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Use JavaServer Faces components with AJAX in Rational Application Developer
1 month, 1 week ago
Design a weather forecast application by using AJAX with a Relational Record List, Combo Box, Panels-Tabbed, and Data Tree components in Rational Application Developer. Also, discover a technique for accessing data elements from a Relational Record List that has two related tables. -
The 8 Essential Tools for Programmers
1 month, 1 week ago
What tools to you consider essential and fundamental for programmers? -
The Ruby Mendicant
1 month, 3 weeks ago
A little while ago, Gregory Brown announced his Ruby Mendicant Project. He’s trying to raise enough money to work for the Ruby community full time for 6 months (or on a time-share basis if he doesn’t raise the full amount, see the web site for the full details). With just 7 days left, he’s about 40% of the way there. This would be a good time to Make a donation. -
Steve Jobs' endangered second act
2 months, 1 week ago
"Will developers wish to tie themselves to the whims of Steve Jobs, the same way they did 25 years ago to Bill Gates--and pay a toll for the privilege of doing so to boot? Or will they spend their time working to support more open platforms, such as Android...?" -
Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits
2 months, 1 week ago
Adopt 10 good habits that improve your UNIX command line efficiency - and break away from bad usage patterns in the process. This article takes you step-by-step through several good, but too often neglected, techniques for command-line operations. Learn about common errors and how to overcome them, so you can learn exactly why these UNIX habits are worth picking up. -
What is your favorite scripting language?
2 months, 2 weeks ago
Which language reigns supreme? This is the question that seemed to create the most controversy in our Readers' Choice poll this year so we thought we'd have some fun and open it up to the public to discuss. (This is better than a vi vs. emacs war!) Cast your vote. -
TechBookReport on 'Visualizing Data'
2 months, 3 weeks ago
Trying to get a handle on large or complex datasets is not always easy or straightforward. Excel, the vehicle of choice for many people doing basic data analysis, simply doesn't cut it. And whereas there are plenty of data mining and knowledge discovery tools to chose from, many of these are designed to run in batch mode. For those interested in iteratively exploring data - in order to understand it, to extract features or discover new knowledge - the needs for interaction are essential. This is the area that Processing, (http://processing.org), seeks to address. Processing is an open-source programming language and environment for processing data and creating innovative and interactive displays for data mining and exploration. -
How to recognise a good programmer
3 months, 1 week ago
How do you recognise good programmers if you’re a business guy? It’s not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don’t always have the “official” experience to demonstrate that they’re great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone’s a great programmer. -
The Importance of Cross Platform Compatibility
4 months ago
I’ve gone on and on about how important cross-platform software really is in the past, and my mission to spread the word about its importance will continue. It can be frustrating to hear about a great application, become intrigued by its features and functionality, and then find out that it’s only available for one operating system. Oh, the humanity! -
Setting up Subversion and Trac as virtual hosts on an Ubuntu server
4 months ago
This howto outlines the process by which one can set up the Subversion version control system, and have it work in tandem with Trac, the project manager for software development projects, on a server running Ubuntu (or possibly Debian). -
Review: Rapid GUI Programming With PytQt
4 months ago
Qt is one of the best known and most widely used of the multi-platform GUI programming frameworks. It is best known as a widget toolkit coded in C++, and is at the heart of the KDE Linux desktop, the Opera browser, Skype and a host of other applications. However, just because Qt is coded in C++ that doesn't mean you're limited to C++ if you want to make use it. There are Qt bindings in a variety of languages, including Java, Python, Ruby and more. In the case of Python, PyQt is a mature and popular GUI framework that enables Python developers to easily create feature rich and good looking GUI applications. And for those developers wanting to gain a good grounding in how to do this Mark Summerfield, one of the authors of the rather excellent 'C++ GUI Programming With Qt 4', has put turned his attention to Python and PyQt. -
TechBookReport on 'Implementation Patterns'
4 months, 1 week ago
Kent Beck should need no introduction. An influential figure in the world of software development, he has been in the forefront of two key movements in the development world: agile software development and unit testing. He was one of the original authors of the Agile Manifesto and one of the creators of extreme programming. If that were not enough he was also the co-developer, (with Erich Gamma), of JUnit, which helped popularised unit testing to a new generation of programmers and which has spawned similar testing frameworks across a range of platforms. In his latest book, 'Implementation Patterns', Beck turns his attention to code, and specifically how we can write code that communicates well and is therefore easier to understand and maintain. -
PHP can slice and dice input quickly
4 months, 2 weeks ago
Pattern matching is such a common chore for software that a special shorthand — regular expressions — has evolved to make light work of the task. PHP applications manage increasingly large amounts of data. Whether you need to validate form input or decompose content, this article will show you how PHP regular expressions can do the trick easily. -
Book review: 'Serial Port Complete'
4 months, 4 weeks ago
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Tcl/Tk 8.5 released
4 months, 4 weeks ago
"The 8.5 release was a long time in development, and brought about several good enhancements to Tcl/Tk. Source releases, the exact changes and ChangeLog for each release are available in the SourceForge Tcl project's file distribution area .... " - More News
Linux.com : Programming
Kernel hacker and Red Hat driver maintainer Jon Masters (video)
Hey, it's dirty and unglamorous coding, but somebody's got to do it. Jon Masters is one of the people who do Good Things for GNU/Linux but get little recognition for their work outside of a small circle of friends. But if you take a look at his personal page you'll immediately realize that Jon, like many inner-circle Linux developers, has many interests besides programming. And despite his many serious accomplishments, as this casual video interview (shot at the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit) clearly shows, he doesn't take himself too seriously.
Bdale Garbee: A fascinating 'open source celebrity' (video)
Let's get the first Bdale question out of the way right now: no, he didn't sell half the vowels in his name. His birth name was Barksdale, later shortened to B'dale, then to Bdale. The next thing you notice (in person) about Bdale Garbee is his size. He's a very large person. But all that aside, look at his personal home page and Wikipedia entry and you'll realize that this man is one of the most prolific contributors to Linux and open source in the world. Besides all that, he's nice (and often funny), too.
Laura Thomson on coding, the workplace, and FOSS
Ever since Laura Thomson wrote her first program in the fourth grade, coding has been a major part of her life. Over the years, she has been a lecturer in computer science at RMIT University in Australia, a principal at OmnTI, a consulting company that designs Internet systems, a trainer of other programmers, the co-writer of PHP and MySQL Web Development and MySQL Tutorial, and a frequent speaker at free and open source conferences. She is currently a senior software engineer at the Mozilla Corporation, where her recent work includes the API for the Add-ons Manager on Firefox 3. With this background, Thomson has strong views on coding, its future, and its place in business, especially where free and open source software (FOSS) is concerned, which she shared with Linux.com at the recent Open Web Vancouver conference.
Tim Bray provides a bridge between Sun and developers
"I'm a genuine old fart," says Tim Bray as he looks back at his three decades in computing. Widely known for his standards work on XML and the Atom syndication format, at an age when many former developers have moved entirely into management, he seems to have found a niche that takes advantage of his experience. As director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, his job is to keep current with Web and general programming and to encourage adaptation of new developments within the corporation. At the recent Open Web Vancouver conference, Bray talked to Linux.com about how he fills his role at Sun, and the trends he sees in computing.
Creating charts on Web pages with Java and GChart
The Apache-licensed GChart utility lets you quickly generate nice-looking charts on your Web site.
Rt2x00 project for wireless nearing success
If you use wireless networking in GNU/Linux with native drivers, then chances are that you benefit from work done by the Rt2x00 project. You may use the MadWifi Atheros drivers with OpenHal, or drivers for the Realtek RTL8180 chipset, but most likely you use one of the drivers developed by the Rt2x00 for Ralink chipsets. In the nearly four years since the project began, its work has moved from having a reputation for bugginess to the point where some of its drivers are now part of the latest Linux kernels. Recently, Linux.com talked to three of the lead developers on the project about where Rt2x00 has been and where it is going.
Open source testing tools target varied tasks
Testing is an important function of the software development process, no matter how big or small the development project. But not every company or developer has access to professional testing tools, which can run into hundreds and even thousands of dollars. The good news is that they don't need them, thanks to the tons of freely available open source software testing tools.
Three ways to test Web form input with a CAPTCHA
Many Web forms these days feature a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) as an effort to stop people from setting up computers to automatically fill in Web forms. A typical CAPTCHA is an image with some numbers and letters in it with distortion and/or background noise, and a Web form input field where you are to enter the numbers and letters from the image. This article investigates three CAPTCHA applications that you can use on a PHP Web site.
It's time to learn Scheme
Have you ever peeked into one of those bazillion .el files in your Emacs installation's lisp folder and wondered what it meant? Or have you ever looked at a GIMP script .scm file and scratched your head over all the parentheses? Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages still in common use, and Scheme is a streamlined dialect of Lisp. Many universities use Scheme as the language to introduce students to the Computer Science curriculum, and some of their teaching methods are based on the assumption that Scheme is the one language they can count on their students knowing. Even so, many active programmers and system administrators are unfamiliar with Scheme. This article will get you on your way to adding this tool to your developer or sysadmin toolkit.
OOo Basic crash course: Creating a simple game using strings in a database
Just because OpenOffice.org Basic is designed to automate mundane tasks doesn't mean that you must use it only for serious work. It's a programming language after all, and nothing stops you from using it to write something fun. Today we'll use it write a simple game where you have to guess a word, a letter at a time, from among words you've stored in a Base database. Although this is not a particularly sophisticated game, it contains a couple of string manipulation techniques and a clever trick for picking a random record from a database, which you might find useful when writing your own macros.
FOSS helps Krugle help developers search for code
In three years, Krugle, the company behind the code search engine of the same name, has gone from an idea to a company that's starting to produce revenue. CEO Steve Larsen, a veteran of half a dozen startups, attributes this brief time to market as being due largely to free and open source software (FOSS). According to Larsen, FOSS has shaped most aspects of the company, including its hiring practices and relations with business partners and users.
Better source control for your coding projects
The proper use of source control systems is a critical skill for programmers to have, and something that many of them have to pick up through observation, trial, and error in the workplace. For students, or people who primarily program as a hobby, the learning process can be particularly slow and painful. Here are some examples and discussion on the best practices you can use to avoid common source control pitfalls.
Debugging Asterisk AGI with PHPAGI and Festival
Programming the Asterisk open source PBX via the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI) is a fun but exasperating exercise for the telephony programmer. It is fun since it can make a telephone dance, but frustrating because errors and debugging information can be difficult to catch since status information arrives on multiple channels: audible, Asterisk console, and STDERR. You can make the process of debugging a bit easier with the assistance of PHPAGI and Festival.
OpenProj: good software, but needs documentation
OpenProj 1.0 was recently released by Projity, which offers a related commercial product called Project-On-Demand. OpenProj is written in Java and licensed under CPAL 1.0, and versions for Windows, Mac OS/X, and Linux can be downloaded from SourceForge.net.
Create an AJAX Web site using dhtmlxGrid to present data
dhtmlxGrid is a JavaScript grid control that you can use to create an AJAX interface to a relational database server. The grid view provided by dhtmlxGrid offers actions that one would expect from a desktop grid control, such as sorting by columns by clicking on them, resizing columns, rich cell rendering, keyboard navigation, themes, and drag and drop.
Zend Studio weds Eclipse
With today's release of Zend Studio for Eclipse, Zend has made Zend Studio, which we reviewed last year, even better.
New D language pumps up programmer productivity
Is it possible to have the performance of C and C++ and the programmer productivity of modern programming languages such as Ruby and Python in a single language? That is the question Walter Bright, the author of the Zortech C++ compiler and the Digital Mars C/C++ compiler, asked himself when creating a successor to C++: Digital Mars D, a practical programming language first released exactly one year ago that helps you get the job done quickly.
GWT: A new way of doing Web development
Are you dazzled by the way you can drag Google Maps around or move from one place to another without having to reload the screen? Or maybe you're a fan of Gmail and its look and feel? If you want to develop Web sites with Google's signature user-friendly features but are afraid of the work involved, take a look at the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
Learn OOP while creating 3-D animations with Alice
College computer science students often find it difficult to get started in programming languages like C++ and Java, largley due to the disconnect between simple middle-school languages like logo and advanced object-oriented programming (OOP) languages. To help bridge the gap, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have developed an OOP language to create computer animations using 3-D models, called Alice.
Writing J2ME applications in Linux
If you want to make the most out of your Java-enabled handheld device, you can write Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) applications (also called midlets) on Linux and run them on your mobile platform. Here's how easy it is to get started; we'll write a HelloWorld application you can run on your cell phone.
