Mainsoft Ports ASP.Net AJAX to Linux, Apr 12, 2008

Mainsoft's new product lets developers use Microsoft's ASP.Net to build applications for Linux.

Wavecom, a developer of embedded comms infrastructure for automotive, machine-to-machine and mobile professional applications, has launched a plug-in to its flagship software platform enabling developers to work in the Lua programming language.

One fascinating session (and one that shows how FOSSCamp works and why it's so productive) was given by Mirco Müller, who discussed using OpenGL in GTK applications.

You might have heard of Microsoft's Silverlight technology. It's a rich internet application (RIA) framework positioned to rival Adobe's Flash. Unlike Flash however, it's only available for Windows and Mac, not Linux. This is where Moonlight comes in. Moonlight is a project to create a Silverlight plug-in for the Mono environment, which will run on Linux, Mac and Windows.

At the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, it was decided to start making Eclipse, the open-source development platform, the Visual Studio for Linux.

In a bid to highlight the ease with which applications can be ported to Linux, the Mono project IBM and Mainsoft will host the 'Race to Linux 2.0'.

The Mono Project on Feb. 20 announced that it has developed a Visual Basic compiler that will enable software developers who use Microsoft Visual Basic to run their applications on any platform that supports Mono, such as Linux, without any code modifications.

When you think programming languages and Linux, the languages that tend to come to mind are C, C++, Perl, PHP, Python and, lately, Ruby. But, Java probably doesn't enter your mind at all -- that's because until recently Java was a proprietary language.

Over the last few years, the number of developers who forecast that they would be coding more Linux than Windows apps has created a clearly rising trend line.

Developers are being urged to join the new Linux Standard Base (LSB) Developer Network, a developers’ website designed to rival the Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN).

Graham Glass wrote a blog entry this week that touched on two of my favorite themes: open source and education. In the middle of a project based on the red-hot Ruby on Rails platform, he took time out to explain how he found, and worked around, a Rails limitation. Digging down to the roots of the problem took six hours of investigation. Crafting the work-around took just six lines of code.

Mono is an initiative to develop an open source version of Microsoft .net that can be used to develop applications for Unix, Linux and other platforms, including Windows. The intention is that, for example, ASP.net applications could be developed.

Developers can use Google and other search engines to find source code, but it's not easy. A Silicon Valley startup claims to have come up with a better alternative -- a search engine for source code and code-related information.

IBM Corp and a dozen others will today announce an open source Ajax project to unify what's been the popular technology's Achilles Heel: the lack of common tooling.

The Mono open-source development platform based on .Net will be in the next version of the Fedora core Linux distribution.

The latest version of Free Pascal, version 2.0.2, has been released. According to the developers, “in combination with the Lazarus development environment, Free Pascal can be considered the ultimate desktop development tool.”

An autoconfiguration system for the project's ASP.NET implementation should make the open source .NET implementation easier to deploy

The Mono project, an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework, is now making it easier then ever for users to actually deploy code.

Developers using Microsoft's popular Visual Studio .Net software engineering suite were today offered a plug-in that allows them to code web applications for Linux.

Earlier this month, REAL Software released a beta of its latest object-oriented, visual RAD (rapid application development) environment for Linux.

SNAPPIX is the first of its kind Linux Live CD focused on easing the tasks necessary to begin learning and using open source Java, Perl, and Python.

This week, the Mono Project announced the release of Mono Live, a LiveCD allowing you to flirt with the Mono framework and Linux, without committing to installing a new distribution.

Graphics software giant Adobe Systems has released some components of its commercial products as open-source software, a move intended to help others ease a tedious but important part of programming.

There have been a number of press reports lately that discuss the techniques used in developing Samba, and that refer to those techniques as "reverse engineering". That term is quite misleading, and does not at all accurately reflect the techniques that the Samba Team actually use. I think that it is time to describe again the techniques that we actually use, and to dispel some other common myths about Samba development.

A new version of the open source programming language called Python will be faster and help ease system administration tasks, advocates claim.

A large part of the software industry has never heard of the science of quality assurance - or if it has, it doesn't believe in it. Thus spake Alan Cox, Wales' most famous Red Hat employee and one of the most influential voices in the IT world. Currently wrapping up his MBA at Swansea University, it's clear that Cox has been spending a lot of time thinking about what the software world can learn from everyone else about quality.

A new operating system filesystem is expected to inject new life into Linux's ability to search files, documents, e-mails and contacts more efficiently.

Oakland, Calif.-based Namesys (short for Naming System Venture) took the wraps off the latest version of its ReiserFS for licensing this week. Dubbed Reiser4, the so-called "Atomic Filesystem for Linux" posted benchmarks Monday showing it is 2 to 5 five times faster than the previous versions.

In what appears to be a coup for the IBM-born Eclipse open source Java development framework, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (Ansto) has started using it to build a Linux-based desktop application for controlling laboratory instrumentation.

Ansto’s IT project manager Nick Hauser said having been through the design phase, development of the application – called Gumtree - has started and is due for completion in two years.

Who said .NET only runs on Windows? In this article we take a look at DotGNU and how you can get .NET applications running on Linux and other flavours of Unix.

Acucorp has developed technology that allows firms to give their Cobol applications a new lease of life by transferring them to 64-bit Linux environments.

We asked two open source leaders -- Brendan Eich, chief architect of Mozilla, and Miguel de Icaza, CTO of Novell's Ximian services business unit -- for their perspectives on Longhorn's Avalon presentation subsystem.

The Eclipse Foundation next month plans to announce a new open-source project to deliver an open platform for frameworks and services for test and performance tools used along the software development lifecycle.

According to foundation officials, the Eclipse Foundation will announce its Test and Performance Tools Platform Top Level Project at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco early next month. Intel Corp., an Eclipse member, will lead the project. The project will foster open-source collaboration in testing and other areas.

Just when we think that the codec wars are just about over, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has released a codec that works differently from other existing systems. In March it issued it to the open source community through Sourceforge under the name of Dirac, named after the eccentric and brilliant British physicist.

This week the BBC said that it has been working on the codec since January last year, and now it is asking for open source help in taking it towards a product. Dirac is different from existing video compression systems, in that it uses wavelet technology.

Now that JBoss Inc., the stewards of the wildly popular JBoss Application Server and other open-source middleware, is on its way to fully license J2EE compatibility, some see the possibility of JBoss disrupting the commercial J2EE app server business the way Linux has disrupted the proprietary Unix business.

JBoss CEO and founder Marc Fleury recently spoke with CRN Senior Editor Elizabeth Montalbano about why he's committed to open source as a lucrative business model and how things have changed between his company and Java steward Sun Microsystems since JBoss Inc. became an official J2EE licensee. Fleury also took a firm stand on why, despite objections from IBM and open-source proponents, Sun should continue to oversee Java licensing and compatibility.

If your program is free software, it is basically ethical--but there is a trap you must be on guard for. Your program, though in itself free, may be restricted by non-free software that it depends on. Since the problem is most prominent today for Java programs, we call it the Java Trap.

Software developers at Innoopract released a Linux port to its Java programming tool for the Eclipse integrated development environment (define) Tuesday, a move that's steps ahead of its competitors.

The software tool, World Wide Web Windowing Toolkit (W4T) Plug-In for Eclipse 3.0, transforms underlying Java code into Visual Basic-style code components -- scroll bars, forms, buttons -- that speed up the Web application process by 50 percent, according to officials with Innoopract.

"Linux developers do not live up (or down, depending on your perspective) to the image of geeks who spend all their time typing cryptic commands," says EDC Analyst Erik Orgell. Only 20 percent of respondents say they use a CLI (command-line interface) exclusively; 45 percent prefer graphical IDEs (integrated development environments), while 28 percent mix IDE and CLI tools.

The Mono project has a clear goal: to become the first-choice platform for Linux software development. Considering that Mono is an implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, that goal might sound particularly audacious to many Linux fans.

To find out more, I attended a two day developer meeting hosted by Novell's Ximian division in Boston, MA. Led by the energetic and inimitable Miguel de Icaza, the meeting gave plenty of opportunity for mingling with the Mono developers and listening to presentations on various aspects of the project.

Borland Software's Kylix development software remains in limbo, with no new release having been issued for a year and the company not saying whether there will be an upgrade.

Kylix is a rapid application development environment for Linux that supports both C++ and Delphi development. An attendee at the BorCon conference in San Jose, California, this week expressed doubt, during a question and answer session, that the company would ever upgrade the product.

I have been to India a few times giving talks, it is huge. The governments in some states in India are pushing Linux and open-source development in their computer science programs. There are a lot of developers who can speak English and read English, so they can easily slip in and be productive. I think once we get more Internet connectivity, which is a big "if" in India, everyone else in the world could quit [and let India] maintain all the development. They have so many people there, so many good developers, its amazing.

The vulnerability affects PHP 4.2.0 and 4.2.1 and comes as a result of a flaw in the HTTP POST parser component of PHP. The HTTP POST parser is used to differentiate between files and variables sent by users to a Web server through Web forms, according to the alert. Insufficient checking in the parser could allow an attacker to crash the server, execute code or even take control of the system, The PHP Group said.

SP: Looking at the usage figures, there are now over 9 million domains using PHP. Did you have any idea that PHP was going to become this big? How does it feel to know that your product is probably the best alternative to Microsoft's solutions for the Web?

RL: First, to be clear, I did not develop the PHP we know today. Dozens, if not hundreds of people, developed PHP. I was simply the first developer.

This new site is dedicated to all spanish speaking users and friends of the famous PHP-NUKE. PHP-NUKE -en espanol offers everything about Php-Nuke builded sites, a place to contribute, new projects, discusion and much more. Visit http://www.phpnuke-espanol.org

 View older news this year: Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan
 View news from other years: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999
 View older news in category Programming this year: Apr
 View Programming news from other years: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2000