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DevelopmentGambas - a BASIC Development EnvironmentThe Gambas project (Gambas Almost Means BASic), is a BASIC language interpreter and development environment that was written by Benoît Minisini. The project was started in February of 2002, according to the change log. The code has been released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.
I want to clear up any misunderstanding immediately. Gambas does not try to be compatible with Visual Basic, and will never be. I'm convinced that its syntax and internals are far better than the one's of its proprietary cousin ;-)
I took from Visual Basic what I found useful : the Basic language, the development environment, and the easiness to quickly make programs with user interfaces.
The Differences From VB document has a lot of information that is useful for VB developers who are interested in using Gambas. There is a Gambas visual introduction document which provides a nice tour of the project. The features section of the introduction explains the architecture of Gambas in more detail, and the FAQ document answers common questions and has some installation information. Version 1.0 of Gambas was released this week, quickly followed by version 1.0.1, which has fixes for a few newly discovered bugs. One piece at a time, open-source developers are building Linux equivalents of the various Windows desktop components, Gambas is well positioned to fill the Visual Basic slot. It should be useful for luring a few Windows users who like the 'cartoon programming' method of software development over to Linux.
System Applications Audio Projects Planet CCRMA ChangesThe latest changes from the Planet CCRMA audio utility packaging project include a bunch of new packages for Fedora Core 3, a small list of failed builds for Fedora Core 3 with a request for assistance, and more.
Database Software Firebird 1.5.2 is ReleasedVersion 1.5.2 of the Firebird database is out. See the release notes for change information.
PostgreSQL 8.0.0 Release Candidate 3 announcedRelease Candidate 3 of PostgreSQL 8.0.0 is available. "Baring *any* coding changes (documentation != code) over the next week or so, we *hope* that this will the final Release Candidate before Full Release, with that being aimed for the 15th (or earlier)."
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe December 28, 2004 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL database information.
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe January 4, 2005 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is available with the latest PostgreSQL database resources and events.
Libraries FreeImage 3.5.3 released (SourceForge)Version 3.5.3 of FreeImage, a library for supporting the PNG, BMP, JPEG, TIFF and other image formats, is available. "Release 3.5.3 is a maintenance release that is worth the try : the library has been updated with the new zlib (1.2.2), libpng (1.2.8) and libtiff (3.7.1) libraries. This means better performance and less bugs !"
liblrdf-0.4.0 releaseVersion 0.4.0 of liblrdf, lightweight RDF library with special support for LADSPA (audio effect) plugins, is out. Changes include SWIG support and better generic id creation.
Mail Software Bogofilter 0.93.3 releasedVersion 0.93.3 of Bogofilter, a spam filter, is out. "The 0.93.3 release of bogofilter brings with it two significant changes. First bogoutil now supports multiple options for working with the Berkeley DB database environment. "bogoutil --help" lists the following options:..."
Networking Tools Click 1.4.2 Modular Router is outVersion 1.4.2 of Click, a modular router, is available. "A Click router is an interconnected collection of modules called elements; elements control every aspect of the routers behavior, from communicating with devices to packet modification to queueing, dropping policies and packet scheduling. Individual elements can have surprisingly powerful behavior, and its easy to write new ones in C++. You write a router configuration by gluing elements together with a simple language."
Peer to Peer XBT Client 0.4.0 released (SourceForge)Version 0.4.0 of the XBT client is out with numerous changes and bug fixes. "This client is an implementation of the BitTorrent peer to peer file sharing protocol in C++. It's designed for low CPU- and RAM usage, an easy-to-use interface and high download speeds. Both Linux (source only) and Windows versions are available."
Printing Common UNIX Printing System 1.1.23Version 1.1.23 of CUPS has been announced. "CUPS 1.1.23 is a bug fix release which fixes two security vulnerabilities reported by Daniel J. Bernstein. The new release also contains other minor bug and documentation fixes that are not security related."
Web Site Development IRM 1.5.0 now available! (SourceForge)Version 1.5.0 of IRM has been announced. "IRM is a Web-based asset and problem tracking system built for IT departments and helpdesks. It keeps detailed information, both hardware and software, about each computer, as well as a complete history of all work requests ever placed. The IRM development team is proud to announce the release of IRM 1.5.0, the first release of a new line of development for IRM, both in terms of the code produced, the development process, and the frequency of releases."
MidCOM 2.0.0 releasedVersion 2.0.0 of MidCOM, the Midgard Components Framework, is out. "The Midgard Project has released the final stable version of the Midgard Components Framework 2.0, now based on the filesystem, not on the Database. Significant performance improvements come out of this."
mnoGoSearch 3.2.29 is availableVersion 3.2.29 of the mnoGoSearch web site search engine has been released. It features bug fixes and performance improvements. See the Change History document for details.
A Move Towards Unified Blogging (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop mentions the release of Drivel 1.3.0, a LiveJournal blog posting tool. "This marks the first release with support for posting to Blogger and Movable Type journals, giving GNOME users an integrated tool for accessing both of these systems while maintaing the smooth interface, syntax highlighting, and spell-checking that LiveJournal users have enjoyed for months. As this is a development release, testing and bug reports would be very much appreciated."
Desktop Applications Audio Applications Ardour 0.9beta22 releasedVersion 0.9beta22 of Ardour, a multi-track audio recorder, is available. "With over a hundred notable new items, and only a handful of bug fixes between this and 0.99, this is a significant release of Ardour."
Ceres V0.41 and Snd-ls V0.9.1.5 are availableNew versions of Ceres and Snd-ls are out. Ceres is a sonogram display and sound effects application, Snd-ls is a sound editor.
Business Applications OpenPSA 1.10 releasedStable version 1.10 of OpenPSA has been announced, it features major improvements to all of the component modules. "OpenPSA is a free web-based package for managing consultancies and software companies. It includes project management, hour reporting, help desk, group calendar, document management and customer relationship management."
Data Visualization Grace-5.1.18 releasedVersion 5.1.18 of Grace, a WYSIWYG 2D plotting tool for the X Window System and M*tif, has been announced. The parser now supports concatenation of quoted strings and numerical expressions, and some bugs have been fixed.
Desktop Environments Dropline Gnome 2.8.2 Released! (GnomeDesktop)Dropline Gnome 2.8.2 has been announced. "After a long delay, an RC and a lot of bug squashing we are finally ready to put our names on this first official release of Dropline GNOME as a community project."
GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced in the last two weeks:
KDE CVS-Digest (KDE.News)The December 24, 2004 edition of the KDE CVS-Digest is out with the following content summary: "Kexi has a new Reports module. KPDF adds a presentation mode. KJSEmbed adds KScript which allows applications to use Javascript as scripting language. Umbrello adds entity relationship diagrams."
KDE CVS-Digest (KDE.News)The December 31, 2004 edition of the KDE CVS-Digest is online, here's the content summary: "Krita implements pasting, layers and autogradient. media kioslave now handles cameras. KGeography adds more maps. Special year end retrospective of the KDE development effort."
KDE Software AnnouncementsThe following new KDE software has been announced in the last two weeks:
Xfce 4.2 Release Candidate 3 releasedRelease Candidate 3 of the Xfce lightweight desktop environment is out. "The third Release Candidate, which provides several bugfixes over the second Release Candidate, is a lightweight desktop environment with several features not found in the Xfce 4.0 series, including a brand new session manager, keyboard shortcut and desktop menu graphical editors, multihead support, "kiosk mode" support, a desktop menu plugin for the panel, CUPS and BSD-LPR printing support, and a new icon theme."
Electronics gEDA NewsThe latest releases from the gEDA project include new versions of gaf, Gerber Viewer, and some hardware projects that were built with the gEDA tools including The GNU Software Radio.
Open Collector ReleasesThe latest new electronics applications on Open Collector include FreePCB 0.943, I2C2P 20041227, Electric 8.01, and more.
Financial Applications SQL-Ledger 2.4.7 releasedVersion 2.4.7 of SQL-Ledger, a web-based accounting system, has been released. Changes include string formatting for transaction printing, bug fixes, and more.
Fonts and Images Open Clip Art Library 0.09 releasedVersion 0.99 of the Open Clip Art Library is available. "This version contains 3104 unique clip art submissions with an emphasis on the past holiday season."
Graphics Gnofract4D 2.5 releasedVersion 2.5 of Gnofract4D, a Python-based fractal image generator, is out. This version adds support for hypercomplex numbers.
Interoperability Wine TrafficIssues number 254 and number 255 of Wine Traffic are online with the latest Wine project happenings.
Music Applications BEAST/BSE v0.6.4 announcedVersion 0.6.4 of BEAST/BSE, the BEdevilled Audio SysTem and the Bedevilled Sound Engine music composition system, is out. "This new development series of BEAST comes with a lot of the internals redone, many new GUI features and a sound generation back-end separated from all GUI activities."
MusE 0.7.1pre2 has been releasedVersion 0.7.1pre2 of Muse, a MIDI and audio sequencer application, has been released. Changes include the inclusion of the new SimpleDrums 0.2 softsynth, bug fixes, and more.
Sfront 0.88 releasedVersion 0.88 of Sfront, a translator for converting MP4-SA files into C programs that generate audio, is out. "this release keeps sfront networking in sync with the IETF Internet-Drafts that define RTP MIDI (the RTP payload format for MIDI)."
Web Browsers Epiphany celebrates its second birthday! (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop.org celebrates the second birthday of Epiphany. "We have set ambitious goals for the next stable release, Epiphany 1.6, that will coincide with GNOME 2.10. To whet your appetite a little: if all goes according to plan, the Bookmarks menu in 1.6 will be able to dynamically show topic submenus and subdivisions, based on the topics the bookmarks belong to. We are soliciting the help of interested coders, designers, documentation writers, bug triagers and translators from the community to help us get there. The 1.6 roadmap shows the plans and indicates their progress."
Miscellaneous Annoucing Pooter 3.1Version 3.1 of Pooter, a Personal Information Manager (PIM) is out. "As well as a continuation of the development of a cross platform version, the 3.1 release has additional versions for Gnu/Linux only. One uses the Simple Look and Feel Program (Slaf) to provide a choice that includes KDE and Gnome, the other uses the Charva windowing toolkit for a version that runs in a terminal emulator or even without XWindows."
Languages and Tools Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe December 28, 2004 edition of the Caml Weekly News is online with a new round of Caml language articles.
Caml Weekly NewsThe Caml Weekly News for December 28, 2004 through January 4, 2005 is online with a new summary of Caml language development activity.
Java ONJava 2004 in Review: Popular Articles (O'ReillyNet)O'Reilly has compiled a collection of popular articles from the ONJava site in 2004.
Towards Bug-Free Code (O'ReillyNet)Ashwin Jayaprakash discusses code debugging in Java 1.5. "Test-driven development sometimes sounds better than it turns out to be. Early decisions to tightly couple functional parts of your system can make it a lot less amenable to testing than it ought to be. As Ashwin Jayaprakash shows, J2SE 5.0's generics make working with abstract classes and interfaces easier than it used to be, which encourages loose coupling and facilitates testing."
The Hidden Gems of Jakarta Commons, Part 1 (O'ReillyNet)Timothy M. O'Brien explores Jakarta Commons in an O'Reilly article. "The Jakarta Commons has a wide-ranging collection of handy classes that can save you the trouble of reinventing the wheel yet again. In this new series, Tim O'Brien looks at some of the more overlooked parts of the Commons and what you can do with them."
Jini: Out of the Bottle and Into the Box (O'Reilly)Daniel H. Steinberg looks at Jini on O'Reilly. "This is not just another article championing a niche technology; it is a tempered rant on why Jini could be seen as central to the future health of Java. We can draw many lessons from the success of web services and from Apple's (soon to be renamed) Rendezvous technology, and we can find many opportunities on the desktop, in the enterprise, and on devices. Everywhere you see a JVM, picture a Jini-enabled device."
Lisp 2004 Lisp TimelineA 2004 Lisp Timeline has been assembled, take a look to see what progress was made in the Lisp arena over the past year.
SBCL 0.8.18 releasedVersion 0.8.18 of Steel Bank Common Lisp has been released. "This version features improvements to shared objects and FFI, support for Solaris 10, and several bug fixes."
CL-PPCRE 1.0.0 releasedVersion 1.0.0 of CL-PPCRE is available. "This version doesn't add new features, but recognizes that the system is stable enough for general usage. CL-PPCRE is a Perl-compatible, fast, portable regular expression library written in Common Lisp. The library also supports a sexp-based syntax for specifying regular expressions."
Perl This Fortnight in Perl 6 (O'Reilly)The December 7-20, 2004 edition of This Fortnight in Perl 6 is online with the latest Perl 6 news.
Building a 3D Engine in Perl, Part 2 (O'Reilly)Geoff Broadwell continues his series on building a 3D engine in Perl with part two. "This time, I'll discuss rotating and animating the view, SDL event and keyboard handling, and compensating for frame rate variations. As a bonus, I'll demonstrate some real-world refactoring, including a conversion from procedural to (weakly) object-oriented code."
PHP A Note on Security in PHPThe PHP site has a new note on PHP security that PHP users should read. "A recent Web Worm known as NeverEverSanity exposed a mistake in the input validation in the popular phpBB message board application. Their highlighting code didn't account for double-urlencoded input correctly. Without proper input validation of untrusted user data combined with any of the PHP calls that can execute code or write to the filesystem you create a potential security problem."
Python Kamaelia's Axon 1.0.1 releasedVersion 1.0.1 of Axon is out with new documentation. "Axon is a collection of pure python modules from the Kamaelia project which allow you to build concurrent systems in a compositional manner using communicating python generators. Components are python generators are augmented by inbox and outbox queues (lists) for communication in a CSP like fashion."
Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!The December 25, 2004 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online.
Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!The December 30, 2004 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is out with the week's Python language news.
python-dev SummaryThe November 11-15, 2004 edition of the python-dev Summary is out with the summary of the python-dev mailing list traffic for that period.
Urwid 0.8.6 announcedVersion 0.8.6 of Urwid, the curses-based UI library for Python, is out. "This version of Urwid changes the default foreground and background for areas of the screen with no attributes. You may need to AttrWrap(..) some of your widgets for your program to look the same." See below for the full list of changes.
Scheme Better programming through effective list handling (IBM developerWorks)Jonathan Bartlett works with linked lists under Scheme in an IBM developerWorks article. "Singly linked lists are a powerful abstraction that allow programmers to represent numerous types of data; extending those lists to handle arbitrary data types can offer effective tools for processing data. In this article, we look at these processes and examine the Lisp variation Scheme, an easy-to-use list-oriented language that delivers list-manipulation capabilities without the complexities of C."
XML Amara XML Toolkit 0.9.1Version 0.9.1 of the Python-based Amara XML Toolkit is out with bug fixes and other improvements.
Mapping and Markup, Part 2 (O'Reilly)John E. Simpson continues his series on XML and GIS with part two. "In Part 1 of this "XML Tourist" feature, I discussed some basic ingredients of a Geographic Information System (GIS) and introduced you to an XML-based, web-delivered application for representing GIS data: the Geography Markup Language, or GML. This month, we'll delve deeper into GML itself--starting with a brief further look into what distinguishes a true GIS from other tools for rendering two- or three-dimensional spaces on a computer monitor."
XML Security: Manage identities more effectively with SPML (IBM developerWorks)Manish Verma explains SPML on IBM developerWorks. "Gain a basic understanding of what Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) is and how it works. After an explanation of SPML's role in the management of the identity lifecycle, this article guides you through an actual working SPML scenario, using OpenSPML. Along the way, the author explains the architecture and design of SPML. Ultimately, you learn to appreciate the usefulness of this technology, and are equipped to participate in the implementation of the standard."
Cross Assemblers gputils 0.13.0 ReleasedVersion 0.13.0 of gputils, a collection of tools for Microchip PIC microcontrollers, has been released. Here are the change notes: "Added many new processors. Added support for extended 18xx mode. Fixed many bugs."
Emulators Write emulator-friendly Linux code (IBM developerWorks)Peter Seebach writes code with emulation in mind. "Computers have been emulating other computers for a long time, often to access a legacy application or to use applications written for a popular OS on a system with a more stable, responsive OS. As Linux grows in popularity, developers need to examine their options when planning binaries that will run on non-Linux systems. This article examines what emulators do and looks at hardware and software emulation issues in detail."
IDEs KDevelop TechNotes Issue #4 (KDE.News)KDE.News has announced the availability of Issue #4 of the KDevelop TechNotes. "This issue describes code navigation in the KDevelop IDE. Read on to learn about the most effective ways to navigate your code with keyboard shortcuts, context menus and "Quick Open..." wizards. The article also gives some useful information about toolview management with keyboard and also describes code navigation features available only to C++ developers."
Graphical Scripting with Kommander (KDE.News)KDE.News mentions a tutorial on the Kommander IDE. ""Graphical Scripting with Kommander" takes us through the creation of a graphical interface for Konstruct, a tool for downloading, configuring and installing KDE from source packages. The article also lists some of the exciting developments coming to Kommander in the near future."There is also a new A Kommander crash course available online.
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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![[Gambas]](/images/ns/gambas.jpg)
The project aims to resemble, and improve upon, the capabilities of Microsoft's Visual Basic.
The Gambas