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The real issue isn't Java - it's javax.swing, the Java Swing toolkit, and the java.awt, the Abstract Window Toolkit . AWT looks awful, has a clumsy event model, and is low level and clunky. Swing provides higher level widgets, but an over-complex API, and it's still slow as hell.

Ever tried SWT from Eclipse? It's the Java widget toolkit that doesn't suck! (as much).

That said, I'm very happy with C++ and Qt. Well, except the C++ bit, but I find Java just as gag-worthy in different ways (Java 1.5 goes some way to rectifying the issues with generics and the collections framework, though. It's still WAY too verbose and static for a truly nice language, though).

The real issue isn't Java - it's javax.swing, the Java Swing toolkit, and the java.awt, the Abstract Window Toolkit . AWT looks awful, has a clumsy event model, and is low level and clunky. Swing provides higher level widgets, but an over-complex API, and it's still slow as hell.

Ever tried SWT from Eclipse? It's the Java widget toolkit that doesn't suck! (as much).

That said, I'm very happy with C++ and Qt. Well, except the C++ bit, but I find Java just as gag-worthy in different ways (Java 1.5 goes some way to rectifying the issues with generics and the collections framework, though. It's still WAY too verbose and static for a truly nice language, though).

If you're doing more or less HTML/JavaScript and some light PHP/JSP/ASP/CF/whatever it depends on how much money you want to spend.

If you don't want to spend any money check these out.

If you want to spend money I recommend Dreamweaver if you don't want to know what's going on or HomeSite if you do want to know what's going on.

http://www.vim.org/
http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/
http://www.nvu.com/
http://www.eclipse.org/
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/

4758 Secure Coprocessor Driver for Linux
This project is a Linux device driver for the IBM 4758 PCI Cryptographic Coprocessor, which is a tamper-sensing and responding, programmable PCI card. It provides a highly secure subsystem in which data processing and cryptography can be performed.

ATM on Linux
ATM support for Linux is currently in pre-alpha stage. There is an experimental release, which supports raw ATM connections (PVCs and SVCs), IP over ATM, LAN emulation, MPOA, Arequipa, and some other goodies.

Abstract Machine Test Utility (AMTU) for Linux
Abstract Machine Test Utility (AMTU) is an administrative utility that checks whether the underlying protection mechanism of the hardware is being enforced. This is a requirement of the Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP) FTP_AMT.1.

Ananas Project: Summary
This is the source for Working XML, a column on developerWorks with companion project code that demonstrates the evolution of full-fledged XML applications. This is distributed under the artistic license.

Apache HTTP Server
The Apache project develops and maintains an open-source HTTP server for various modern desktop and server operating systems.

BlueHoc simulator
BlueHoc is a tool that predicts the performance of Bluetooth wireless hardware technologies. BlueHoc simulates the baseband and link layers of the Bluetooth specification.

COIN (Common Optimization INterface)
Developers can use Common Optimization INterface (COIN) to build optimization solutions. IBM mathematical optimization researchers opened the code they use in finding the optimal allocation of limited resources. The code has many applications in a variety of industries.

Channel Bonding
The Channel Bonding project works on methods to join multiple networks on Linux into a single logical network with higher bandwidth. The project team works with the Beowulf Ethernet Channel Bonding project, where bonding work began.

Consensus prototype
Consensus is a joint European project carried out by six companies. The project is partially funded by the European Commission. The project goal is to provide technology to support single-authoring for mobile devices. developerWorks hosts the open source implementation developed by the Consortium. Detailed information about the project is at the Consensus Project home page (http://www.consensus-online.org./

Content Query System (CQS) Project: Summary
Content Query System (CQS). CQS is a distributed peer-to-peer query system for the purpose of discovering content or data. XML messages are passed between systems and query "engines" are used to access the data that is being made available on the system.

Crypto Accelerator Driver
Device Driver Support for the IBM eServer Cryptographic Accelerator.

Crypto Interface Library
Generalized Interface library for the IBM eServer Cryptographic Accelerator Device Driver. Note, this is a low level api for the Specified adapter, it is not intended to be an interface which is written to by applications. Applications should use the openCryptoki PKCS#11 api for interfacing to the token.

Dynamic Probe Class Library (DPCL)
DPCL is an object-based C++ class library that allows tool developers and sophisticated tool users to build parallel and serial tools using a technology called dynamic instrumentation.

Embedded IBM PowerPC 4xx Linux Support
This project contains packages which enable add

The only things you need to start developing J2EE applications are: Tomcat (http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/index.html), optionally a web-framework (like http://jakarta.apache.org/tapestry/index.html) and you can start developing tomorrow (if you know Java of course) and a decent IDE (http://www.eclipse.org/). It will cost you about $0.

First, you have some misconeptions about J2EE.

True, you can't just drop J2EE on your desktop because there's no such _thing_ as J2EE. J2EE is a set of standards (which contains just about everything).

The only things you need to start developing J2EE applications are: Tomcat (http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/index.html), optionally a web-framework (like http://jakarta.apache.org/tapestry/index.html) and you can start developing tomorrow (if you know Java of course) and a decent IDE (http://www.eclipse.org/). It will cost you about $0.

Java has some metaprogramming featues starting from version 1.5. Right now we're writing application in C++ and Python, so I don't miss metaprogramming features :)

RoR is extensible, but some features are just very hard to implement: maintaning persistent object identity, complex mappings support, distributed caching and long-running transactions with optimistic locking.

We had previous expirience in dynamic languages (Python, Perl, PHP). This project was a sort of expirement - we wanted to see what can be done with RoR.

Some folks might be interested to learn of the open-source Flash development trend that is slowly growing. People are starting to use open tools such as Eclipse, Flashout and MTASC to program and compile Flash applications.

Also take a look at Qt, this is used for building KDE apps, among others. It's got very good documentation. I also like Eclipse's SWT framework if you want to use Java.

bla bla bla...

That's why 3.1M7 is a milestone release, NOT a stable release...

You can read up on some of the performance enhancements here:

performance bloopers

Matt

However if I alt-tab away from my Eclipse window for a while then come back to it to do more coding, it seems to be reloading itself and acts very slow for a minute or two. It drives me crazy.

Apparently Windows is very aggressive about forcing all memory allocated by minimized windows out into VM. There's an attempt at a fix for this in the latest milestone (3.1M7)...

Unlikely. While Netbeans is a java IDE, Eclipse can also be used many things not java; eg. as a C/C++ IDE

You can see what's coming in the next version of Eclipse here:
http://www.eclipse.org/org/councils/PC/platform/ec lipse_project_plan_3_1_2005_02_14.html

The Web Tools Project is adding Eclipse support for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, XSD, XSLT, SVG, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, SQL, XQuery, etc:
http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/index.html

And keep in mind that Eclipse can currently run on an entirely Free Software platform using GCJ (with prebuilt RPM's included in Fedora Core 4!):
http://klomp.org/mark/gij_eclipse/setup.html

You can see what's coming in the next version of Eclipse here:
http://www.eclipse.org/org/councils/PC/platform/ec lipse_project_plan_3_1_2005_02_14.html

The Web Tools Project is adding Eclipse support for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, XSD, XSLT, SVG, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, SQL, XQuery, etc:
http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/index.html

And keep in mind that Eclipse can currently run on an entirely Free Software platform using GCJ (with prebuilt RPM's included in Fedora Core 4!):
http://klomp.org/mark/gij_eclipse/setup.html

Actually, you don't have to wait. Just pull the latest milestone or nightly build from this page:

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/inde x.php

Watch this now. Try it in a little while.

• OSDL
• Sendmail
• Eclipse
• Ghostscript

Gee.. I wonder why you posted that as an AC

Using linux does not have to mean typing in scripts at a bash shell.
Linux can be made to look and act just as point-and-clicky as windows.

Using K12LTSP enables you to quickly set up a large school network where students have access to office applications, web browsing, photo editing, desktop publishing, web publishing,programming languages , etc.
It also centralizes network administration, allows for recycling hardware, and saves a ton of money on software licensing.
It is important to teach computer concepts, not just the nuances of the latest proprietary office suite.

Just remember, It should never under any circumstances be the responsibility of educators to teach brand loyalty.

In reality, almost no one does this. Because of the nature of AOP, it requires IDE support--see the AJDT (http://www.eclipse.org/ajdt/) for one example of what this looks like.

With IDE support, you can see exactly where aspects might affect your code, and you can easily navigate to the definition of these aspects. Tool support essentially gives you the desired scoping back, even though it's missing in the language.

Gregor Kiczales and Mira Mezini have a nice paper on this (http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~gregor/papers/kiczales-icse 05-aopmr.pdf), and I've done some more theoretical work validating the claim that modular reasoning is possible in AOP, given the proper module system and tool support (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/papers/open-module s.pdf).

No better way to code in Java than Eclipse

Java must embrace SWT and start doing GUIs in a fast, portable, native way. SWING is slow, redundant and ugly. IBM knows the right way, SUN should follow them or surrender to .NET (both windows and mono have NATIVE widgets stuff).

First off, no one said it's what we need. And regardless if you or I feel there might be no need for it (I personally use it daily), there are plenty of shops out there that do.

And second, they're addressing a significant issue with Swing which is its pokyness. This is going head on with SWT , a 'feature' that Eclipse people have enjoyed for sometime. This also signifies Sun throwing in the towel on their whole Swing widget abstraction, abstraction, abstraction mantra in favor of using the native OS rendering widget facilities. This has been a major Java gripe for some time; why can't my Windows Java app look like a Windows app and why does it have to be do damned slow?!

Should be interesting to see how these features/additions play out. Also, looks like Swing apps are finally getting native aa font support. This will please many as the text rendering in Java apps is still in the Windwos 2k/GTK 1.x days..

The interesting point is their constant hyping of .NET, especially in early chapters. Their religious zeal for .NET and C# is not matched by any clear superiority of those technologies over Java/Eclipse, although they try to convince you otherwise. It can't be long before significant numbers of developers simply start wandering away from the MS camp towards greener pastures, especially those that are 1) free, 2) really cross-platform (the book's authors make curiously equivocal remarks in this regard) and 3) provide a large ready-to-integrate framework like Eclipse.

Don't expect any earth-shaking change, just a gradual wearing away of the MS developer base and an increasingly desperate MS unable to evolve its business model.

what's left is the player, but there are some projects to build one, too.

Personally, I like ObjC. As for Java - there's always talk that it's crappy GUI toolkits that make Java programs feel like VB in tar. Does it _feel_ considerably sleekier on Macs?

In my experience, Java performance on the Mac is impressive. As you may know, Java applications on the Mac use the same native GUI toolkit (Cocoa) as ObjC. As a result, Java apps look and feel exactly like their ObjC counterparts. From the end user's perspective, it's very hard if not impossible to tell whether an application was implemented in Java or ObjC, other than by looking at the memory usage.

I've always liked Java, but, historically, Java GUI development has been a big joke. However, with the possible exception of Eclipse or perhaps J#.NET, OS X is the only platform on which I would consider using Java to implement a GUI application because there is really no negative impact on the end user.

..I think that XCode is awful. It's horribly unintuitive and enjoys separating you from your code. When you just want to build a damn executable it has you messing with build targets and all sorts of garbage that I will never care about. Even Apple calls XCode "A New Way to Work" (headline half way down the page). Sorry, but I liked my old way of working - you know, where I was productive and didn't have to learn the quirks of your stupid IDE. If I was ONLY developing for the Mac I might take the time to learn it.. but I'm not, so I will never waste my time on it.

Anyway, I found that I was most productive in OS X by treating it like Unix. I use Scons to build projects (no more Make for me), and I use Eclipse as an IDE (or occasionally Emacs as a straight editor when I'm doing something simple). Eclipse is originally a Java IDE (which is itself written in Java), but it has a C++ development extension available from their site and works nicely with standard tools like GCC and GDB.

So I use Eclipse to edit code, configured to call a custom Scons script (that I wrote and maintain to build the project) whenever I hit compile. The C++ Eclipse extensions understand how to parse error messages passed back from GCC, so while IDE integration isn't perfect, it works well enough to be productive. AND I still get command-line compilation if I don't feel like using an IDE that day.

Best of all: Eclipse and Scons are completely free and completely cross-platform (Scons runs whereever Python does). And I have an identical development environment on Windows (using the free MingW32 port of the GCC compiler), Mac and FreeBSD (although of course, my Scons script handles the multiplatform compilation issues internally, such as which system libraries to link with on different platforms).

(Disclaimer #1: I'm actually writing OpenGL applications via the SDL multimedia library - your milage may vary if you need a full UI, but I'd try wxWidgets if that were the case).

This is not the first time Microsoft releases open source software. He has also released the following projects

- Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset
- Windows Template Library
- FlexWiki

all under IBM's Common Public License which is approved by the OSI. Maybe they'll chose CPL again(?).

"we represent as open-source friendly a commercial organization as you are *ever* going to see"

"Unlike the Marine corp, the open source community is more than willing to ignore their bad apples as 'not my problem' (the Marine corp punishes the group for the behavior of the bad apples, pretty soon there are no bad apples)."

Larry suggested, "if Linus and Andrew and the others moved elsewhere, we'd glady comp them licenses", referring to their current employment with OSDL.

You forgot SWT.

I've seen plenty of OSS and proprietary software code that had comments that *looked* auto-generated. Stuff like: /** Sets the Home to a new value */
public void setHome(String newHome)
{ ...
}

I've never understood why people do things like this. Why not do something useful: specify what's a valid or invalid value of newHome, say when it should or should not be called. Or just leave it blank if you can't find something useful to say.


Have you never used an IDE? They look auto-generated because they were.

IronPython-0.6 is now available as Open Source Software under the Common Public License version 1.0. A single zip file containing both the source code and the binary executables can be downloaded below.

You are joking Right?

Esclipse

Fortunately, nowadays the situation has improved considerably. You can find a lot of useful BSD-licensed icons in the eclipse project, most of them are quite IDE-related, but with a little bit of imagination you can use them in lots of different situations.

If you have some money to spend, you can buy the icon collections from Incors. They're really great Windows XP-style icons for a very reasonable price.

Geez, maybe you should pay attention to what you are answering. As I said already, most people do not care about development of software and totally don't care about software development tools.

Those who do, can quite easily work under MS Windows by using Free Software tools. GCC - go down the list and you will see that you can get yourself a build that works on MS Windows.

Here is a PHP installer for Windows.

Here is a JDK installation for windows from Sun.

Here is a bunch of Free apps that will run under Java on any platform Apache

Here is a nice development tool for you - Eclipse.

Here is cygwin, in case you want your vi and other *nix tools under MS Windows.

I can give you thousands more examples. A whole bunch of interpreted languages, native compilers, free dev tools, you name it. It all works under Windows. You are spreading the FUD.

Now, as I said, the argument that GNU/Linux costs less works much better for the PCs sold to lower-class people, if it means they can actually afford the box.

If you are a middle-class individual, who can afford the box even if it is whatever X dollars more expensive, you are much better off with a Windows box. The chances are you will want to run MS Windows software and if you cannot then what good is the box?

Anyone at all can download a Free OS, once you have some OS installed on some box.

Just been poring over the new RPM versions...

I see FC4 includes MySQL 4.1.10 a nice wee jump up from 3.23. Apparently RedHat are now happy with the MySQL licensing terms.

It has Eclipse 3.1, dovecot, bash 3 (with debugger), Tomcat 5 (but only 5.0, not the declared stable 5.5.7), Xen 2. And that is about all that caught my eye.

Having just been recompiling the RHEL4 sources I'm struck by how similar the versions all are. I'm presuming that rhel4 split off fc4 or vice versa a month or two back. I'd be curious how/if they co-ordinate all the patches and source code between the two different brands.

--
FC3 (now!) and RHEL4-based (soon!) VPSs

Likewise, there are several IDEs that can nicely handle a C++ project which uses GCC. Eclipse is maybe the best example of these.

Besides, do you really want "Must have GUI to cope with compiler" on your resume? ;-)

The Eclipse project actively encourages its users and clients to log bugs and change requests as well as vote and comment on them through their Bugzilla.

IIRC, this concept was encouraged by ERS in Cathedral... It would be nice to see other mainstream OSS projects such as GNOME actively embrace this model of community involvement.

That being said, I think GNOME has done some wonderful things in the past, and as far as I'm concerned the desktop improves with every release, keep up the good work!

The Eclipse project actively encourages its users and clients to log bugs and change requests as well as vote and comment on them through their Bugzilla.

IIRC, this concept was encouraged by ERS in Cathedral... It would be nice to see other mainstream OSS projects such as GNOME actively embrace this model of community involvement.

That being said, I think GNOME has done some wonderful things in the past, and as far as I'm concerned the desktop improves with every release, keep up the good work!

• C++
  • jEdit is a Java programmer's editor with excellent C++ support. I do development on Linux, Win32 and MacOS X, so it's very nice for me to have one editor I use on every platform. jEdit's not as featureful as, say, Emacs, but it's considerably more friendly to use.
  • Boost. If you're writing C++ and you're not using Boost, you're committing a crime against yourself.
  • Python. With Boost's Python library, it's easy to make your C++ applications scriptable. Write the heavy lifting parts in C++, then make those parts callable from Python. Do the rest of your development in a far safer, more sane language. You get almost all of the speed of C++, and far fewer headaches.
  • SWIG is another tool that's excellent for creating scriptable C++ applications.
  • Subversion for your version-control needs. Nothing else will do.
  • Doxygen for all your documentation needs. Learn it, love it. Your code's not done until every public part of the API has been doxygenated.
  • The GNU Autotools are really, really awful. They're also far better supported than Scons or pick-your-Autotools-replacement. Get ready to feel the pain of m4 macros. Sorry. :(
  • The GNU Compiler Collection started getting a good C++ compiler around version 3.0. I've been quite favorably impressed with 3.3, and I'm looking forward to 4.0. I don't recommend it for Windows, but for Solaris and x86 Linux it's beautiful.
  • I haven't found a good C++ unit testing framework yet. If you find one, please let me know.
• Java
  • Eclipse is an excellent Java IDE. jEdit also fits the bill nicely, if all you want is an editor. I use both frequently, and am quite pleased with both.
  • Subversion again for your version-control needs.
  • jUnit for unit tests. Your code's incomplete unless you've written unit tests for it.
  • Javadoc for documentation. I would recommend Doxygen, but it's quite possible you'll be deploying your applications on machines that don't have it installed.
  • Ant for all your build needs.

for scripting, you can use eclipse with the AS Development Tool, flashout and MTASC as the compiler. there are commercial products, too.

I think the Eclipse platform has a great Java Debbuger, I used while making an app with something called JADE (java agent development kit) which spawn 1 thread per agent, and I had to work with lots of agents/threads (more than 10).

I found the debbuger useful when debbuging these threads, and of course, you could also try to write your own debbuger

I think the Eclipse platform has a great Java Debbuger, I used while making an app with something called JADE (java agent development kit) which spawn 1 thread per agent, and I had to work with lots of agents/threads (more than 10).

I found the debbuger useful when debbuging these threads, and of course, you could also try to write your own debbuger

Have you looked into eclipse? Runs on pretty much anything (isn't java grand?). Although I do not use it for such, there are C/C++ plugins avaliable (http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ and http://librenix.com/?inode=1423) as well as perl etc. For java at least, has auto complete, integrated help into javadoc etc. Give it a try, I have found that it rivals Visual Studio (not in speed though, sadly).

I've not used them (can't stand UML myself), but I've noticed that Eclipse has some UML tools. Try this, for instance.

Again, I have no idea about the quality of the plugin. Just one I've noticed along the way.

I've not used them (can't stand UML myself), but I've noticed that Eclipse has some UML tools. Try this, for instance.

Again, I have no idea about the quality of the plugin. Just one I've noticed along the way.

http://www.eclipse.org/

Ahem... http://www.eclipse.org

This is a big step forward. Something I've waited for a long time. If it is possible to unite all those vector-graphics efforts in cairo more time can be spent on "stuff that matters".

Well, I always hoped X11 would do this step but they seem to enjoy doing politics instead of standards... On the other hand this approach has some unique advantages:

• Platform independence: runs on win32 and linux, awaiting os x...
• Can work without X11...especially interesting in not-so-full-powered-configurations (directly via OpenGL)
• Independent... People at freedesktop seem to do the trick very well (they didn't get between the lines -- yet)

Interesting is, that there are also java-bindings that work together with SWT which is an interesting step (mono is already on board -- see previous comments)

So hopefully the time of ugly graphics in platform-independent OpenSource-Software is finally over... (just watch OpenOffice -- uaaahh)

Well, a last wish: If Qt guys come aboard, this means KDE is in which on the other hand means that gnome and KDE join on the same backend... just dreaming...

Who is accountable for the security of the Linux kernel? Does Red Hat, for example, take responsibility?

Who is accountable for the security of windows?
Can I bill last months lost work-hours due to spyware-/worm recovery on windows to Microsoft or - better - personally to you, Nickie?

In Microsoft's world customers are confidant that we take responsibility. They know that they will get their upgrades and patches.

Oh, let me rephrase that a little:
In Microsoft's world customers have learned that Microsoft has never taken responsibility for security problems. They know that it can take months for MS to release a patch for a critical issue and that often these patches will break other things (even open new security holes) completely unrelated to the initial problem. They also know that many major MS products like Internet Explorer are commonly banned from corporate network environments for exactly these reasons.

Linux is not ready for mission-critical computing. There are fundamental things missing. For example, there is no single development environment for Linux as there is for Microsoft, neither is there a single sign-on system.

First, you obviously have no idea what you're talking about as your requirements for "mission-critical computing" have nothing to do with it.

Anyways, there is not one but many capable "developement environments" for linux. I assume your definition of "developement environment" would be a pretty IDE like eclipse. Most real developers I've met prefer to just work on the powerful unix shell using their editor and toolchain of choice, though.

As for single signon, again I cannot see how this relates to "mission critical computing". But you can have it on linux.
There's kerberos, NIS+ and probably other options that I don't know about.
Also there's samba to emulate the windows crap if you have to.

These are factors that are holding back Linux.

Look, Nickie, nothing's really holding back linux.
It's fools like you writing ridiculous articles like the one I'm responding to that prove how helpless and jealous Microsoft is watching the steady growth
of linux.

You haven't tried Eclipse yet?