See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

FOX, which stands for Free Objects for X, is a C++ based toolkit that provides components for writing Graphical User Interface software. Design goals of FOX include ease of programming, portability, speed, and minimal memory usage. FOX runs on a variety of platforms, including most popular Unix and Windows variants.

FOX development was started in 1997 on the Linux platform. FOX has been designed so that applications written with it can move across platforms with ease. The FOX documentation Foreword and Goals pages explain the history and design goals of FOX in greater detail.

The FOX Screenshots page give a look at various FOX applications. One such application is the FOX Calculator, a general purpose scientific calculator application. Also, see A.D.I.E., the ADvanced Interactive Editor, another FOX based application. See the FOX-Based Projects and screenshots page for more examples.

FOX bindings are available for Python via FXPy, for Ruby via FXRuby, and for Eiffel via EiffelFox.

Development version 1.1.9 of FOX has recently been released. This version features a new FXGradientBar widget, improved performance, bug fixes, and more. The release notes indicate that steady progress is being made on FOX development, the project has become stable enough to warrant a 1.X designation.

FOX may be downloaded here, packages are available for Debian, Red Hat, and Mandrake, in addition to .gz files. FOX has been released under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL). (Thanks to Dejan Lekic.)

Databases

Mini SQL 3.0 Pre 4.1. Mini SQL 3.0 Pre 4.1 has been released. This version fixes a bug that was found in Mini SQL 3.0 Pre 4. See the release notes for all of the details.

Education

Seul/EDU Linux in Education Report. Issue #70 of the Seul/EDU Linux in Education report looks at German efforts to bring open-source software to education, the Vidyakash 2002 online learning conference, and more.

Embedded Systems

Linux Devices Embedded Linux Newsletter. The May 9, 2002 Embedded Linux Newsletter has been published by Linux Devices. Topics include penguins on the North pole, the Hippo Internet phone, real-time Linux sub-kernels, a new ELC membership structure, and more.

Mail Software

Mail filtering with Sentinel. Version 1.2 of an email filtering utility known as Sentinel has been announced. Sentinel works on various Unix operating systems in conjunction with sendmail. Sentinel is licensed under the GPL.

Science

Littlefish . Linux Med News reports that the Littlefish Health Project, a patient information and recall system, has been integrated into the Res Medicinae project.

System Administration

A Batch Job to Add New User IDs (O'Reilly). Arnold Robbins explains how to use the Korn shell to automate systems administration tasks. "A common system administration task is to add new users. In large installations, such as central computing servers at universities or in large companies, adding users is often best performed as a 'batch' job, one that is automated with scripts. Consider, for example, the start of a new semester at a large public university, where there are hundreds, if not thousands, of new students. Creating accounts by hand would be impossible, so we need to automate the task."

Web-site Development

Managing Images With a Web Database Application (O'Reilly). Hugh E. Williams talks about the use of PHP and MySQL for managing image archives on the web. "Web developers often need to store images, sounds, movies, and documents in a database and deliver these to users. In this article, I'll show you how to develop a simple Web database application that allows users to upload and retrieve images, but can easily be adapted to storing files of any type."

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

WaveSurfer 1.4 released. Version 1.4 of the WaveSurfer tool for sound visualization and manipulation. is available. The CHANGES file has not been updated as of this writing.

Web Browsers

Mozilla 1.0 RC2. Release Candidate #2 of the Mozilla browser is available. The release notes mention a plugged security hole, fixes for the 15 most common crashing bugs and 10 freezing bugs, support for CSS2:hover, and more.

Also, see the coverage of this release on MozillaZine.

Desktop Environments

GNOME 2.0 Desktop Snapshot 20020509: 'Cominagetcha'. A new snapshot of GNOME 2.0 has been announced. The 'Cominagetcha' release contains 17 updated modules.

KDE Usability Team Takes First Steps. The KDE Usability Team has made big changes to the Kicker KControl module.

Games

4st Attack (PyGame). This week, the PyGame site features 4st Attack, a stone-connecting game. "The goal of the game is to connect four of stones in a straight line. This can be horizontaly, vertically and even diagonnally."

GUI Packages

FLTK 1.1.0rc2 Now Available. A new version of FLTK, the Fast, Light ToolKit, has been announced. FLTK 1.1.0rc2 features portability fixes, tooltip changes, and bug fixes.

Interoperability

Kernel Cousin Wine #122. Issue #122 of Kernel Cousin Wine covers the Xandros Beta, removal of the Quartz dll, SafeDisc support, the Native user32 dll, trading patches, and more.

Wine release 20020509. A new developer's release of Wine has been announced. Version 20020509 features dll separation work, async I/O improvements, more unit tests, less multimedia code, as well as portability and bug fixes.

Multimedia

GNOME Media 1.547.0 released. A new version of GNOME Media has been released. Version 1.547.0 features general improvements and bug fixes.

Office Applications

GNOME Office becoming more than a name. Progress is being made with the integration of AbiWord into the GNOME environment, according to this message on Gnotices. Included are links to screenshots of AbiWord embedded within Gnumeric and Evolution.

AbiWord 1.0.1 released.. The stable AbiWord release is no longer a stealth product: the AbiWord team has announced the release of AbiWord 1.0.1. See the release notes for details.

AbiWord Weekly News. Issue #91 of the AbiWord Weekly News covers all of the latest AbiWord development issues.

Kernel Cousin GNUe #28. Issue #28 of Kernel Cousin GNUe looks at using GNUe for plant nursery management, problems with GNUe Common and mySQL, the GNUe Application Server, and much more.

Bluefish needs GTK 2 porting help. The Bluefish HTML Editor home page mentions that help is needed for porting Bluefish to the GTK environment2.

Miscellaneous

Nautilus homepage and theme tutorial. A number of resources for the Nautilus file manager are now online on the Nautilus home page.

Kooka Scanner Suite Now With Website (KDE.News). A new web site has been announced for KDE's Kooka. "Kooka is a scanner management suite for KDE with support for Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The Kooka web site offers extensive documentation on Kooka and the KScan library, future project plans, screenshots, and much more."

Languages and Tools

Caml

Caml Weekly News for May 14, 2002. The May 7-14, 2002 Caml Weekly News covers new releases of gmetadom, gdome2-xslt, and lablgtkmathview, and looks at random variables, graphics without open_graph, the FFTW interface, and more.

The Caml Hump. This week's Caml Hump additions include an interface to the FFTW library, gdome2-xslt, gmetadom, lablgtkmathview, Camomile, DBC, Stew, and OCamlMySQL.

Haskell

Haskell Communities and Activities Report. The second edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report has been published. "The idea behind these reports is simple: twice a year, a call goes out to the main Haskell mailing list, inviting all Haskellers to contribute brief summaries of their area of work, be it language design, implementation, type system extensions, standardisation of GUI APIs, applications of Haskell, or whatever. The summaries introduce the area of work, the major achievements over the previous six months, the current hot topics, and the plans for the next six months. They also provide links to further information." (Thanks to Christian Sievers.)

Java

Test flexibly with AspectJ and mock objects (IBM developerWorks). Nicholas Lesiecki discusses unit testing and eXtreme Programming for Java on IBM's developerWorks. "The recent attention to Extreme Programming (XP) has spilled over onto one of its most portable practices: unit testing and test-first design. As software shops have adopted XP's practices, many developers have seen the increase in quality and speed that comes from having a comprehensive unit-test suite. But writing good unit tests takes time and effort."

Developing Highly Distributed Applications with Jtrix (O'Reilly). Nik Silver shows how to make use of Jtrix on O'Reilly's OnJava site. "Jtrix is an open source Java platform for creating highly scalable, distributed, and efficient Web services. This article describes Jtrix, compares it to other Java technologies, and illustrates how to write a Jtrix application -- both a client, and the service it uses."

Perl

Ask Perl 6 (use Perl). It's time to send your Perl 6 questions in. The questions will be answered by the Perl 6 design team, answers will be posted on May 20th.

The Perl You Need To Know - Part 2 (O'Reilly). Stas Bekman illustrates Perl debugging techniques on O'Reilly's perl.com site.

Where Wizards Fear To Tread (O'Reilly). Simon Cozens explains the Perl op tree on perl.com. "So you're a Perl master. You've got XS sorted. You know how the internals work. Hey, there's nothing we can teach you on perl.com that you don't already know. You think? Where Wizards Fear To Tread brings you the information you won't find anywhere else concerning the very top level of Perl hackery."

PHP

PHP 4.2.1 released. Version 4.2.1 of PHP has been announced. This is a bug fix release that addresses a problem with MySQL, among other things. See the Change Log for more information.

PHP Weekly Summary for May 13, 2002. The May 13, 2002 edition of the PHP Weekly Summary covers the new PHP 4.2.1 RC 2, the PHP 4.3.0 release schedule, bug fixes, and more.

Developing Professional Quality Graphs with PHP (Zend). Jason E. Sweat has put together a tutorial that covers the generation of graphics from PHP. "This tutorial is intended for the PHP programmer interested in applying PHP's GD image manipulation to chart data. This tutorial will focus not on the lower level GD calls, but on using the JpGraph libraries to wrap the GD calls."

Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! for May 14. Here's the weekly Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! with news and links for the Python community.

Building basic browser functionality with wxPython (IBM developerWorks). Nicholas Bastin introduces wxPython on IBM's developerWorks. "Embedding a Web browser in your application eliminates the need to worry about which browser a client uses to view your pages, and also allows you to create custom tags that tie the HTML page back to your application."

Cross-compiling Python. K's cluttered loft features an article about the trickeries involved in cross-compiling Python.

"Cross compiling Python is tricky because:

• The compiled python binary is used to compile and install the modules. The parser generator which is linked to some Python libraries is executed during compilation.
• The compiled modules are checked if they can be imported. But they can't be imported because they are not running on the host system.
• These modules are automatically removed which is bad."

The Daily Python-URL. This week, the Daily Python-URL features articles on the European Python and Zope conference, the Wing IDE, the webAppWorkshop, the Python pattern, fun with generators, Coffee, conversation and ZUBB, and more.

Ruby

The Ruby Garden. This week, The Ruby Garden looks at Array.rassoc and Array.assoc for making arrays of arrays, and Float#to_s issues.

The Ruby Weekly News. The Ruby Weekly News has announcements for SOAP4R 1.4.4.1, QuantLib-Ruby 0.3.0, JTTui 0.11.0, Practical Ruby 0.3.3, PageTemplate 0.2.0, REXML 2.3.2, and xample-pp 0.0. Other ruby discussions are also included.

Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!. This week's Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! covers interpreter aliases, concurrency and re-entrancy problems, the grid manager, documentation, and more.

Integrated Development Environments

Phpmole 1.3 released. A new version of the Phpmole IDE, which is used for developing web based and phpgtk based applications, has been released. This version features a new look, a beta interactive debugger, a database navigator/viewer, an html presentation module, and more.

GNUstep Weekly Editorial. The GNUstep Weekly Editorial for May 11, 2002 covers the latest developments to the GNUstep object oriented development environment.

Revision Control Systems

An Introduction to the arch Version Control System (Linux Journal). Linux Journal introduces arch, an alternative to the popular CVS version control system. "One reason for arch's creation was to overcome some weaknesses in existing version control systems, such as the lack of atomic commits, the inability to keep track of file renames and difficulties when working on different branches of a project.

arch also provides support for easily and intelligently merging code from several different branches (e.g., stable, development, feature-test) of a project. Projects and revisions stored in arch have globally unique names, which allows branch and merge operations to span network boundaries."

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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