See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

The jack project aims to provide a low-latency audio server for connecting multiple audio applications together under Linux.

According to the Jack FAQ, Jack used to be called LAAGA, which stands for Linux Audio Application Glue API. The LAAGA concept was defined on the linux-audio-dev mailing list.

A LAAGA is supposed to solve the following problem: "Let's say you are using a multi-track recorder/mixer. It's working nicely on your Linux box. You can record and mix without problems. But now you've found a couple of interesting new apps, let's say a software synth and a virtual drum machine. They seem to work great, so why not use them in your recordings? But how to connect them to the multi-track recorder?" Jack was designed to perform that function.

The jack documentation is still in an early state of development. The project is seeking volunteers to help fill that out.

A number of audio applications already work with jack. Among them is the audio player AlsaPlayer, the audio processor ecasound, and the multi-track recorder Ardour. More applications are under development.

Developers should check out the jack API to get an idea of how it all goes together.

Update: we've received a note from the Jack developers that clarify some inaccuracies that were originally in this article. We regret the errors.

CORBA

Help with Designing or Debugging CORBA Applications (Linux Journal). Linux Journal is running an article by Frank Singleton on CORBA application design and debugging. "This article explores how I have added some useful extensions to an open-source protocol analyzer in order to allow the extraction of OMG IDL (interface definition language) defined data types from TCP/IP traffic (using GIOP/IIOP). I also discuss the development and use of a helpful tool (idl2eth) that can take your own OMG IDL file(s) and generate protocol analyzer plugins, and lead you through the steps of creating your own plugin for the CORBA project you are working on."

Databases

Standalone ZODB 1.0 released. The 1.0 release of the stand-alone Zope Object Database has been . The ZODB part of Zope is interesting in its own right, and it has many applications that have nothing to do with web serving; it's worth a look for Python programmers building complex and/or distributed applications.

New SAP DB Documentation. New online documentation is available for the SAP DB database.

Electronics

New stuff on the gEDA site. The gEDA site features new versions of Icarus Verilog, Gerber Viewer, and gEDA/gaf, a collection of tools which includes gschem, libgeda, gnetlist, gsymcheck, and associated utilities.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter for February 7, 2002. The February 7, 2002 edition of the LinuxDevices Embedded Linux Newsletter is out with the latest embedded Linux news. This week features lots of new stuff from the LinuxWorld conference.

Embedded Development with Qt/Embedded (Dr. Dobb's). Dr. Dobb's Journal features an article on writing Qt applications for embedded Linux systems. "When developing software for handheld computers such as the iPAQ, Palm, and Visor, you often face challenges that are at odds with each other. On one hand, users expect applications with resource-hungry GUIs that can be manipulated via stylus, virtual keyboard, and the like. On the other hand, you must contend with the space and processing constraints that are normal in the embedded world. In part due to issues such as these, Linux is increasingly becoming the preferred platform for embedded devices such as handheld computers."

Mail Software

rbl-milter 0.1 released. The first release of rbl-milter, a spam filter that works with sendmail, has been released. Rbl-milter has been released with the GPL license.

Network Management

Aide 0.8 released. Version 0.8 of Aide, the Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment, has been announced. This release adds cleaner reports, syslog reporting, dead symlink warnings, bug fixes, and more.

Peer to Peer

Distributed Systems Topologies: Part 2 (O'Reilly). Nelson Minar covers Distributed Systems Topologies in the second part of a series on O'Reilly. "In this second part, I describe seven characteristics of distributed systems that are commonly used when talking about system design and then analyze each characteristic for each of the topologies." If you want to start from the beginning, Part 1 of the series is here.

Printing Software

LPRng 3.8.6 released. Version 3.8.6 of the LPRng print spooler has been released. The CHANGES include a number of bug fixes and documentation updates.

Web-site Development

The latest Zope Members News. This week's entries on the Zope Members News include new releases of NuxWidgets, ZCoMIX, Emil, and ManageInZODB and more.

Python Conference, Day One (ZopeZen). Zopista writes about Zope at the Python conference. "The conference kicked off with a talk from Andrew Koenig. Andrew has been programming for 5 years more than I have been alive and talked about languages he has used prior to Python."

Documentation

GNU FDL 1.2 draft available. A draft of version 1.2 of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) has been announced.

LDP Weekly News for February 5, 2002. The February 5, 2002 LDP Weekly News is out. News includes the release of documentation in the Plucker format for viewing on PDA devices. New documents include "How to Develop Accessible Linux Applications", and the "Linux Crash HOWTO".

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

AlsaPlayer 0.99.53 released. A new version of the AlsaPlayer audio utility has been released. The project ChangeLog file lists improved support for Jack (see above), and some bug fixes.

Web Browsers

BugDays Are Back! (MozillaZine). Join the Mozilla developers for another BugDays event on February 14 and 15, 2002. "Join us this Thursday and Friday as we work to clean up the bug database, weeding out duplicate reports, confirming or resolving bugs, and adding comments and testcases to assist developers working on difficult issues. We're getting very close to Mozilla 1.0."

Desktop Environments

KDE Core Services: Trouble In Paradise. The KDE site has been having a few problems lately. As a result, the KDE 3.0 beta has been delayed.

First GNOME 1.4.1 release candidate. The first release candidate for GNOME 1.4.1 has been announced. A great many fixes and improvements have been worked into this release.

Graphics

GSview 4.2 Released. Ghostgum Software Pty Ltd has released version 4.2 of the GSview PostScript previewer. "This release works with the new Ghostscript 7.04 security updates. It includes a Swedish translation and a number of bug fixes." GSview has been released under the Aladdin Free Public License.

Gimp 1.2.3 and 1.3.3 released. Stable version 1.2.3 of the Gimp is available here. This version features a number of bug fixes.

Development version 1.3.3 of the Gimp is available here. "This release is targetted for developers and curious users. Don't use it for your daily work."

Interoperability

Wine contemplating a license switch to LGPL. The leaders of the Wine project have announced a plan to change the Wine license to the LGPL. "However, with some recent events I cannot disclose, it is clear to me that the opportunity for Wine to be used in a proprietary product is too tempting and has caused some harm to the Wine project. Based on experience, I feel strongly that the potential for harm is great enough that CodeWeavers needs to take two actions. First, we would like to release all new code we develop under an LGPL style license. Second, I would like to open another call for a license change and thereby strongly add my voice to Alexandre's." (Thanks to Dan Kegel.)

Wine Weekly News. The latest Wine Weekly News covers Wine 20020122, LindowsOS and Wine, a new SDL driver, Wine version numbers, and more.

Office Applications

Gorilla Released. Gorilla, a vector-icon based theme for Nautilus, has been released. Gorilla is also discussed on the Gnotices site.

Pan 0.11.2 released (Gnotices). Version 0.11.2 of the Pan news reader has been released. This version features bug fixes, performance improvements, and user interface tweaks.

Miscellaneous

Gnopher 0.2 released (Gnotices). Version 0.2 of Gnopher, the GNOME Gopher client, has been released. Gnopher claims to be the "first fully themeable Gopher client ever." See the Release Notes for all of the details.

Programming Languages

C

GCC now runs on the SuperH SH5. Support for the SuperH SH5 64-bit RISC microprocessor has been added to GCC, the Gnu Compiler Collection.

Caml

Caml Weekly News for February 12, 2002. The February 12, 2002 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out. Topics include a new OCAML beginner's list and OCamldoc 3.04 +1.

Java

DML Statements (O'Reilly). Jason Price writes about the SQL Data Manipulation Language (DML) on O'Reilly's OnJava site. "DML statements may be used to retrieve and modify the contents of database tables. In this article, you will also learn how to process database null values and handle database exceptions."

Ease your multithreaded application programming (IBM developerWorks). Joseph Hartal and Ze'ev Bubis discuss the Consumer class on IBM's developerWorks. "Multithreaded applications often make use of the producer-consumer programming scenario, wherein repetitive jobs are created by a producer thread, passed to a job queue, and processed by a consumer thread. While this programming method is very useful, it often results in duplicate code, which can be a real problem to debug and maintain."

Lisp

Two Lisp Books Available Online. Two Lisp books are now available online. On Lisp by Paul Graham, and The Common Lisp Cookbook, a collaborative work that aims to be the Lisp equivalent of the Perl Cookbook.

CL-PDF 0.41 released. CL-PDF 0.41, a Common Lisp library for generating Adobe Acrobat documents, has been released. This version adds support for internal PDF data compressin as well as new drawing primitives. The software is available here. CL-PDF is released with a FreeBSD style license.

Perl

An SVG Histogram (O'Reilly). J. David Eisenberg writes about using Perl and scalable vector graphics (SVG). "In this article, we'll generate a graphic from existing data. Specifically, we'll write a Perl program that draws a graph of the distribution of file sizes in a directory and its subdirectories."

Optimizing Your Perl (O'Reilly). Robert Spier offers some tips on Perl code optimization. "Is your Perl program taking too long to run? This might be because you've chosen a data structure or algorithm that takes a long time to run. By rethinking how you've implemented a function, you might be able to realize huge gains in speed."

This Fortnight on Perl 6 (O'Reilly). The latest Perl 6 Porters covers a Parrot problem, Unicode strings, the Regex Engine, Perl 6 On Mono, and more.

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for February 10, 2002. The latest PHP Weekly Summary looks at a bug involving negative indices, talk of the addition of case sensitivity to PHP, manual translations, a new build system, and more.

Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!. The of the Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is out with all of the latest Python news.

The IPC10 Python Gathering (O'Reilly). Mark Lutz writes about the IPC10 Python Gathering. "First, and foremost to me, there is a tangible 'back to work' mindset in the Python world at large. People are busy having fun with Python again, whether they are getting paid for it or not. Really, there never was much of a pause. Most of what happens in Python has always been a labor of love, and so Python is by and large immune to Wall Street shenanigans."

The Daily Python-URL. This week's entries on the The Daily Python-URL looks at a Python based art project, the Python Routing Toolkit, the pyirclib IRC library for Python, the Frowns chemoinformatics system, coverage of the Python conference, and more.

Ruby

This week on the Ruby Garden. This week's Ruby Garden features articles on Advanced Programming Language Design, the Coerce-ability of bitwise operators, Obfuscated Ruby, the Radical 0.4 web framework, and more.

The Ruby Weekly News. The Ruby Weekly News for February 11, 2002 features software for generating libraries from XML schemas, and expert system shell with a TK front end, a Ruby task distribution system, OpenSSL for Ruby, and more.

Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!. This week's has been published. Check it out for all of the TCL news.

XML

Embed binary data in XML documents three ways (IBM developerWorks). Gowri Shankar writes about embedding binary data in XML. "Originally, HTML was supposed to handle only text, but today it is commonly used to refer and mark up non-text data as well. So it is quite natural that XML followed suit. Because XML does not follow a specified syntax (as HTML does) and is more extensible than HTML, people use it in any way they wish to mark up all types of data."

Second Generation Web Services (O'Reilly). Paul Prescod discusses the evolution of Web Services. "In fact, I believe that second generation web services will actually build much more heavily on the architecture that made the Web work, using the holy trinity: standardized formats (XML vocabularies), a standardized application protocol, and a single URI namespace."

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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