EXE articles from April 2000

EXE archives from April 2000

Linux for e-commerce.(GBdirect)(Company Operations)
April 1, 2000... GBdirect has been running its business on Linux for years and the OS has been a key element in our success as an e-commerce company. In practice, the shift to Linux meant replacing Microsoft in our offices and the installation of Linux on most...

Digests.
April 1, 2000... db.linux is Centura's Open Source data management system for Information Appliances. A C-based API provides full low-level access. It's available for downloading and for collaborative development from Open Avenue's hosting site. Open ...

Stingray's Objective Studio for W2K.(programming utility)(Product Announcement)
April 1, 2000... Objective Studio for Windows 2000 has surfaced from the gloriously titled Stingray division of Rogue Wave, and Visual Studio-housed developers are the target (rather than Troy Tempest or Commander Shore). The Studio provides a set of tools for...

Linux Dev Tools.(Code Fusion, GNUPro Dev Kit for Linux, Source Navigator)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
April 1, 2000... Red Hat has now released its range of Red Hat Development Tools for Linux (the tools formally known as Cygnus). This includes Code Fusion, the GNUPro Dev Kit for Linux and Source-Navigator. Code Fusion is a Linux IDE with C/C++ and Java...

Are you talking to me?(Chant's SpeechKit 2.1 speech recognition software)(Software Review)(Evaluation)
April 1, 2000... 'Are you talking to me?' is the question posed by a de Niro-esque developer toolkit from Chant. It was only a few months ago that we reported on Dragon Software's NaturallySpeaking Developer Suite and now a rival's offering has been updated:...

CodeMagicCD - a programmer's toolkit.(Blue Square Consulting)(Product Information)
April 1, 2000... Blue Square Consulting describes CodeMagicCD v1.0 as a compilation of the best programming software available on the Internet. The toolkit, which is aimed at professional developers, has its own 'universal IDE' and a programmer's editor to...

Digests.(application development software)(Software Review)(Buyers Guide)
April 1, 2000... JBuilder 3.5 will include support for Linux and tight integration with, and free development licences for, the Inprise Application Server. Built itself with Java 2, there is strong support for J2EE - from the high-level EJBs down to...

Who changed what when? Why?(Quma Software's QVCS 3.4 version control software)(Product Information)
April 1, 2000... You are using a version control system, aren't you? Of course you are: it's a life-saving friend in times of need and, ideally, quietly unobtrusive during the normal working day. So, although it might not set the pulse racing, in the spirit of...

Code to the max.(CodeMax program editor)(Product Information)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... CodeMax is an editing component for procedural languages. As well as built-in support for the use of C/C++, Pascal, Basic and SQL, you can add your own proprietary languages (you build a list of the language keywords to be processed). It...

e-Failure.(Company Business and Marketing)
April 1, 2000... Last Christmas, the final Christmas of the old millennium, was dubbed by the press the first 'e-Christmas'. What they meant was that this was the first Christmas where people didn't go out to do their Christmas shopping, but instead stayed at...

An ickey interface.(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2000... Dear Sir, Since David Mery has been so foolhardy as to invite thoughts on user interfaces (More hands Welcome, Soapflakes, February 2000), then here goes. Once upon a time, I dreamed up an Interactive Keyboard Interface, IKI, as a...

Sitting on a mountain.(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2000... Dear Sir, In your Soapflakes column in the March EXE (Of safety belts) you raise the issue of errors that dump the user unceremoniously back to the operating system. Surely users should never sit in an application for three hours...

Stop stalking Stob.
April 1, 2000... [Another snapshot of the emails we received about 13 Ways to loathe VB, Stob, January 2000] Nice one - I am forwarding this to my friends. You seem to have missed some items though... Runtime behaviour is affected by a project option...

Chuck & Kylix: straight outta Scotts Valley; Exciting times at Inprise. But after a series of crises, cumulating with the Corel purchase, the company is fighting back with Kylix, an ambitious project to port its Windows development environments to Linux. Chuck Jazdzewski, Chief Architect of Delphi, took time out from wrestling with the X API to explain to Will Watts how things were going.(Technology Information)(Column)(Technical)
April 1, 2000... Had you ever been a Unix-head before starting this project - for example, on a college VAX or whatever? How are you finding it? Have you become a master of shell scripting and regular expressions? This is the first project of significance...

How easy can Linux on a PC get?; Eliminating any barriers to the use of Linux was the goal of Corel. Peter Collinson tests whether it has succeeded with its Debian- and KDE-based OS. Peter Collinson is a freelance consultant specialising in Unix. He can be reached electronically as pc@hillside.co.uk, by phone on 01227 761824 or on the Web at www.hillside.co.uk.(Corel Linux)(Technology Information)
April 1, 2000... Those who have had Unix on their desktops for a long time have always been somewhat bemused by the statement that 'Unix is not ready for the desktop'. I suppose that I've grown up doing what I want to do on my Unix system using the tools that I...

Houston, we have a component; Getting among Windows synchronisation objects, Tony Jinks creates a robust Delphi program launcher component.(the CreateProcess API function)(Technology Tutorial)(Tutorial)
April 1, 2000... The inspiration for this article was a posting to a Delphi newsgroup, asking how to launch an external program and then wait for it to complete. However, in case of problems (eg the external program getting stuck and never terminating), it had...

Truly, madly, virtually; As well as a couple of early contenders for 'C/C++ Book of 2000", Francis Glassborow adds some further thoughts on what 'virtual' means in C++.(Technology Tutorial)(Tutorial)
April 1, 2000... The keyword virtual was a very early addition to C's set of keywords during the development of C++. It was introduced at a time when there was immense reluctance to add extra keywords. I suspect that this was the main motive for it being...

Meaning business objects; It might require a mind shift , but Philip Brown believes that encapsulating business rules lays the foundations of a true OO application.(Technology Tutorial)(Tutorial)
April 1, 2000... Most Delphi applications written today are not object-oriented. Just because the language has an object model and many existing and new classes are used, this does not mean that the application can be regarded as truly OO. Code reuse has...

A visit to alphaWorks; John Wilson salutes IBM's alphaWorks website. It's developed from being just a showcase for in-house projects to being a resource for some excellent, and freely available, technologies.(Java technology)(Company Business and Marketing)
April 1, 2000... 'Plagiarise, Let no one else's work evade your eyes, Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, So don't shade your eyes, But plagiarise, plagiarise, plagiarise - Only be sure always to call it please "research".' ...

It's all (nearly) in the script; Jon Perkins reviews the key features of the VBScript dialect of Visual Basic, and examines its use in the Windows Scripting Host.(Technology Tutorial)(Tutorial)
April 1, 2000... I must admit to feeling very fortunate about being the regular columnist for Visual Basic. Not only is Visual Basic the most widely adopted of Microsoft's developer tools but the core language crops up in several places, most notably in Visual...

Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.(Review)
April 1, 2000... An ever-increasing list of software - Linux, GNU, Apache, Perl, etc - is the visible product of the Open Source movement and its thinking. However, it would be wrong to think that as a movement it was conceived of as a whole, fully formed in...

Leen Ammeraal; Leen Ammeraal is a lecturer in Computer Science and author of many books about programming, programming languages and computer graphics, both in English and his native Dutch. Recent publications include 'STL for C++ programmers', one of the first books to tackle the Standard Template Library , and a new revision of his tutorial 'C++ for programmers'.(People)(Interview)
April 1, 2000... What was the first computer you worked on? After a (theoretical) IBM course for the IBM 650 in the autumn of 1959, I wrote my first real program in 1960 on the Stantec ZEBRA. The ZEBRA was a computer designed in Holland by Dr W.L. van der...

Down the pole; '"I can see a slow trend of Visual C++ developers moving to Visual Basic," said Cameron Michaelson, software engineer for Micron Technology Inc.' according to ZDNet report. Surprisingly, Ms Stob has seen this phenomenon too.
April 1, 2000... Blenkins was the first to go. Maybe I could have saved him. I spotted the first signs, but I thought nothing of it at the time. One never does, does one? We were standing outside the dome, he and I, during a rec break. No, not that dome....