ITWorld.com has a great article that discusses how different development is in today’s world as compared to say 10 years ago. They focus on the fact that Linux is at the core of so many devices these days how can you know what hardware platform your app will need to run on? The article asks lots of interesting quesitons and has some ideas of where we are going. Where do you think we are headed? Is having so many different ways to use linux, i.e. Phones, Laptops, tablets, making it harder or easier to program?
Here are ten new ones to look at over on inforworld.com. While new languages come out all the time there are only two on this list that anyone here at linuxinstall.net had even heard of. Before you decide to build your next startup on one of these make sure you know what you are getting yourself into. The road to today’s modern languages is paved with the dead languages that came before them.
On of my favorite tools I never get enough time to use is expect. What is expect? Expect is a scripting language that let’s you automate responses to scripts or daemons and pretend to be a users. So you can write a script to say update the passwords on all your systems with just one command. Another way I am planning to use this in the very near future is to do MD5 Check Sums on a file and compare them. If the files aren’t then it will the re-copy over the files that are missing. Over at linux-mag.com they have a great gettings started document you should check out to see if it can make your life easier.
I came across an article over on the Gaurdian talking about the real lack of need to the larger more established solutions. When you start developing on Linux or FreeBSD the points in the article ring even clearer. Even if you are developing Java applications whether you should use the free eclipse solution or a packaged eclipse solution like IBM’s RSA or RAD or the much cheaper MyEclipse‘s cheaper but still costing solution. If you want to save your company money take just a little bit of time and something to develop and look at the many free and open source options available.
If the application you are having problems with does a lot of reading and writing to files a quick fix might be to use a RAM based file system. Yes that precious RAM we all love to have for our apps might be better spent creating a temporary file system. If you then copy the often written to application files onto this RAM based file system you should see tremendous performance increases. With systems running the Core i7 architecture the boost could be even higher because of the higher RAM speeds and lower latency between the CPU and the chips. The only way to find out though is to give it a try. To do that you will need a RAM Disk of some kind. I found this how to over at Linux Mag that should be a good starting point. While I haven’t done these exact instructions, I have done this before and they seem to be correct. As with anything though your mileage may very. Test your solution thoroughly before implementing this in a production environment. Remember you are dealing with RAM and if you have to reboot anything not saved off from that RAM Disk will be lost.
Jono Bacon, Community Manager at Ubuntu, has assembled a nice article about what one needs to write the quick and scratch your own itch applications Linux and FLOSS are known for without a lot of hassle. The concept hearkens back to the good old days of Unix when apps were focused on doing one task and doing it well. His article is a great getting started guide to help you easily find the parts you will need. Check it out.
While doing some research for a friend I came across this article about the gripes of an Android Developer. The list, found here, doesn’t have anything I would consider a show stopper but I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. Before you start or decide to start developing on Android this is a great list of warnings and things to think about.
I support web development for a living and here are my thoughts about what you need to do it right. After almost 15 years of supporting pesky developers I have learned a few things. In this article I try to help you understand what you should plan to have and do. Check out and participate in our discussion about the proper setup of web development environments. Let us know how whether or not you agree with our thoughts in this post. The story is right here.
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