General Development Archive

"It is a surprising fact that anyone studying GNUstep or the Cocoa Framework will notice they are nearly identical to the NEXTSTEP APIs that were defined ten years ago. A decade is an eternity in the software industry. If the framework (and its programming language--Objective C) came through untouched these past ten years, there must be something special about it. And Objective-C has done more than survive; some famous games including Quake and NuclearStrike were developed using Objective-C." Read the introduction to Objective-C at LinuxJournal.

Code Completion is now back, in the new version of SharpDevelop.The forms designer received a major working over and now can handle invisible controls and autogenerates C# and VB.NET code for the forms. Stability overall also has improved. In similar news, Borland Software Corp will increase its support for .NET with development tools the company believes will win corporate backing despite reduced IT spending, Gavin Clarke writes.

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced the intention to release the bulk of its proprietary device driver development tools under a new dual license structure. SciTech’s commercially available graphics driver pack, SciTech SNAP Graphics, currently supports nearly 180 graphics chip sets on multiple OS’es with full 2D acceleration. Access to all existing SciTech SNAP drivers will remain available under SciTech’s commercial license and will not be Open Sourced due to existing NDA’s with chip vendors.

This IBM article shows how J2EE (WebSphere for Linux) and .NET can work together using Web services standards. Specifically it explains how EJBs can interact with COM+ components using Web services standards developed on WebSphere Studio and Visual Studio .Net. You can download WebSphere Studio for Linux. Update: On a related note, Microsoft released its Web Services Development Kit Technology Preview.

This is just a follow-up to our previous story about Apple designing the new Sherlock 3 to be very similar to Watson. We raised the question if this policy (the OS company competing with its own third party developers in the application space) was a good thing or not in the long run. Now the company behind Watson, Karelia, openly speak against Apple's policy and they are planning to port their (great) application to Windows. On a similar note, did anyone got even close to start working on this? Update: Stardock's CEO, Brad Wardell, wrote an editorial related to the question above.

Borland, in the midst of a turnaround after years of financial struggles and strategic missteps, is preparing to go head-to-head against Microsoft next year with new programming tools that allow developers to build software for Microsoft's Windows operating system and its overarching .Net software strategy. Borland's suite of tools, code-named Galileo, will be positioned to compete against Microsoft's popular Visual Studio.Net tool suite, said Ted Shelton, Borland's chief strategy officer. In the meantime, Borland has just released Kylix 3 for Linux.

"Almost a year after it donated some $40 million worth of code and tools, IBM is on the warpath once again, drumming up support for the open-source Eclipse project. Eclipse may not be as well known as some other open-source projects, such as Linux, Mozilla, or Apache. It's certainly not as sexy. At its core, Eclipse provides a common platform, user interface, and plug-in framework for integrating development tools." Read the rest of the story at InternetWeek. We should add that if the Eclipse web site add some easy to find screenshots and become a bit more straightforward of what it is and what it does, instead of corporate blah-blah, surely more people would get interested in. Expect a review of the QNX version of Eclipse, dubbed 'Momentics', in the near future.

Marcelo Tosatti released 2.4.20-pre4 today. Included in the bug fixes and driver updates was the merge of JFS. JFS is IBM's journaled filesystem port from OS/2. JFS had previously been merged into the -ac tree (2.4.18pre9-ac4) and was merged into the 2.5 tree early on (2.5.6). JFS joins ext3 and reiserfs in the 2.4 tree. SGI's XFS is still awaiting inclusion into the stable tree. Read more at KernelTrap.

So, you downloaded the free .NET SDK and compiler but you don't have a good and free IDE for your C# programming? The open source SharpDevelop 0.89 was just released and is available for download: "This release completes a major restructuring of the infrastructure and source code tree. Projects support backend bindings that are not targeting compilers, the object browser has much more functionality than before, folding was re-integrated and a new XML formatting strategy added (for details, see the Changes section). Our feature preview this time: a Windows Forms Designer. Take a look at the tech note and source code - if you have time to spare, help us make it a great open source implementation of a forms designer!"

Here is an overview of assembly language from a PowerPC perspective that contrasts examples for three architectures: ia32, ppc, and ppc64. This article assumes a basic understanding of computer design and of operating systems (system calls, exceptions, process stacks). It contains information that will be useful to PowerPC programmers unfamiliar with assembly as well as programmers who already know IA32 assembly and want to broaden their knowledge.

This GCC release is based on the GCC 3.1 sourcebase, and thus has all the changes in the GCC 3.1 series. In addition, GCC 3.2 has a number of C++ ABI fixes which make its C++ compiler generate binary code which is incompatible with the C++ compilers found in earlier GCC releases, including GCC 3.1 and GCC 3.1.1.

So, you want to write an operating system. We discussed earlier a generic set of considerations that are important, from my experience, for this type of adventure. We proceed to look at solutions to the problem of actually getting started with writing your system: how to do it when you know you don't know what you're doing, making it work before making it work fast, and what to do when things go wrong.

"The ability to share disks, directories, and files over a network is one of the most significant advances in modern computing, reducing local disk space requirements and making it easy for users to collaborate without ending up with hundreds of versions of the same files. Personal computers running Microsoft Windows and Apple's MacOS and Mac OS X inherently support sharing disks and directories with other systems of the same types. Linux and Unix systems traditionally use the NFS network filesystem in order to do the same sort of thing." Read the article at LinuxPlanet.

"Borland Software Corporation today announced Borland Delphi 7 Studio, featuring full support for new and emerging Web Services, integrated model driven development, and preview capabilities for the Microsoft .NET Framework. Using Delphi 7 Studio, the estimated one million Delphi developers can begin developing their skills for .NET and preparing applications for .NET without abandoning their existing work and skills on the Windows platform." Read the rest of the press release at Borland USA.