See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

The document aims to answer a number of questions concerning the upcoming Mozilla 1.0 release:

• What: Mozilla 1.0 would be the first major version numbered release. The release would include promises to maintain compatibility with a number of APIs from which to build upon. The release would also involve a stable branch off of the cvs.mozilla.org trunk.
• Why: There is a need for a stable long-lived branch of Mozilla. If Mozilla.or does not create such a branch, it will be done by others, and the result would be unnecessary fragmentation. There is still a need for a 1.0 management plan, input is being accepted.
• How: There is a need for big-fixing milestones. There is also a need for reducing the bug count to "near-zero". The plan is to obtain a stable, long-lived branch. The plan involves obtaining version 1.0 through a small number of milestones. Developers are being asked to schedule their bug fixes within the boundaries of those milestones. The focus will be on stability, not new features. Commercially contributed features are to be synchronized with the milestones, and may be isolated with CVS branches or #ifdef statements.
• When: There is a strong desire among Mozilla developers to achieve 1.0 "sooner than later". There is a desire to obtain a stable branch and offer a release "within six months". Again, the emphasis will be on attaining stability more than new features.
• Who? Brendan Eich will get the final say on what goes into version 1.0. He will delegate layers to various other people. "First in the line of delegation, judgment, and consensus are staff and drivers, who in turn depend on porkjockeys, reviewers, module owners, bug assignees, QA contacts, triagers, and other members of the community." Bugs are being nominated for fixing by version 1.0, and guidelines have been given for that bug status.

Audio

Ogg Traffic #1. A new status page for the Ogg Vorbis project (free MP3 replacement) is available. Ogg Traffic gives the latest project status and is a good look at the inner workings of an open-source project.

Clusters

High Availability Linux status for October, 2001. Alan Robertson sent in the October 2001 status report for the Linux High Availability project.

Electronics

Xcircuit 2.3.5 released. Tim Edwards has released version 2.3.5 of the xcircuit schematic drawing package. This release includes lots of bug fixes and enhancements to the Python interface.

New gwave for October 21, 2001. A new version of gwave, the GPL'ed Waveform Viewer has been released. The changes include improved measurement from cursor positions, better log scale operation, and bug fixes.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter. The LinuxDevices.com Embedded Linux Newsletter for October 18 is out, with the usual roundup of interesting embedded Linux stories.

Printing Systems

AFPL Ghostscript 7.03 Released. A new release of AFPL Ghostscript has been announced. The release includes bug fixes and performance improvements.

Science

Parma Polyhedra Library. Version 0.1 of the Parma Polyhedra Library has been released. "The Parma Polyhedra Library is a C++ library for the manipulation of convex polyhedra. The applications of convex polyhedra include program analysis, integer and combinatorial optimization and statistical data-editing."

Web-site Development

The Simple Web Service API. ActiveState has sent out an announcement about the new "Simple Web Service API," a standardized way for programmers to implement web services in a number of scripting languages. A beta implementation is available for Perl, Python, and PHP, with Ruby and Tcl in the works.

mnoGoSearch 3.2.2 released. Version 3.2.2 of the mnoGoSearch web search engine has been released. The changes include processing for Content-language and lang, support for IBM's DB2, documentation updates, and lots of bug fixes.

Zope Members' News. The latest news from the Zope Members' site looks at the new Z SQLvMethod, Portable Holes for Zope, CMFImageDoc 0.9, Lockable Folder 0.1.0, and more.

Building a Large-scale E-commerce Site with Apache and mod_perl (Perl.com). Perrin Harkins writes about large scale E-commerce on Perl.com. "Application server vendors will insist that you need a packaged all-in-one solution for the software. Hardware vendors will tell you that you need the top-of-the-line mega-machines to run a large site. This is a story about how we built a large e-commerce site using mainly open-source software and commodity hardware. We did it, and you can do it, too."

Webalizer Version 2.01-09 released. Version 2.10-09 of the Webalizer Web log analyzer program is available for download. This version features security related bug fixes as well as support for more languages. Upgrades are strongly recommended.

Miscellaneous

This week in DotGNU. The DotGNU weekly summary has been posted by Norbert Bollow; it gives an overview of some of the initiatives within the DotGNU project and how they are progressing.

Writing DLLs for Linux apps (IBM developerWorks). Allen Wilson talks about DLL equivalents under Linux. "Plugins and DLLs are often a great way to add functionality without writing a whole new application. In Linux, plugins and DLLs are implemented as dynamic libraries. e-business consultant and architect Allen Wilson introduces dynamic libraries and shows you how to use them to change an application after the app is running."

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

Desktop Development

Audio Applications

The latest from Linux Music. This week, the Linux Music site looks at Spiral Synth Modular, Muse, GSMP, and DarkIce. The second part of Dave Phillips' article on Snd is also mentioned.

Browsers

Mozilla Bug Week. A new Mozilla Bug Week has been announced for October 27 through November 4, 2001.

Galeon 0.12.5 released. The Galeon project has released version 0.12.5. Features of the release include the ability to drag tabs as well as numerous bug fixes.

Desktop Environments

This week's GNOME summary. The GNOME Summary for October 19 is out. Topics include the GNOME 2 wish list, the new Nautilus release, the Evolution cheerleader squad, and more.

GNOME Installation Guide 10/2001 has been published. A new version of the Gnome Installation Guide has been published.

GNOME Foundation Elections 2001. The GNOME Foundation has announced an election for the Foundation's board of directors. The election will be held the week of November 13-20, 2001.

KDE 3.0 Multimedia Meeting (KDE.News). Stefan Westerfeld has posted a summary of last month's KDE multimedia IRC discussion.

C Mania: KDE 3 Offers C Bindings (KDE.News). Richard Dale has committed new C bindings to KDE's CVS repository via a hacked version of kdoc.

FLTK 1.1.0b4 released. Version 1.1.0 beta 4 of the Fast Light ToolKit (FLTK) has been released. This version includes lots of bug fixes and feature enhancements.

Games

Crystal Space 0.90 r001 released. A new release of the Crystal Space game development kit has been released. This version has the aim of stabilizing the API so that game developers need not spend so much effort catching up to changes. New features include an isometric engine, a landscape engine, and a texture generation utility. A new space demo is also included. (Thanks to Jorrit Tyberghein.)

Interoperability

Wine Weekly News for October 15, 2001. The October 15, 2001 edition of the Wine Weekly News is available. Topics include Debugging MFC Programs, Submitting Patches for Wine, Borland Style Imports, and DDEConnect Errors.

Office Applications

Gnumeric 0.72 released. Gnumeric 0.72 (the "oooh yummy eye candy" release) has been announced. The eye candy (much of which depends on the new guppi-0.40 release) notwithstanding, the emphasis in this release is on bug fixes and stability. "Guppi is a GNOME-based framework for graphing and interactive data analysis."

Programming Languages

C

Gcc 3.0.2 released. Version 3.0.2 of the Gnu Compiler Collection has been released. GCC is available here. (Thanks to Martin Lindhe.)

COBOL

TinyCOBOL. It has been brought to our attention that there is an open-source COBOL compiler project known as TinyCOBOL. The compiler is currently functional, no changes have been posted since last July's 0.54 release. (Thanks to Fred Mobach.)

Java

Learning Command Objects and RMI (O'Reilly). William Grosso, talks about Java command objects in an O'Reilly article. "In this article, I introduce the basic ideas behind command objects. In order to do so, I drag in an example application that provides a translation service from a remote server. After introducing this application, I will show how to use command objects to structure the remote method invocations (RMI) made from a client program. As part of this article, I will introduce a fairly general framework for encapsulating remote method calls in command objects."

Threading lightly : Sometimes it's best not to share (IBM developerWorks). Brian Goetz discusses Java threading details on IBM's developerWorks. " Writing thread-safe classes is difficult. It requires a careful analysis of not only the conditions under which variables will be read or written, but also of how the class might be used by other classes. Sometimes, it is very difficult to make a class thread-safe without compromising its functionality, ease of use, or performance. Some classes retain state information from one method invocation to the next, and it is difficult to make such classes thread-safe in any practical way."

Perl

Perl Debugging for Beginners (O'Reilly). John Callender talks about Perl debugging in an O'Reilly article. "Debugging is a specialized skill and it takes practice to become adept at it. Debugging is somewhat like car repair; an experienced mechanic can ask a few questions, listen to the engine for a second, and immediately tell you what's wrong with your car and what it will take to fix it. Meanwhile, a novice mechanic will pull apart the transmission when the real problem is a broken light on the dashboard."

P5EE Project, Mailing List Started (use Perl). A new mailing list has been set up to discuss P5EE, a Perl API that is similar to Java's J2EE.

Perl 6 : Not Just For Damians (Perl.com). Piers Cawley looks at the differences between Perl 5 and Perl 6 on Perl.com.

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for October 22, 2001. The October 22, 2001 edition of the PHP Weekly Summary is out. Topics include: "Extension authors, PHP on Netware, PHP 4.1.0 RC 1, PHP for Win32 via Cygwin, PHP and MySQL 4.0.0, ext/skel, CVS reorganization, fix to snapshots, new 'overload' extension."

PHP-GTK 0.1.1 released. A new version of PHP-GTK is available, with lots of changes.

Peeking at Pear (O'Reilly). Chris Coleman examines Pear. "If you have ever programmed in Perl, chances are you have heard of CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. As you know, it's an easy way to add functionality to Perl. Most Perl programmers can't see how they ever lived without it.

PHP has a similar capability. It's called Pear: the PHP Extension and Add-On Repository. Pear is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components."

Python

Python 2.2.b1 released. The first beta of Python 2.2 has been released. See the announcement for a description of what's new.

This week's Python-URL. Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for October 24 is out, with the latest from the Python development community.

PyXPCOM - Python bindings for Mozilla XPCOM technology. ActiveState has announced the first release of the Python bindings for the Mozilla XPCOM (Cross-Platform COM) technology. "Although this is the first public release of these extensions, they are being used extensively in the Komodo project, ActiveState's cross- platform, multilanguage IDE based on Mozilla. Thus the functionality and stability of this package is remarkably high for a first release." This project is being released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

Ruby

This week on the Ruby Garden. The latest topics on the Ruby Garden include discussions on #exception, Python modules for Ruby, and more.

Smalltalk

OOPSLA 2001 Trip report. John McIntosh summarizes the events at the OOPSLA 2001 Smalltalk conference.
"Some of the questions to ask ourselves are:
What to do with the 17 year old geek Linux kids, how do we reach them, what do we say?
Why do I have five spell checkers on my machine, but none accessible from email?"

Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL. Here's Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for October 22, with the latest from the Tcl/Tk development community.

Tcl/Tk 8.3.4 Final Release. Version 8.3.4 of the Tcl language and Tk toolkit has been announced. This release features lots of bug fixes, patches, and improved HURD support. (Thanks to David Welton.)

XML

An introduction to SyncML (IBM developerWorks). Scott Stemberger looks at SyncML, an open industry spec for data synchronization. "In recognition of the fact that as the number of unique devices and the desire to access different enterprise resources proliferates, the SyncML initiative was formed to provide a uniform synchronization protocol for connecting multiple devices over any network to any data store. This article provides an overview of the open industry specification for data synchronization -- SyncML -- designed to meet the needs of the mobile user and their any-device, any-network synchronization needs."

Effective XML processing with DOM and XPath in Perl (IBM developerWorks). Parand Tony Darugar examines DOM and Xpath on IBM's developerWorks. "Based on an analysis of several large XML projects, this article examines how to make effective and efficient use of DOM. Developer/author Tony Daruger provides a set of usage patterns and a library of functions to make DOM robust and easy to use. Though the DOM offers a flexible and powerful means for creating, processing, and manipulating XML documents, some aspects of DOM make it awkward to use and can lead to brittle and buggy code. This article suggests ways to avoid the pitfalls. Perl code samples demonstrate the techniques."

The Slippery Soap (O'Reilly). Martin Gudgin and Timothy Ewald look at SOAP on O'Reilly's XML.com. "SOAP 1.1 has become a de facto standard, with broad industry support from many vendors, large and small, providing client and server implementations. The specification defines a set of conventions for exchanging XML messages, including rules for encoding data structures, an extensibility mechanism, a binding to the HTTP protocol, and conventions for RPC style invocations."

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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