General Development Archive

“Modern Operating Systems”: Page Replacement Algorithms

Eugenia Loli 2002-02-12 General Development 4 Comments

Yet another excerpt (previous articles here and here) from the well known "Modern Operating Systems" book at InformIT (free registration required): "When a page fault occurs, the operating system has to choose a page to remove from memory to make room for the page that has to be brought in. This sample chapter from Modern Operating Systems looks at a variety of page replacement algorithms designed to tackle this problem." InformIT also features two more excerpts this week: "Multithreading and the C++ Type System" from the "Modern C++ Design" book and "Solaris: Cluster and Complex Design Issues" from the "Designing Solutions with Sun Cluster 3.0" book.

Borland to Ship C++ Builder 6

Eugenia Loli 2002-02-06 General Development 5 Comments

Borland on Friday will ship a new software development tool for C++ programmers. The new version, Borland C++ Builder 6, features support for Web services, allowing developers to build software that is accessible over the Internet via PCs, cell phones and other handheld devices. The cost is $2,999 for the enterprise edition, $999 for the professional edition and $69 for the personal edition. In other development news, Rational Software on Tuesday introduced a new software development tool that is compatible with software from Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems. The software company, which has worked mostly with Microsoft in the past, announced Tuesday that its new XDE Professional v2002 product will work with Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net development tools and IBM's rival WebSphere Studio development tools. The XDE, or extended development environment product, has also been designed to support IBM's Eclipse IDE, software based on Sun's Java technology.

Intel’s C++ Compiler Significantly Faster than GCC

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-26 General Development 27 Comments

"Intel's C++ Compilers for Linux and Windows smoke GNU C and MS Visual C++ in number crunching benchmarks" the article at Open-Magazine suggests. We are not surprised at all, as we already talked about this on OSNews, months ago.

Journal File Systems in Linux

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-25 General Development 1 Comment

"First of all, there is no a clear winner, XFS is better in some aspects or cases, ReiserFS in others, and both are better than Ext2 in the sense that they are comparable in performance (again, sometimes faster, sometimes slightly slower) but they a journaling file systems, and you already know what are their advantages... And perhaps the most important moral, is that Linux buffer/cache is really impressive and affected, positively, all the figures of my compilations, copies and random reads and writes. So, I would say, buy memory and go journaled ASAP..." Read the rest of the 8-pages long article.

Why You Might Want to Try Ruby

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-07 General Development 4 Comments

"Ruby. Perhaps you've heard of it? "Oh, yeah, I think it's one of those new object oriented scripting languages", you say. I know a lot of you might be thinking "Not another new language! I'm perfectly happy with (COBOL/C/cshell/awk/Perl/...); why does the world need another programming language?!", while a few others are thinking 'Cool, a new language to explore'." Read the rest of the article, an introduction to the Ruby programming language, at FreshMeat.

Krusader & Gnumeric 1.0 Released

Eugenia Loli 2002-01-02 General Development 3 Comments

Good news for the Krusader fans, as version 1.0 was released today after 1.5 years of development. Krusader is a KDE/QT-based file manager and being similar to Norton or Midnight Commander it should already have lots of friends among the Linux users. Krusader seems to be today the only real & viable alternative to Konqueror or Nautilus today under a Linux desktop. In a related note, Gnumeric 1.0, the Gnome Office spreadsheet was released recently.

New Versions for Well Known Open Source Software

Eugenia Loli 2001-12-26 General Development No Comments

There is a new version for the unstable build of mySQL 4.01, WindowMaker 0.80 (with some nice new features), GCC 3.03, while KDE released version 2.2.2 for FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems.

Python 2.2 Released

Eugenia Loli 2001-12-23 General Development No Comments

The founder of the Python programming language, Guido van Rossum, writes: "On December 21, just in time to be placed under the Christmas tree, we're issuing the final release of Python 2.2. We're proud of this release, and expect that you'll like it". Read what's new in the new version and other related information.

Eclipse’s First Plugin a Reality

Submitted by Jeff Condon 2001-12-20 General Development No Comments

Eclipse, IBMs open sourced development tool donation (which is now supported by an organization of a number of companies), just got a little stronger as the released their first plugin sub-project. The C and C++ IDE for the Eclipse platform, with focus on Linux development and deployment. On a similar note, developerWorks is offering a trial download for WebSphere Studio Application Developer for Linux which is a pluggable tool-development and integration platform that incorporates the technology found on Eclipse.

BASH Programming Tutorial & ActiveX Introduction Article

Eugenia Loli 2001-12-17 General Development 9 Comments

The New Order web site, recently published two interesting articles. One is a nicely written BASH programming tutorial, and the other one is an introduction article to ActiveX and its surrounding technologies. Wether you are a Unix geek or a Microsoft newbie developer, a visit to New Order's web site would be time well spent.

Bochs Project Releases New Version of their Free x86 Emulator

Eugenia Loli 2001-12-11 General Development 12 Comments

The Bochs IA-32 Emulator Project unveiled a new version of the popular Bochs emulator to the public today, improving on the stability and ground breaking improvements of Bochs 1.2. Bochs 1.3 includes many major enhancements including a powerful menu-based configuration system and networking support for Linux and Windows NT/2000. Other additions in this release include support for ISO-format disk images, improved mouse performance, physical CD-ROM support for all versions of Windows, parallel port emulation, enhanced debugger, and many cpu and device model improvements. Bochs 1.3 also adds native support for Mac OS X and Amiga MorphOS, along with improved support for BeOS.

PHP 4.1.0 Released

Eugenia Loli 2001-12-11 General Development 1 Comment

The new version of the PHP programming language, PHP 4.1.0, includes several other key improvements: A new input interface for improved security (read below), Highly improved performance in general, Revolutionary performance and stability improvements under Windows. The multithreaded server modules under Windows (ISAPI, Apache, etc.) perform as much as 30 times faster under load! We want to thank Brett Brewer and his team in Microsoft for working with us to improve PHP for Windows. Versioning support for extensions. Right now it's barely being used, but the infrastructure was put in place to support separate version numbers for different extensions. The negative side effect is that loading extensions that were built against old versions of PHP will now result in a crash, instead of in a nice clear message. Make sure you only use extensions built with PHP 4.1.0. Turn-key output compression support. Lots of fixes and new functions.

Advanced Filesystem Implementor’s Guide, Part 8

Eugenia Loli 2001-12-08 General Development No Comments

"I'm going to be honest. For this article, I was planning to show you how to get ext3 up and running on your system. Although that's what I said I'd do, I'm not going to do it. Andrew Morton's excellent "Using the ext3 filesystem in 2.4 kernels" page already does a great job of explaining how to ext3-enable your system, so there's no need for me to repeat all the basics here. Instead, I'm going to delve into some meatier ext3 topics, ones that I think you'll find very useful." Part 8 for this great series of articles. Get links for the previous articles here.

A First Look at Kylix 2 Open Edition

Eugenia Loli 2001-12-02 General Development No Comments

"Obviously, Kylix OE is not a moneymaker for Borland. It is a gift to the open source community. That community does not even represent Borland's target developer market. Borland customers are, for the most part, programmers and IT shops firmly entrenched in the Windows world. It's aimed at Delphi users who are branching out from writing for the Windows platform to Linux. Not the other way around." Get the rest of the story at LinuxWorld.

High-Performance Socket Programming on Linux & Windows

Eugenia Loli 2001-11-29 General Development 7 Comments

In last month's column, Dr. Edward G. Bradford, senior programmer at IBM, covered synchronization primitives and gave a reprise on pipes. This month he takes a first look at communication using sockets. Ed demonstrates some techniques for writing a sockets program and shows how his programming techniques perform in various operating system environments.

Reiserfs or ext3: Which Journaling Filesystem is Right for You?

Eugenia Loli 2001-11-29 General Development 19 Comments

"Reiserfs is fast and reliable. The new ext3 is an easy upgrade. Both journal metadata, but ext3 journals data too, but at a big price. Which journaling filesystem is right for you?" The IDG Network discusses which Linux journaling filesystem is right for you. Our Take: Personally, I would definetely go with SGI's XFS.

Advanced Filesystem Implementor’s Guide, Part 7

Eugenia Loli 2001-11-16 General Development 2 Comments

With the 2.4 release of Linux come a host of new filesystem possibilities, including Reiserfs, XFS, JFS, and others. These filesystems sound cool, but what exactly can they do, what are they good at, and exactly how do you go about safely using them in a production Linux environment? Daniel Robbins answers these questions by showing you how to set up these new advanced filesystems under Linux 2.4. In this installment, Daniel takes a look at ext3, a new improved version of ext2 with journaling capabilities. Make sure you read the also incredibly interesting previous articles: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

KDE Studio Gold 3.0 Final Available

Eugenia Loli 2001-11-06 General Development 1 Comment

KDE Studio Gold is a full-fledged IDE for the development of sophisticated C++ applications - including the high utility features you expect from a modern development environment, such as code completion, dynamic syntax highlighting and popup function parameter lookup. Debugging is simplified by tight integration with kdbg in the IDE, and comprehensive documentation is provided. Version 3.0 is now available and shipping. TheKompany added a couple of new features to this final release, which includes an integrated Programmers Calculator and Font Viewer. Demo versions are also available.

Read BeOS BFS Volumes Under Linux

Submitted by Will Dyson 2001-11-04 General Development 6 Comments

Will Dyson wrote in to inform us about the brand new version of his BFS filesystem driver for the Linux 2.4.x kernel. His code is based on Makoto Kato's original work, while there is another, older, version of a BFS driver for kernels 2.2.x already available. These drivers are all read-only and they do not (yet) expose the BeFS's advanced features like attributes and indexes.

Issues with Open Source Development Models

Eugenia Loli 2001-11-03 General Development 3 Comments

"Most senior engineers understand the technical details about what it will take to move Linux or FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD to support enterprise computing environments. What we don't often understand is what the actual competitive advantages of open source systems are, and what the open source communities need to do to help maintain these advantages." The author explains how the two major open source development models work in different ways: the Linux and the *BSD. Read the editorial at BSDToday.