Development

GNOME 2.2.0 released

Version 2.2.0 of the GNOME desktop has been announced, one month ahead of schedule.

The release notes document the changes and include many screen shots. Here are a few highlights:

• A matured GNOME 2 developer platform.
• A UI overhaul for the Nautilus file manager with context sensitive menus.
• Application startup notification via a clock cursor.
• Support for themes in the panel.
• A Show Desktop panel button for raising desktop icons.
• Improved file searching via the Actions menu.
• An Open Recent capability in the Actions menu.
• An instant messenger Notification Area on the panel.
• A wireless link status box on the panel.
• Inclusion of the GStreamer multimedia framework.
• Improved View As features for Nautilus with support for Audio.
• More file formats are supported by the multimedia utilities.
• New thumbnailing abilities for additional multimedia types.
• A simpler and more powerful Theme Preferences dialog.
• Desktop-wide support for fontconfig and Xft2.
• Better font configuration and rendering.
• Multihead support for systems with multiple screens.
• Support for the Metacity window manager.

GNOME 2.2.0 also features a number of new and improved applications:

• Spell checking and an output window for the gedit text editor.
• Rotation and full screen views for the Eye of GNOME image viewer.
• Unicode character support for the Character Map.
• The File Roller archive manager for working with numerous archive formats.
• Keyboard key assignment capabilities via the Multimedia Keys Preferences dialog.
• Language support for 26 languages, including right-to-left languages.
• Standards support via freedesktop.org for better KDE interoperability.

GNOME 2.2.0 also features a focus on better UI consistency, accessibility features for the disabled, and improved performance. The documentation continues to be improved, and a new comprehensive guide for administrators has been included.

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Ogg Traffic for Sunday, February 2, 2003

The February 2, 2003 edition of Ogg Traffic is available with the latest Ogg Vorbis audio compression software news. Topics include: Status Updates, PlusV for Ogg Vorbis?, FLAC joins Xiph.Org, and Speex RC2.

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Alsa 0.9.0 rc 7 available

Version 0.9.0 release candidate #7 of the Alsa sound driver development release is ready for downloading. Change info is in the source code.

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BLOP 0.2.6 released

Version 0.2.6 of BLOP, the Bandlimited LADSPA Audio Plugins, is available with lots of new audio synthesis features.

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JACK Rack 1.2.0 released

Version 1.2.0 of JACK Rack is available. "No response to the beta testing request, so I'll have to subject you all to a likely hairy release :) Arbitrary channels are the biggest thing. Also, previous save files will no longer work as the save files use XML now."

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Npgsql adopted into the Mono Class Library

Npgsql has been incorporated into Mono. "The Npgsql Development Team is proud to announce that Npgsql (the .NET Data Provider for PostgreSQL) stable sources are now part of the Mono Class Library cvs codebase."

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SAP DB 7.4.03.10 available

Version 7.4.03.10 of the SAP DB database is available. See the release info document for details.

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Databases and Element Names (O'Reilly)

John E. Simpson explains how to deal with XML-illegal characters in database field names on O'Reilly's XML Q & A column.

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Xcircuit 3.1 released

Development version 3.1 of XCircuit, an electronic schematic drawing program, has been released. The download page says: "The source for version 3.1 contains the first official release of the (long-in-coming) Tcl/Tk-based version of xcircuit. At this time (January 27), everything in the original program has been implemented in the Tk GUI. The Tcl version has the greatest amount of command-line control, and can be run exclusively from the command line (e.g., from a script). A command-line argument "-exec" has been added to facilitate running xcircuit in "batch mode"."

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LinuxPrinting.org news

The latest news from the LinuxPrinting.org site includes the release of version 3.0.0beta1 of the Foomatic printer support database, and the addition of the Epson Stylus C50 to the database.

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Zope Members News

The most recent headlines on the Zope Members News include: Groupware Suite for CPS, Developer Preview, ZChecker 0.1 Released, New release of OpenPT and PlacelessTranslationService, RenderPM renamed to RenderableCharts, Solutions Linux is in Paris - where are you?, ZWiki 0.15.0 released, Zope 2.6.1 beta 2 released, Plone 1.0 Release Date and Celebration, Open Letter to the Community (Updated), and more.

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Zope Newbies

New articles on Zope Newbies include: A Conversation with Guido, Part IV, Zope 2.6.1 beta 2, Write the Web goes Zope, Upgraded to Apache 2, Plone 1.0 RC2 installer for Mac OS X, and more.

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ZODB 3.1.1 beta available

Version 3.1.1 beta 2 of ZODB3, the Zope Object Database, is out. "We've made another beta release of ZODB 3.1.1 available, including ZEO 2.0.2. This is primarily a bug fix release; see the NEWS.txt file excerpt below for details. Of particular note are the enabling of the BTrees-based index for FileStorage and the disabling of the rare "hosed" state in ZODB."

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mnoGoSearch 3.2.8 search engine released

Version 3.2.8 of the mnoGoSearch web site search engine software is available. A number of changes have been included, see the change log for details.

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XML Forms, Web Services and Apache Cocoon (O'Reilly)

Ivelin Ivanov writes about XForms on O'Reilly. "Server side business logic is often invariant with regard to client devices. An email client supports the same basic operations whether it's used from a cellular phone, PDA, or a PC. To address the needs of web developers who build applications for a variety of devices, the W3C has formed the XForms working group. According to the XForms specification, "XForms" is W3C's name for a specification of Web forms that can be used with a wide variety of platforms including desktop computers, hand helds, information appliances, and even paper."

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PythonCAD third release available

The third release of PythonCAD, an open-source CAD package written in Python, is available. "The third release adds some new functionality to the program. Construction lines can be easily drawn tangent to circles and arcs, as well as drawn perpendicular to the various entities in a drawing. The thickness of drawing entities like line segments and circles is now drawn on the screen, too. Splitting the entities in the drawing can now be done by clicking on them at the point where they are to be split, or entities can be split at points where they intersect one another."

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Open-HCI Announced

KDE.News reports on efforts to gain closer cooperation between the KDE and GNOME usability teams.

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FootNotes

Headlines on the GNOME desktop FootNotes site include: GNOME 2.0 Desktop for Solaris released, First pre-release of GTK2 Dia available, 2.3 Proposed Features, New Nautilus features, librsvg 2.2.2 released, Open-HCI Announced, Gnumeric 1.1.16 aka 'L M L W' is now available, GNOME 2.2 Translation Statistics and Rankings, Fifth Toe Website, A glimpse of the future? I hope so, GNOME comes to Clemson University!, and more.

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KDE-CVS-Digest

The January 31, 2003 edition of the KDE-CVS-Digest is out. "Is the 3.1 the ultimate in KDE? The end of development? Not from looking at the commits for this week. Some of the less trivial fixes from Apple are getting applied to Konqueror. The user interface continues to be refined. The Kde PIM project and all it's parts are a beehive of activity. Utilities such as K3b and Cdbakeoven are actively worked on. I'm already impatient for 3.2!"

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Pygame updates

New Python-based game software on the Pygame site includes: Pygsear .25 and Pyui 0.95.

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Crystal Space 0.96r002 released

The beta 2 release of Crystal Space 0.96, a portable 3D Engine, is available. "Again a new release of Crystal Space. This releases fixes a few bugs here and there and also adds a VERY significant optimization in the OpenGL renderer. This optimization can effectively double performance for some levels."

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FreeSCI: Rebuilding Sierra's Classic Quests (O'Reilly)

Howard Wen writes about the FreeSCI project on O'Reilly. "For the past few years, programming-capable adventure fans have been developing FreeSCI, an open source SCI clone. Their goals are to port SCI games to other platforms, to add new features to the original games, to provide an engine upon which other hobbyists can create new Sierra-style games, and simply to have fun."

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FLTK Developments

The latest new software for FLTK, the Fast, Light ToolKit includes: fl_connect 0.92, Log 0.91, Fltk 1.1.XX utf-8 patch, SPTK 1.00, FL-Inventor 0.9.5-rev1, and more.

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Kernel Cousin Wine

Issue #155 of Kernel Cousin Wine is out. Topics include: News: Install IE 6, Threading Problems with glibc 2.3, User Interface Status, RPC Data Marshalling, File Dialog Options, and Windows API Database.

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Xmingwin for cross-generating apps (IBM developerWorks)

Cameron Laird introduces Xmingwin for cross-platform development on IBM's developerWorks. "I do much of my Window development on Linux hosts, even when working in C. This installment of Server clinic tells how you can, too, and why you might want to add mingw32-gcc source.c -o executable.exe to your usual repertoire of gcc source.c -o executable."

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GStreamer 0.6.0 released

Version 0.6.0 of the GStreamer streaming media framework is available. "At this point in time GStreamer is fully functional for creating audio-based applications, as shown by applications such as gnome-sound-recorder, Rhythmbox and nautilus-media. Video-based applications still have some issues at this point, but we plan on solving those issues during the 0.6.x series in an ABI compatible way."

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GnuCash 1.8.0 released

The long-awaited release of gnucash 1.8.0 - the beginning of a new stable series - has happened. This version of gnucash includes scheduled transactions, mortgage and loan handling, some small business accounting support, multi-currency support, and much more. Click below for the release announcement; LWN also previewed this release last December.

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Kernel Cousin GNUe

Issue #66 of Kernel Cousin GNUe is out with the latest GNU Enterprise development news. Topics include: New release of Double Chocco Latte, Text Encoding in Common, Gadfly database driver for GNUe, Modal forms in wxPython and GTK, Passing parameters to Forms, and Passing parameters to Forms.

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AbiWord Weekly News

Issue #129 of the AbiWord Weekly News is out, with the latest AbiWord word processor development news. "Gabriel Gerhardsson declares the hash downloader bloat, ironic the maintainer would come out and say that after a long absence. Dom starts adding HELP! buttons everywhere, while I recommend altering them to "Don't Panic" buttons. The 1.0.5 HackDown displays that Hub has no belief that historical record is a sign of future performance, as he dares to add even more bugs and features to the new HackDown. Hey, he's French. AbiWord II: The Wrath of Dom will break an incredible historical record that no one would have anticipated: It shall be the most fully documented word processor, the most fully documented any application for that matter, before it even comes out."

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mozillaZine

The latest mozillaZine topics include: Independent Status Reports, MozillaZine Readers Give Their Verdict on Safari, ActiveState Komodo 2.3 Beta 1 Released, mozdev.org Soliciting for Donations, Integrating Switch Accessibility into Mozilla, and more.

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Lynx version 2.8.5 dev 14

Version 2.8.5 dev 14 of Lynx, a text-based web browser, has been released. Change information is in the source code, which can be downloaded here.

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GCC 3.2.2 has been released

Version 3.2.2 of GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, has been released. Change documentation is forthcoming.

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Caml Weekly News

The Caml Weekly News for January 28 - February 4, 2003 is out. Topics include: Wish: dynamic linking for Ocaml, question: "autoconfiguration" of Ocaml code, @, List.append, and tail recursion, XML-RPC server for OCaml, New release of Active-DVI, Finding the sign of a float, and WDialog 2.00-test4 released.

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The Caml Light / OCaml Hump

This week, the new software on The Caml Light / OCaml Hump includes: XmlRPCServer, OCaml XML-RPC, Active DVI, and WDialog.

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J2EE technologies for the stateless network (IBM developerWorks)

Kyle Gabhart covers stateless session beans on IBM's developerWorks. "In this first installment, we'll explore stateless J2EE components and evaluate the most appropriate one to use for your enterprise architecture. When it comes to stateless, request-processing components, you have two primary J2EE technologies to choose from: servlets or Enterprise JavaBeans technology -- or more specifically, stateless session beans."

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XML in Java: Data binding, Part 2: Performance (IBM developerWorks)

Dennis M. Sosnoski writes about XML data binding on IBM's developerWorks. "Enterprise Java expert Dennis Sosnoski checks out the speed and memory usage of several frameworks for XML data binding in Java. These include all the code generation approaches discussed in Part 1, the Castor mapped binding approach discussed in an earlier article, and a surprise new entry in the race. If you're working with XML in your Java applications you'll want to learn how these data binding approaches stack up!"

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Java Swing: Menus and Toolbars, Part 3 (O'Reilly)

O'Reilly continues the series on Java Swing with part 3. "In part three in this book excerpt series on Swing menus and toolbars from Java Swing, 2nd Edition, learn about the JMenuItem class."

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EJB Inheritance, Part 4 (O'Reilly)

Emmanuel Proulx continues his series on EJB inheritance with part 4. "So far, we've seen how inheritance can be used when calling an EJB directly through RMI. However, SOAP (web services) and JMS also allow you to invoke objects remotely. Recognizing this, the EJB committee introduced JMS consumer beans (message-driven beans) in version 2.0 of the specification, and, in version 2.1, a generic asynchronous mechanism allowing web service invocations. This article discusses the steps involved in using inheritance in message-driven beans."

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Building Dependency Webs in J2EE

Alex Iskold and Daniel Kogan cover dependency webs on O'Reilly. "J2EE applications are fundamentally complex. A typical system may contain thousands of EJBs, Java classes, JSP pages, and servlets, which are linked into an intricate web of numerous dependencies. Managing this complexity is the key to building stable and flexible J2EE applications. To deal with complexity, it is important to focus on the structure of the dependencies between all components in the system."

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Dynamic Learning Center for Lisp

Lisp vendor Franz, Inc. has made a Lisp educational resource site, known as the Dynamic Learning Center, available to the public. "The Dynamic Learning Center contains sample programs with documentation, programming exercises with solutions, support tools for learning and teaching Lisp, links and references to useful material. Practical notes and collateral material will also be made available."

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This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

The January 27 - February 2, 2003 edition of This Week on perl5-porters is out. "Hi all, here's your weekly dose of bug and fixes. Fold constants, send signals, leak memory and introspect layers through this week's summary."

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This week on Perl 6 (O'Reilly)

The January 26, 2003 edition of This week on Perl 6 is out with the latest Perl 6 news. Topics include: The eval patch, The Parrot crashes, Compiling to Parrot, Extending the packfile format, The long running Objects thread, Intersegment branching, Bytecode Metadata, Odd JIT timings, L2R/R2L syntax, A proposal on if and else, Arc: An Unfinished Dialect of Lisp, Array/Colon question, Multiple Dispatch by Context?, and more.

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PHP Weekly Summary

Topics on this week's PHP Weekly Summary include: RSS bug feed, QA results suite, str_replace() sensitivity, Conferences, conferences everywhere, Array to XML, Mandatory file locking, and Sablotron build problems.

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Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!

The Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for February 3, 2003 is available, with this week's news and links for the Python community.

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January 31 python-dev summary

The python-dev summary covering the second half of January is now available; it looks at Japanese support in the distribution, extended function syntax proposals, adding "capabilities" to the language, and several other topics.

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The Daily Python-URL

This week's Daily Python-URL article topics include: A conversation with Guido van Rossum, part IV, What Python Can Do for the Enterprise, pyblosxom, a chapter from Python in a Nutshell, An introduction to SkunkWeb, Introduction to PyObjC, Test-Driven Development by Example, REST and FSM and BP for Quixote, PiP - Python in PHP, REST for AOLserver, PyWX, and Quixote, pin.py, SQLObject, PyObjC, rlcompleter2, EuroPython 2003 Conference, Eric3, a Python IDE, and more.

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The Ruby Weekly News

Topics on this week's Ruby Weekly News include: The Ruby Way in Japanese, OSCON Presentations, Ruby Books, Test::Unit order of tests, and Local variables and blocks.

New Ruby software includes: FXRuby-1.0.18, cLabs IEController, Borges, Webplayer, and the Ruby Application Archive version 2.3.0.

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Scheme Weekly News

The February 3, 2003 edition of the Scheme Weekly News is out. Topics include: scsh 0.6.3, SISC 1.7.1-beta, LAML version 19, SRFI-37: args-fold, SRFI-40: A Library of Streams, ReadScheme Library Expands Again, GNU TeXmacs 1.0.1.2, Scheme UK Meeting 5 Feb 2003, Quack.el 0.17, Guile GTK at Savannah, Guile 1.6.3, Scheme Scribe 1.1a, and Swindle 20030203.

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This week's Tcl-URL

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for February 5 is available with the latest from the Tcl/Tk development community.

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XML Pipelining with Ant (O'Reilly)

Michael Fitzgerald looks into Ant on O'Reilly. "Ant is an extensible, open-source build tool written in Java and sponsored by Apache's Jakarta project. Ant has developed into something more than a just a build tool, however. It has gone beyond its predecessor make (and make's kin) to become a framework for performing an even larger variety of operations in a single step, not just compiling code or cleaning up after a build."

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OProfile 0.5 released

Version 0.5 of OProfile, a code profiler, has been released with a long list of new features and bug fixes. "OProfile is still in alpha, but has been proven stable for many users."

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