November 1, 2005

ONDotnet.com has published a fascinating two-part interview with Anders Hejlsberg, the chief architect of the C# language. Anders talks about the past, present, and future of C# and .NET.

August 6, 2005

ONLamp.com has published an article about object oriented programming in PHP, and talks about the advantages, disadvantages, and pitfalls of using classes in PHP. For those building ever larger PHP applications, the use of classes is something that enhances productivity and creates cleaner, more manageable code.

June 16, 2005

The LAMP open source development stack is steadily winning marketshare against Microsoft's .NET and Sun's Java programming suites. LAMP includes the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the MySQL database and the scripting languages PHP, Perl or Python. In recent months, the LAMP suite has been making big inroads into large companies, due to a growing number of third-party software and service providers that are helping to accelerate the push of LAMP into corporate IT. A number of open source and commercial web applications like SugarCRM and Journyx are also being built atop the LAMP stack instead of atop .NET or Java. Microsoft is now also viewing LAMP as serious threat and is focusing on reducing the cost and complexity of using the .NET framework. As a response, Microsoft is working on a series of low cost products to compete directly with LAMP.

June 15, 2005

REAL Software has released the latest version of its REALbasic cross-platform application development tool. REALbasic 2005 supports development of GUI software that can be compiled for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. REALbasic has a high degree of compatibility with Microsoft's Visual Basic language, and has other features as well, including an SQLite-based database engine. The Mac version also supports Mac OS X 10.4's Spotlight search system. In addition, REAL will soon be offering the Standard Edition of REALbasic 2005 on the Linux platform free of charge.

June 8, 2005

Informit.com has published an article explaining how to use the Google Web API from your own .NET and Java applications. Using the Google Web API, your applications can access many of Google's services, including its immense index of the web. The API uses a combination of WDSL, XML, and SOAP to communicate with Google, but all of that complexity is hidden from developers thanks to the Google Web API. The article shows you how to put together sample Google Web API applications in C# using Visual Studio and in Java using the Sun JDK.

June 8, 2005

MacDevCenter has published a two-part article explaining how to build powerful and interesting dashboard widgets for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Dashboard widgets use HTML and a special set of JavaScript functions to access many features of the Mac OS X 10.4 operating system. Widgets can run any Unix command, interact with programs like iTunes, draw on the screen using the Quartz API, make use of Internet plugins, and more. This article includes several dashboard widget source code samples to get you started.

June 2, 2005

WindowsForDevices has published a lengthy guide to Windows Mobile 5.0, from a developers perspective. The article provides an overview of the new tools needed for building applications on the new platform, as well as new features like picture management, contact management, GPS and Smartphone integration, SMS messaging, multimedia support, managed code support, Direct3D / DirectDraw / DirectShow APIs, digital rights management (DRM) support, ActiveSync integration, Telephony API integration, GPRS network support, new Outlook Mobile functionality, Configuration Manager integration, the Camera Capture API, Mail Application Management, and more. The article also looks at new tools like Visual Studio 2005, the Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK, advanced device emulator support, an improved debugger, and more. The article also includes plenty of source code examples for readers to examine.

June 1, 2005

MSDN has published a lengthy article about the new System.Transactions framework in .NET 2.0. This new transactional programming model allows developers to write transactional code with low overhead, asynchronous capabilities, event tracking, enhanced security, concurrency management and interoperability.

May 20, 2005

ONLamp.com has published a very informative article that explains how to develop sophisticated web applications using XMLHttpRequest, the core of the Ajax development methodology. If you want to create great web based applications like Google Maps, GMail, and Flickr, then this is a great article to get you started.

May 11, 2005

An article over at CocoaDevCentral explains how to build Mac OS X applications using the Core Data framework. With Core Data, you can build 90% of a sophisticated data management application without writing a single line of code. If you already use Objective-C and Xcode, Core Data makes building database applications in Mac OS X easy and fun.

May 7, 2005

MacZealots.com has published an article for those interested in getting started in Mac application development. Although the article mentions AppleScript, Java, and Carbon, it is primarily focused on Objective-C development with Cocoa, using Xcode and Interface Builder. If you are at all interested in developing serious applications for the Mac platform, this article provides valuable information as well as pointers to useful resources.

May 5, 2005

ONJava.com has published a two-part article explaining how to use the new generic types feature in Java 5.0. This feature allows you to create parameterized types which provide a degree of type safety for collections and other classes. In addition, generic types allow your methods to safely accept multiple types for any given argument.

May 4, 2005

Mac DevCenter has published an article showing how you can create custom Actions for use in Automator scripts. If none of the more than 200 Actions provided with Automator let you do exactly what you need, then you need to read this article. Actions may be written in either AppleScript or Objective-C and can be used for distributing your scripts to others.

May 2, 2005

Scott Robert Ladd has put GCC 4.0.0 up against the earlier GCC 3.4.3 in a number of computational, ray tracing, audio encoding, and scientific benchmarks. The compilers were used to generate both Pentium 4 (32-bit) and Opteron (64-bit) code to see if GCC 4.0 lives up to the hype.

May 1, 2005

Tom's Hardware, AnandTech, and TechReport have provided complete coverage of all three days of the WinHEC 2005 conference. Coverage includes Bill Gates' keynote speech, previews of Longhorn, TPM and FVE security features, hybrid hard drives, an introduction to Metro, auxiliary displays, digital rights management, embedded processors, and more.

April 29, 2005

ONLamp.com has published an article about Kupu, an open source WYSIWYG editor written JavaScript that can be embedded into any arbitrary web page, without using any plug-ins or Java. It is especially useful for embedding into content management systems (CMS) like Zope or Plone, as well as web-based blogging, e-mail and groupware software. Features include bold, italic, underline, image embedding, colors, text justification, table creation and a lot more. Kupu, like Google Maps, relies on XMLHttpRequest functionality to communicate with the server. Try the demo page to see it for yourself.

April 28, 2005

If you're a Java developer trying to decide between using Swing or SWT for your next project, this excellent article is just what you need. Although the article comes out in favor of Swing, it does contain has a lot of information about both SWT and Swing that you really should be aware of before making your choice.

April 26, 2005

WindowsDevCenter has published a very informative article explaining how to create Windows DLLs with Visual Basic. While critics of the language like to say that Visual Basic can't be used to create Windows DLLs, this is simply not true. See how to do it, and do it quite easily.

April 25, 2005

Coverage of the first day of the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC 2005) is now hitting the web. First, there's a video of Bill Gates' keynote speech. In the keynote, Bill Gates focused on the power of 64-bit hardware and software, security, SQL Server 2005, Tablet PCs, and Longhorn. Several demos were on display, including one of NewTek LightWave 3D running in 64-bit mode, as well as a demo of SQL Server 2005 running in 64-bit mode. Also mentioned was new high availability and clustering functionality to be available in SQL Server 2005. The demo of Longhorn showed off features like transparency, reflections, scalable vector graphics, Avalon web applications, enhanced security and privacy, enhanced reliability and diagnostics, driver discovery and updates, Windows Update enhancements, media enhancements, desktop search and visualization, virtual folders with dynamic views, and the Metro output model. Microsoft Watch provides additional WinHEC coverage of the new Tablet PCs and Metro.

April 24, 2005

MacDevCenter has published an article that explains how to use the Eclipse IDE to develop Java based Cocoa applications for Mac OS X. Eclipse is free and offers many advantages for Java compared with Apple's Xcode, which was designed primarily for Objective-C development. For example, the Java debugger in Eclipse is very powerful and nothing like it exists in Xcode. In addition, the article explains how to use Eclipse and Ant to simply builds, configurations, and deployment.