Development

SCons, a Software Construction Tool

SCons is a software build tool that is intended to replace the common utility Make. It is loosely based on CONS, another build tool.

The SCons FAQ page says: "SCons is implemented as a Python script and set of modules, and SCons "configuration files" are actually executed as Python scripts. This gives SCons many powerful capabilities not found in other software build tools."

Some of the SCons features include:

• Cross-platform operation.
• Python-based configuration scripts for solving software build problems with a powerful language.
• Automatic dependency analysis, no need for make depend/make clean.
• Support for C, C++, FORTRAN, Java, Yacc, and Lex.
• Extensible, support for other languages and file types can be added.
• Support for fetching files via SCCS, RCS, CVS, BitKeeper and Perforce.
• Works with timestamps and MD5 signatures.
• Better parallel build support compared to Make.
• Built-in Autoconf-like support for working with #include files, libraries, functions and typedefs.
• Global view of all dependencies, multiple build passes are not necessary.
• Can share pre-built files in a cache, this speeds up multiple builds.

SCons is divided into three source packages.

• scons: The basic SCons installation and utility tools.
• scons-local: A component that is intended to be included with other software packages that are built using SCons.
• scons-src: The complete SCons source distribution tree, useful for those who wish to build SCons itself.

A number of different companies and projects are now using SCons for building software.

For more information, see the online SCons Documentation. Downloads of SCons are availalble on the SCons page at SourceForge. SCons has been released under the MIT license.

Version 0.90 has been released, the authors claim that due to their software building methodology, SCons is already quite stable. A 1.0 release is coming soon. Maybe its time for someone to try setting the Linux kernel up to build under SCons.

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System Applications

Audio Projects

Linux Audio Workstation 1.1 released

The Linux Audio Workstation distribution has released version 1.1, named "message in a bottle". This release works with RedHat 7.2, 8.0, and 9 and features ALSA upgrades, documentation pages for all audio applications, and more.

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Database Software

JDO Persistence, Part 2 (O'ReillyNet)

O'Reilly continues its excerpt series on JDO persistence with part two. "In part two in this three-part series of excerpts on JDO persistence from Java Database Best Practices, author George Reese covers basic JDO persistence best practices for transaction management and query control."

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MySQL FULLTEXT Searching (O'ReillyNet)

Joe Stump shows how to do FULLTEXT searching with MySQL. "Have you ever wanted to search text stored in your database, but couldn't figure out how to do it efficiently? Are you lazy like me and don't enjoy maintaining reverse indexes, dictionaries, and word scores? You're in luck. The release of MySQL 4.0 has made searching text stored in databases available to the masses."

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PostgreSQL Weekly News

The June 26, 2003 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News has been published with the week's roundup of PostgreSQL database news.

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Mail Software

SpamAssassin Milter 0.2.0 released

Version 0.2.0 of the SpamAssassin Milter Plugin is available. The change summary says: "Lots of new features: Spam can be redirected to a separate email address. Arbitrary netblocks can be excluded from scanning. You can now pass custom arguments to spamc without recompiling. Sends extra headers to spamc to mimic the ones the local sendmail adds. The manpage should now be readable on all OSes. And some minor bugfixes concerning messages with no headers and localhost mail submission."

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Defending Your Site Against Spam (O'Reilly)

Dru Nelson discusses Spam filtering on O'Reilly. "Like so many other people out on the Internet, I get unsolicited commercial email or "spam". Until recently, I could handle spam by just deleting it or using email aliases. Unfortunately, my server was rendered useless by a spam attack launched by an unknown spammer. The experience forced me to improve my spam defenses. In two articles, I will share the research and results of my effort to implement an anti-spam system. In this first installment, I will briefly cover various anti-spam systems and the system I chose, a network level defense. In the next installment, I'll dig deeper into the details of an implementation with qmail. (The information is general enough that it could be applied to other email systems such as Postfix or Sendmail.)"

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Medical Software

OpenEMR 2.0.0 Release (LinuxMedNews)

Version 2.0.0 of OpenEMR has been released. "OpenEMR is a modular, HIPAA compliant, Open Source, cross-platform Electronic Medical Records system (EMRS) developed by Synitech Incorporated. OpenEMR runs under Apache or IIS, PHP and MySQL, and includes advanced authorization and auditing functionality, automatic timeouts, group-based user configuration, extensive logging, and supports patient-requested file changes."

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Networking Tools

Network programming with the Twisted framework, Part 1 (IBM developerWorks)

David Mertz looks at Twisted on IBM's developerWorks. "Twisted is an increasingly popular pure-Python framework for programming network services and applications. While there are a large number of loosely coupled modular components within Twisted, a central concept to the framework is the idea of non-blocking asynchronous servers. In this article, David introduces you to this style of programming -- a novel one for developers accustomed to threading or forking servers, but one capable of great efficiency under heavy loads."

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Printing

LinuxPrinting.org news

The latest changes on LinuxPrinting.org include support for the Canon LBP-470, HP OfficeJet 4105, HP OfficeJet 4115, HP OfficeJet 4110, and HP PSC 2175 printers, and improvements to the Samsung GDI printer driver.

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Security

Sussen 0.4 released

Version 0.4 of Sussen, a client for the Nessus security scanner, has been released. This release adds an embedded MySQL server backend, customizable report generation capabilities, bug fixes, and more.

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Web Site Development

mnoGoSearch 3.2.12 released

Version 3.2.12 of mnoGoSearch, a web site search engine, has been released. This release features the ability to create and drop the database structure, as well as several bug fixes. See the Change Log document for details.

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Issue Handler 0.8.16 released (ZopeMembers)

Version 0.8.16 of Issue Handler, an information management application for Zope, has been released. "This release features minor feature enhancements".

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Scratchy 0.5.1 released

Scratchy is a Python-based Apache log file report generator. "Scratchy is a set of scripts to parse Apache web server log files and extract useful information. From this data, Scratchy will create HTML reports so that website administrators can easily view the information and determine trends and their typical audience."

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Silva 0.9.2 released! (ZopeMembers)

ZopeMembers has an announcement for Silva release 0.9.2. The list of new features includes: a revised user interface, a new metadata architecture, text is now stored as unicode, indexing is now done with the Zope catalog, and performance improvements.

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Top Ten Tomcat Configuration Tips (O'ReillyNet)

Jason Brittain and Ian F. Darwin write about the configuration of Tomcat on O'Reilly. "Now that writing Java web applications has become a common way to create and deploy new web content, people around the globe are finding the Jakarta Tomcat servlet and JSP container useful. It's free, it's multiplatform, it's rich in features, it's rapidly evolving and improving, and it's never been more popular."

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ZShellScripts v0.41 is out with Ruby support (ZopeMembers)

Version 0.41 of ZShellScripts has been announced. "ZShellScripts unifies the Zope notion of scripting by allowing scripts to be written in a bunch of different languages. This version features Ruby support,meaning that you can now write scripts in Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Lisp, or Bash and have them executed from within Zope, with a more or less semi-transparent access to Zope objects and variables."

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Zope 2.6.2 Beta 3 Released (ZopeMembers)

Versions 2.6.2 Beta 3 of Zope has been released. Changes include bug fixes, Python 2.2 compatibility fixes, several back-port fixes, and more.

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ZTimeReg 1.0 Released (ZopeMembers)

ZTimeReg is a Zope product that lets employees register time spent on customers and projects. Version 1.0 stable was just released.

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ZWiki 0.20.0 released (ZopeMembers)

Version 0.20.0 of Zwiki, a Zope-based Web Wiki, has been released. The change summary says: "Simpler page types, smarter message handling, auto subscription option; mail, skin and miscellaneous bugfixes; python 2.1 or greater now required."

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Web Services

High-impact Web tier clustering, Part 1 (IBM developerWorks)

Sing Li looks at several Java-based web services packages on IBM's developerWorks. "As the J2EE platform has matured, it has opened up the opportunity to deploy commodity servers in networked cluster configurations for scaling of Web services and Web applications at the Web tier. These commodity servers, interconnected through commodity LAN hardware, can provide cost-effective clustering solutions. The last piece of the clustering puzzle is in the software. In this series, Sing Li examines three open source software substrates that can enable high-impact Web tier clustering, beginning with JavaGroups."

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Miscellaneous

Gled 1.2.0 released

Version 1.2.0 of Gled is available. "Gled is an implementation of a hierarchic server-proxy-client-viewer model written in C++ and offering a mixture of object oriented framework and toolkit." The Gled status page says: "Gled v1.2 is a functional base upon which higher-level functionality can be built. Minimal changes in the core implementation are expected. Gled as an OO framework/toolkit is stable enough to allow development of user classes and applications."

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

Ardour 0.9 beta 1 released

A Slackware Linux package for version 0.9 beta 1 of Ardour, a multi-track audio recording application, has been released. This is the initial release of Ardour. "I am happy to announce that the first public tarball release of Ardour, numbered 0.9beta1, is now available for download. This very much a beta release, there are still many bugs to be fixed before 1.0 release scheduled for late July/early August."

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BEAST/BSE 0.5.3 released

Version 0.5.3 of BEAST/BSE, the Bedevilled Audio SysTem and the Bedevilled Sound Engine, are available. BSE is "a library for music composition, audio synthesis and sample manipulation". "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 any GUI activities. The most outstanding new features are the track editor which allowes for easy selection of synthesizers or samples as track sources, loop support and unlimited UnDo/ReDo capabilities."

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Glame 1.0.1 released

Version 1.0.1 of Glame, an audio editor, is available. This release adds support for importing mp3 and Ogg Vorbis audio files.

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Desktop Environments

KDE Traffic #56 is Out

Issue #56 of KDE Traffic is out. The KDE.News summary says: "This week we have some news about LinuxTag, a fun and interesting little contest that I hope a certain developer has a sense of humor about, some news about KOffice (thanks Jürgen!) and more."

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KDE-CVS-Digest

The June 27, 2003 KDE-CVS-Digest is out, here's the summary: "Multimedia gets some attention, with fixes to aRts and artsbuilder. KGhostview now has a full screen mode. Work starts on a BIDI mode for Kate. Cervisia, the GUI frontend for CVS, now has an SSH password authentication dialog. KMail encryption plugins as well as IMAP support is improved. Plus bug fixes and improvements in Kopete, KHTML, KWin and many others."

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YAGnoBS, GCipher, Heartbeat, & GNOME 2.0 turns 1 (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org has published a multiple announcement for new versions of the YAGNobs GNOME build script, and the Heartbeat system monitoring tool, and GCipher.

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Final Modules List for the GNOME 2.4 Desktop Release (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org reports on the contents of the GNOME 2.4 Desktop Release. "Here is the final modules list for the GNOME 2.4 Desktop Release! It was a very tough process, as anyone who watched the d-d-l threads knows, because all of the modules proposed for inclusion are top-notch, brilliant pieces of GNOME software."

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Games

Pygame updates

The Pygame site features new versions of Pytego and Pathological.

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Graphics

GIMP 1.3.16 Released (GnomeDesktop)

The GIMP version 1.3.16 has been announced and comes with lots of new features.

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GUI Packages

SPTK 2.0a3 available

Version 2.0a3 of SPTK, the Simply Powerful ToolKit has been released, it features bug fixes and some improved widgets.

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Interoperability

Samba 3.0.0 beta2 released

Samba 3.0.0 beta2 has been released. "The Samba Team is proud to announce the availability of the second beta release of the Samba 3.0.0 code base. While we are significantly closer to the final release, you should be reminded that this is a non-production release provided for testing only."

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Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News

The June 29, 2003 edition of the AbiWord Weekly News is out with the latest AbiWord word processor news. "The remainders of GUADEC, the death of the hash downloader, a new preferences mock-up, 2.0 beta, anti-abi advertising, Mac OS X and that has nothing to do with the more interesting stories, like Linux going to Congo schools and Microsoft using DRM to lockout other office competitors, all of this and screenshots are waiting within."

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Web Browsers

Epiphany 0.7.2 released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.7.2 of the Epiphany web browser for GNOME has been announced, many code changes and bug fixes are included.

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Demonstration of Robin Remote XUL Desktop Available (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine reports on a remote XUL desktop environment called Robin, the Remote Operating System Build in Netscape.

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The Future of Mozilla Application Development (O'ReillyNet)

O'Reilly covers recent changes to the Mozilla development roadmap. "In April, mozilla.org announced a major update to its development roadmap. Some of the changes in the new document represent a fundamental shift in the direction and goals of the Mozilla community. To help make sense of how these changes will affect Mozilla application developers, this article provides an analysis of the new roadmap and also demonstrates how to convert an existing XPFE-based application into an application that uses the new XUL toolkit."

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Mozilla 1.4 Released (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine reports on the release of version 1.4 of the Mozilla web browser. "This release offers several enhancements over Mozilla 1.3.1, including NTLM authentication support (Windows only), bookmarks improvements, click-and-drag image and table resizing in Composer, smooth scrolling (disabled by default), junk mail improvements and proxy auto-config failover."

Comments (6 posted)

Netscape 7.1 Released (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine has an announcement for the newly released Netscape 7.1 web browser. "Netscape Communications Corporation today released its new Netscape 7.1 browser, which is based on Mozilla 1.4. This version — codenamed Buffy during development — offers several new features, including automatic image resizing, which shrinks large images to fit in the browser window, and Find As You Type, a tool that allows users to search for links or text on a webpage just by typing."

Comments (1 posted)

2003-06-24 Release of WaMCom Available (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine has an announcement for a new release of WaMCom, the Web and Mail Communicator. "WaMCom is a distribution of Mozilla 1.3.1 that incorporates 480 additional trunk bug fixes and also some extra features that are not yet part of the Mozilla Application Suite."

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Mozilla Status Update

The June 27, 2003 Mozilla Status Update is out. "This status update contains news on Mozilla 1.4 Release Candidate 3, the Mozilla 1.5 Alpha schedule, Composer, Mozilla Thunderbird, ChatZilla, tabbed browsing, the DOM Inspector and more."

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Multiple Mozilla Staff Meeting Minutes

The minutes of the Mozilla.org staff meetings from June 16 and June 23, 2003 are available for your inspection.

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Miscellaneous

Peacock 0.6.1 released

Version 0.6.1 of Peacock, an HTML Editor for GTK+/GNOME, has been released. New features include find/replace, a shift of file operations to the GnomeVFS architecture, and GtkHTML preview click functionality.

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Languages and Tools

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The July 1, 2003 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with the latest Caml language development news.

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Java

Using the Jakarta Commons, Part 1 (O'ReillyNet)

Vikram Goyal writes about the Jakarta Commons on O'Reilly. "Ever find yourself thinking "Someone's surely solved this problem before?" That's the beauty of open source. In this first of three articles, Vikram Goyal explores the Jakarta Commons, mature and well-defined reusable Java components."

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Lisp

SBCL 0.8.1 released

Version 0.8.1 of Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is available.

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Perl

This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

The June 23-29, 2003 edition of This Week on perl5-porters has hit the virtual street. "This week's p5p summary is going to be a bit unusual : a few very long threads will be summarized (logically) in longer paragraphs. Read about hashing algorithm vulnerabilities, new proposed syntax, CHECK and INIT blocks, and other unlittle things."

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This week on Perl 6

Two editions of This week on Perl 6 have been published. The summary for the June 22, 2003 report says: "Continuation Passing Shenanigans, evil dlopen() tricks, and controlling method dispatch dominate perl6-internals and perl6-language, according to fearless summarizer Piers Cawley."

The June 29, 2003 summary says: "Exceptions, continuations, patches, and reconstituted flying cheeseburgers all dominated discussion on perl6-internals and perl6-language, according to summarizer Piers Cawley. No kidding."

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Perl 6 Design Philosophy

O'Reilly has published an excerpt from the book Perl 6 Essentials. "Perl 6 Essentials is the first book to offer a peek into the next major version of the Perl language. It covers the development of Perl 6 syntax as well as Parrot, the language-independent interpreter developed as part of the Perl 6 design strategy. In this excerpt from Chapter 3 of the book, the authors take an in-depth look of some of the most important principles of natural language and their impact on the design decisions made in Perl 6."

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Power Regexps, Part II

Simon Cozens continues his series on Perl regular expressions with Part II. "In the previous article, we looked at some of the more intermediate features of regular expressions, including multiline matching, quoting, and interpolation. This time, we're going to look at more-advanced features. We'll also look at some modules that can help us handle regular expressions."

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PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for June 30, 2003

The PHP Weekly Summary for June 30, 2003 is out. Topics include: PHP 5 beta test, Apache 2 support, preg_match_*, Bundling libxml2 (continued), SQLlite extension, PHP 4.4, Major CVS changes.

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Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!

The Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for June 30, 2003 is out, with news and links for the Python community.

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Scheme

Scheme Weekly News

The June 30, 2003 edition of the Scheme Weekly News is out. Take a look for the latest Scheme language news.

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Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

The June 30, 2003 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL is out with the weeks' Tcl/Tk development news.

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XML

Unofficial XML-RPC Errata

Fredrik Lundh has published an Unofficial XML-RPC Errata document. "This is an unofficial errata, intended to clarify certain details in the XML-RPC specification, as well as hint at "best practices" to use when designing your own XML-RPC implementations. This errata is mostly based on real-life experiences from early adopters and toolkit implementors (filtered through the brain of one such early adopter/implementor)."

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XULMaker 0.50 Released (MozillaZine)

According to MozillaZine, version 0.50 of XULMaker, a visual XUL application builder, is available. "This release includes support for the complete set of XUL elements, attributes and values."

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The Open Applications Group Integration Specification (IBM developerWorks)

Michael Rowell inspects The Open Applications Group Integration Specification on IBM's developerWorks. "The Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) is an effort to provide a canonical business language for information integration. It uses XML as the common alphabet for defining business messages, and for identifying business processes (scenarios) that allow businesses and business applications to communicate. Not only is OAGIS the most complete set of XML business messages currently available, but it also accommodates the additional requirements of specific industries by partnering with various vertical industry groups."

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Web-based XML Editing with W3C XML Schema and XSLT, Part 2 (O'Reilly)

Ali Mesbah and Arjan Vermeij continue their series on web-based XML editing with Part Two. "This article describes a concept in which elements can be inserted into an XML instance document through an automatically created form-based GUI, based on the XML Schema of the instance document." You may want to start with the first article.

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How (Not) to Grow a Technology (O'Reilly)

Kendall Grant Clark discusses the growth of the XML standard on O'Reilly. "In this article I consider the two most common ways of growing XML technologies, particularly in the context of standards bodies and the XML development community. While these two methods are well-known, I draw my inspiration from an XML-DEV posting by Roger Costello. His post suggests that there are two ways in which a technology may be developed: by committee or by "the market." In the committee case, a group of people -- often an element of a standards body -- is primarily responsible for the development of the technology."

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Editors

Conglomerate XML Editor 0.5.4 Released (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org has an announcement for version 0.5.4 of Conglomerate, an XML editor. This release features bug fixes, build improvements, and more.

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IDEs

Anjuta 1.1.97 released (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org has an announcement for version 1.1.97 of the Anjuta IDE for GNOME. This version features support for all text file encodings, line and word selection menu entries, .css files highlighting, bug fixes, and more.

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Version Control

Vertoo - simple versioning support tool

A new versioning tool called Vertoo has been released. "Vertoo is a tool that lightens developer's burden to maintain up-to-date versioning information across project's files. Vertoo provides simple interface to change the version (or it's part) and distribute these changes through the project's files. Configuration describes versions used in a project, each in arbitrary, user-specified scheme and formats for each of the occurences of the version's data in the project files."

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Miscellaneous

Mono 0.25 released. (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org has an announcement for version 0.25 of Mono, an open source implementation of the .NET Development Framework. See the RELEASE NOTES for more information.

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