby programming community has launched. The site provides code fragments, classes, and modules, intended to help the new Ruby programmer get up to speed quickly.

Smalltalk

Squeak Smalltalk 3.0. Squeak is a multi-platform open-source Smalltalk compiler with built in multimedia capabilities. Version 3.0 of Squeak has recently been released. "Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change." Squeak is being distributed under an Apple Computer, Inc Software License.

Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL. Here is Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for April 9, 2001, with the usual collection of useful information from the Tcl/Tk development community. This week's edition mentions a call for Tcl core team Tk maintainers, the upcoming Tcl-2001 conference, and more.

Tcl/Tk 8.3.3 released. Tcl/Tk version 8.3.3 has been released. This version features lots of bug fixes and performance improvements.

XML

maki: serving XML via Apache and Python. The initial release of maki, a Python based XML server for Apache, has been announced. "The purpose of maki is to serve XML files via the web. A web developer can specify that the XML data be processed or transformed through any number of steps. Each step is either a stylesheet transformation or a custom process. A processor that evaluates embedded Python code is included. The output of each step is passed as the input to the next step (similar to a Unix pipe). Additionally, the output of each processor step can be cached for a user-specified time period. All configuration is in a central XML file that specifies rules based on matching paths against regular expressions."

If you are wondering about where the name comes from: "The name maki refers to maki-zushi (rolled sushi). The choice of name is somewhat arbitrary, although you are welcome to read meaning into it." Maki has been released under the GPL license.

Miscellaneous

History-making components (IBM developerWorks). James Durham looks at the history of Object Oriented Programming in an IBM developerWorks article. "This timeline explores some of the key events of components and object-oriented programming in the last 50 years. We could have gone back further to John von Neumann's 1946 proposals that changed computer architecture forever, or perhaps further back to ENIAC, Babbage or even Pascal. However, we decided to begin in 1951 since the birth of the widely publicized UNIVAC seems to spark the commercial engine that drives the modern pursuit of object-oriented programming and development."

The Story Behind the Parrot Prank (O'Reilly). Simon Cozens reveals the truth about the April Fools Day Parrot Language hoax. "All right. I admit it. In case you haven't guessed by now, Parrot was a very elaborate April Fools' Day hoax. It seems to have caught a lot of people out... including some people who really ought to know better. I've had a couple of requests from people who want to know how the hoax was perpetrated, so here's the story."

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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