Articles - Languages

Upon examination the Linux Standard Base, in the currently released form, is missing one large camp of developers and applications—namely Java. That’s not to say you can’t run Java applications on essentially every Linux distribution. What it does say is there is no “LSB certified” offering for developers to target, giving them 100% confidence that their application will run as they intend it to.

By Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz Welcome! This is Regular Expressions, or, more precisely, its early-September 2008 installment. Regular Expressions is a column we've written around a hundred times already, stretching back to the late '90s. We're excited to bring it now to Linux Developer Network (LDN), which will publish two installments each month.

Part one of this article, Cloud Computing and Open Source, presented an overview of several cloud computing solutions available today that are friendly to open source. In this article we'll focus on one of these solutions, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and walk through the development of an open source mashup for EC2. Amazon EC2 is a top player in the cloud computing space and gives organizations the ability to leverage world-class compute resources on a pay-as-you-go basis.... [more]

Creating applications with a visually appealing graphical user interface (GUI) requires some type of foundational toolkit to make the job practical. The leading candidates for Linux are the toolkits behind the two most popular desktop environments--namely GNOME and KDE. While they represent similar functionality, they are two totally different entities with different design philosophies and structure.

Once upon a time, Java was persona non grata on Linux distributions.

Application development for Linux is, without question, a wide open opportunity. Some might say Linux has everything a person would need to get virtually any job done. Developing custom applications for Linux is tells a different story. Microsoft's Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) offers a wealth of tools for serious application development and deployment. A number of fine development tools do exist for Linux, but none of them seem to have the comprehensive level of feature... [more]

2008 marks the tenth anniversary of the birth of Eclipse. It got its start in life as a proprietary development tool, but in 2001 IBM decided to change that and make it available under an open source license (Eclipse Public License).  Most people connect Eclipse with Java development, although with appropriate plug-in modules it is now much more than that.... [more]

This tutorial will give you a basic idea how to debug a program in Linux using GDB. As you are aware, Visual Studio doesn’t run on Linux so you have to use some of the tools provided on the command-line.

If you are used to Linux or UNIX, familiar with C or C++ development, or have ever downloaded and installed a source distribution that wasn't a source RPM, you probably have some familiarity with GNU Autotools. If you want to find out how they work and how they work together, what they are useful for, and how to make use of they in your application, this document is for you. It is intended to give a basic introduction to the use of the GNU Autotools toolchain, particularly on SUSE Linux.... [more]

By Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz Python is among the leading languages for development of embedded systems. You probably already recognize what a temptation exaggeration is for columnists. The world is a noisy place, and when a particular story deserves readers' attention, it's easy for "three elders coincidentally die in remote village" to become "Deadly Mystery Grips Town" by the time it hits the headlines.