See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

"The primary goal of the Khronos Group is to develop a cross-platform standard programming environment for capturing, transporting, processing, displaying, and synchronizing digital media. We call this media-rich programming environment OpenML."

The project is intended to solve a fairly difficult problem, integrating and synchronizing 2D and 3D graphics, audio, video, I/O, and networking applications via a single API on multiple platforms. A wide range of platforms, from embedded and palmtop devices to high end workstations, will be supported. Existing standards will be utilized wherever possible. Sample implementations and testing will also be part of the project. This unified platform will provide software developers with an easy framework to code within.

The OpenML white paper is available in pdf format. The position on dealing with Linux is fairly clearly stated:

...the founders of the Khronos Group recognized the need for an open, cross-platform framework for the creation and playback of digital media content. The Khronos Group SIG was formed to develop a specification that would address this need.

The rapid expansion of the Open Source model and the Linux operating system has amplified this need. A major issue in the Linux environment is the lack of cross-platform standards for multi-media application development. OpenGL is the only truly open, cross platform standard in this area. For this reason, OpenGL is a key component of the OpenML specification.

Interested parties need to license the OpenML 1.0 spec in order to participate in its evolution, fortunately, the license is royalty free. Commercial implementations are expected to be released on Linux, Windows, Irix, and Solaris this year.

A BOF session is scheduled for discussing OpenML at the upcoming SIGGRAPH 2001 meeting in Los Angeles, California on August 12, 2001. The press release seems to be geared towards corporate participation, hopefully the group will welcome open-source development efforts into the fold.

Education

Linux in Education Report #50. The August 6 edition of the Seul/EDU report is available. Topics this week include the creation of a new educational software listing database, Linux in Italian schools, an open-source conference registration system, and a discussion of techniques for promoting the use of Linux in schools.

Embedded Systems

BusyBox 0.60.0 released. A new version of the BusyBox embedded toolkit has been released. The changelog file lists all that is new with this release. The BusyBox 0.60.X series is considered to be a stable release that is intended for production systems. Several bugs have been fixed and new utilities include traceroute, modprobe, and pidof.

Embedded Linux Newsletter, August 2, 2001 (LinuxDevices). This week's Embedded Linux Newsletter includes a white paper on embedding Linux, a study on the growth of embedded linux development, and NASA's personal digital assistant.

Small Linux Resource List (LinuxDevices). In response to reader queries, LinuxDevices has started a list of devices suitable for Linux-based projects.

Interoperability

New Wine Snapshot for July 31, 2001. The WineHQ site lists a new Wine snapshot for July 31, 2001. Not much information has been made available about this release, the diffs file sheds some light on what files have been changed.

Science

The database of BioInformatics Software tools (bioinformatics). The bioinformatics site looks at BISR, the database of BioInformatics software tools. "The database will hold and distribute source code for software tools which may be used to solve problems in bioinformatics and computational biology. Test data and documentation will also be included if available."

Web-site Development

Mod_Python 2.7.6 released. A new version of mod_python is available. The documentation on the web site and in the .tgz file has not been updated to reflect the changes in this version. Those wishing to have the latest bug fixes should probably check this version out.

The State of Midgard - August 2001. Not much news has come from the Midgard project lately, Developer Henri Bergius has just sent out a State of Midgard letter to buck that trend. For starters, the project could use some help in the documentation area.

SkunkWeb 3.0beta1 released. The first public release of the SkunkWeb Web Application Server has been announced. SkunkWeb is written in Python and is designed to be easily extensible with C/C++.

Miscellaneous

lfm 0.5 released. Version 0.5 of lfm, the "Last File Manager", has been released. Lfm is a Python based clone of Midnight Commander and is being released under a GPL license.

Roundup issue tracker version 0.2.6 released. Version 0.2.6 of the Roundup issue tracking system has been released. Should you have any issues to deal with, this tool offers the ability to track them with web, command line, and email interfaces. Database backends are also under development.

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

C

DBI abstraction layer in C. A new C library - libdbi - has been released which abstracts database access in the same way the DBI/DBD layer does in Perl. Currently the library supports MySQL and PostregSQL, with a plug-in architecture that allows the adding of other database interfaces.

Caml

Caml Weekly News for August 7, 2001. The latest edition of the Caml Weekly News is out. Topics include the release of Ocaml 3.02, CamlIDL 1.0.1, and Ensemble 1.10.

Lisp

SBCL 0.6.13 released. Version 0.6.13 of SBCL, Steel Bank Common Lisp, has been released. The main new feature is a port to the Compaq/DEC Alpha CPU. The release also features improved output from DISASSEMBLE and DESCRIBE, better ANSI compliance, and bug fixes.

Perl

Perl 5 Porters for August 1, 2001. The August 1, 2001 edition of the Perl 5 Porters digest is out, a few days late. Topics include hash clamping, asynchronous callbacks, the Perl 5 Porters meeting at TPC, and other Perl stuff.

Several new Date:: modules (use Perl). The use Perl site takes a look at several new Date:: modules. Now it is possible to calculate dates for Passover, find out the animal year from the Chinese calendar, and get the golden number of a given year, among other things.

Using the Perl Debugger (Dr. Dobb's). Brian d Foy investigates the Perl Debugger in an article on Dr. Dobbs. "Perl comes with a built-in debugger. Although you could use third-party debuggers such as perltkdb and ActiveState's Komodo, which provide a graphical interface, you already have everything you need if you have Perl. In this article, I show you how to use the Perl debugger to execute arbitrary Perl statements, create and examine variables, and step through and set breakpoints in programs so that you can start using the Perl debugger right away. As you get comfortable with the basics, you can start to explore its other features."

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for August 6, 2001. The August 6, 2001 issue of the PHP Weekly Summary is out. Topics include generating random numbers with rand and mt_rand, naming tests, case-sensitive constants, data de-serialization, new math functions, and more.

PHPGTK 0.1 released. The fourth version of PHPGTK 0.1, "the void which binds" release, is available for download. The changelog file details the changes which include a number of bug fixes and new features. "Too often PHP is thought of as only an HTML-embedded web scripting language. However, it is also a very full-featured general purpose language that can be used for much more. One of the goals behind this project was to prove that PHP can be used to write client-side GUI applications."

Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!. The August 6, 2001 Python-URL! from Dr. Dobb's carries word that the SpecTcl GUI builder has been revived from a three year hiatus. Also, a discussion of language use and evolution is presented.

Also out is the Python-URL for August 2, 2001 with discussions on dynamic typing, PyUnit, Python on the Palm, and a quick start guide to CORBA use.

Python-dev. Andrew Kuchling has put out the latest Python-dev summary; covering development discussion through July 15. It's main topic is the inclusion of XML-RPC into the Python standard library.

O'Reilly Open Source Convention Editor's Dispatch: Python Track (O'Reilly). O'Reilly's Laura Lewin summarizes the Python activity at the recent O'Reilly Open Source Convention. "What continues to surprise me as I follow the Python scene is that Python seems to offer satisfying solutions to non-programmers, artists, and hardcore, number-crunching Numerical Python scientists alike."

PyUnit 1.4.0 released. A new version of PyUnit, the Python standard unit testing framework has been released. This release is described as: "the much-delayed stand-alone release of the PyUnit version bundled with Python 2.1".

Ruby

The latest from the Ruby Garden. The latest postings from the Ruby Garden include discussions on unparsed string literals, adding RubyUnit to the base distribution, a step method for Range, static vs. dynamic typing, and more.

Smalltalk

Kats 0.1a - a Smalltalk transaction service. Stephen Pair has released Kats 0.1a. Kats is a transaction service written in Smalltalk and licensed under the LGPL.

Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!. From Dr. Dobb's this week, the Tcl-URL! points readers to news of the release of TclXML 2.1 as well as Pinebrush Technologies' use of Tcl for high speed raster processing.

XML

Using XLink to simplify the representation of data (IBM developerWorks). Kevin Williams looks at the use of the XLink specification to break XML documents into distinct elements which are more optimized for a variety of uses.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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