Dynamic languages have changed the landscape and their only downfall is speed compared to native languages like C and C++. C/C++ have had a bit of a resurgence with embedded devices and such sucesses as the iphone and ipod touch. To get the most out of these devices native is the way to go. Both iPhone SDK and Android NDK are native based. The best games and graphically intensive applications need hardware rendering and the fastest way to get there is native. Larger companies like Google need to take advantage of speed to market and fast execution. The outcome of that appears to be the Go language.
Native applications are more complex to manage, so lots of work like Unladen Swallow getting Python running with LLVM, PyPy and others to make CPython faster. Google has supported Unladen Swallow. But a company the size of Google has massive scalability problems to solve, and maybe they are looking to go more native? The go language is now available from Google and it is deemed “Python meets C++”. Where Apple has Objective-C (which is actually as old as C++) which is a bit more message and event driven, Google has Go which is much like Python and other dynamic languages but much closer to C++ speeds.
We will learn more about Go over time but it looks like it is taking the best of both the dynamic and native/static worlds in programming languages which is a great evolution in technology.
Mono 2.2 has been released. Mono is a really great open source version of .NET and it is finding its way into many platforms that need to support multiplatform code such as Unity3D.
This update brings in some great stuff like routing controllers to use the ASP.NET MVC architecture, csharp inteactive shell and other great performance enhancements to an already speedy C#.
Python 2.6 was released not too long ago as an update adding great stuff like simplejson within python. But Python 3000 might be the release that draws lots of usage and programmers new and veteran.
Mono 2.0 the open source .NET framework has been released. Mono has made it’s way into many great systems by now from websites to even 3d engines such as Unity3D. It is great to have a toolkit that is powerful, has a great language set from C# to Boo and that is available on multiple platforms. From Windows, to *nix to of course Mac OSX built on unix, it all just works.
Having 2.0 solid and complete is a great step to making production apps run off of it.
Microsoft Compatible APIs
ADO.NET 2.0 API for accessing databases.
ASP.NET 2.0 API for developing Web-based applications.
Windows.Forms 2.0 API to create desktop applications.
System.XML 2.0: An API to manipulate XML documents.
System.Core: Provides support for the Language Integrated Query (LINQ).
System.Xml.Linq: Provides a LINQ provider for XML.
System.Drawing 2.0 API: A portable graphics rendering API.
Mono APIs
Gtk# 2.12: A binding to the Gtk+ 2.12 and GNOME libraries for creating desktop applications on Linux, Windows and MacOS X.
Mono.Cecil: A library to manipulate ECMA CLI files (the native format used for executables and libraries).
Mono.Cairo: A binding to the Cairo Graphics library to produce 2D graphics and render them into a variety of forms (images, windows, postscript and PDF).
Mono’s SQLite support: a library to create and consume databases created with SQLite.
Mono.Posix: a library to access Linux and Unix specific functionality from your managed application. With both a low-level interface as well as higher level interfaces.
Third Party APIs bundled with Mono
Extensive support for databases: PostgresSQL, DB2, Oracle, Sybase, SQL server, SQLite and Firebird.
C5 Generics Library: we are bundling the C5 generics collection class library as part of Mono.
Compilers
These compilers are part of the Mono 2.0 release:
C# 3.0 compiler implementation, with full support for LINQ.
Visual Basic 8 compiler.
IL assembler and disassembler and the development toolchain required to create libraries and applications.
I am pleased to announce that Mono C# compiler (gmcs) has now full C# 3.0 support. Most of the features has been available since Mono 1.2.6 release. However, with the upcoming Mono 2.0 release we will also support complex LINQ expressions and mainly expression trees which is fairly overlooked new feature with a lot of potential.
For anyone interested in compiling and running this LukeH’s slightly extreme LINQ example I have good news. It compiles on Mono and it runs as fast as on .NET.
Lua is a very useful language for many things. Extending core base code with modules and add-ons have made it very useful in game development but since Lua is table-based it can also be easily applied to web development. Well that time has come, See the Kepler Project for a nice collection of modules that make a good start for web development with Lua.
Kepler is an open source platform that brings the power of Lua to web development. There are a number of great Web development platforms out there but none balances portability, size, power and extensibility quite like Kepler does:
Being extremely portable and light means that it can be installed in very constrained devices as much as in providers that limit the amount of RAM and processing time for your scripts.
If you ever heard of the customization features of games such as World of Warcraft, think about all that power applied to web scripting.
Being extensible means both that we can extend the platform by adding new modules and that the users of the applications that you build can extend those applications using Lua.
Kepler was created by Fábrica Digital and PUC-Rio and is continuously being improved by a core team of commiters (see Dev Team) and lots of contributors (see Credits).
Kepler is free software and uses the MIT license model: it can be used for both academic and commercial purposes at absolutely no cost. See the Kepler License for more details.
Kepler is a platform that uses LuaRocks to offer Modules such as:
Page based and MVC XHTML generation (WSAPI, CGILua and Orbit)
SQL and XML processing (LuaSQL and LuaExpat)
Hash (MD5) and a pair crypt/decrypt
Zip files reading (LuaZip)
The Lua community is constantly contributing with more modules that can be used with the Kepler Architecture. Most of those modules are catalogued on LuaForge and new ones keep coming.
Unix installation
Please check UNIX Installation for a detailed view of how to install Kepler on Unix machines (including OSX).
Windows installation
Installing Kepler on Windows does not require any C compiler and should work on any Windows machine with internet access.
Download LuaRocks and install it using install /SCRIPTS c:\luarocks\0.5.2
Add the LuaRocks scripts dir to your system path (the same directory used in the /SCRIPTS parameter above)
Install Kepler and Xavante using luarocks install kepler-xavante
Configure everything using setup-kepler and following the instructions
Use xavante to run Xavante as a tray bar application, or use ‘xavante_start’ to run Xavante from the command prompt. Another option is to run Kepler using CGI
Once Kepler is running, you might want to look at those pages:
Hello World will tell you how to write a simple application
Using a Database will tell you how to use some of the popular databases with Kepler.
The Kepler 1.1 Unix installer can be downloaded from its downloads page. Check the Installation page for more details and for the Windows installation instructions (using LuaRocks).
If you need the binaries for specifics Modules you can also get them from LuaForge, on the module respective project page.
Well Mono has finally reached 2.0. This is great news! .NET skills now can span *nix, OSX, and Windows platforms. But is your app or assembly capable of running on Mono? Find out with MoMa.
Of course this is just a heuristic check and only finds out if your application on the surface has issues with running on a mono platform such as calls to p/invoke to windows apis or unsafe code that uses native calls but it is a great place to start.
While MoMA can help show potential issues, there are many complex factors that cannot be covered by a simple tool. MoMA may fail to point out areas that will cause problems, and may point out areas which will not actually be an issue.
Use the results provided as a guide to get you started on porting your application, but remember the true test is actually running your application on Mono.
For a description of the errors that MoMA detects and how to deal with them, see MoMA – Issue Descriptions.
I have recently been really interested in making platforms and applications that aren’t limited by the OS they are contained in. Thus mono is a very interesting platform now that it supports 2.0 fully and all the generic goodness to limit boxing/unboxing, common code between .net 2.0 apps (which are pretty much mainstream now) and developing for more of a standard that ensures your apps are portable.
Granted .NET 3.0 and 3.5 (pretty much the same version really with the addition of new frameworks such as WCF, LINQ which is very cool and functional as well as Silverlight) but most places deployed code is still .NET 2.0 and the poor souls working on very constricting .NET 1.0 and 1.1.
Is Microsoft going baseplane? Lots of people are going towards web based office in many ways, it is wise to release and allow people to export to these formats cleanly.
Microsoft Office Binary (doc, xls, ppt) File Formats
baseplane is a technology tentacle of drawk, a digital design and development company that produces web applications and games.
The goal of baseplane is to deliver tools that help developers, users and creating a level playing-field in a world of software where platform and company religiosity is breaking standards, simplified software entry points and going against the main rule of software, to minimize complexity.
With such great changes in software happening and so many platforms to consume, tools to simplify and make broad platforms to help manage bigger services it is key to take control of these services as the web generations advance.
baseplane has tools to help with social networks (Open social wrappers and other services), blogging aggregation (XMLRPC, metaweblog), code generation (data, to activity to apis to services to service modules like JSON services), consistent architecture spanning multiple platforms (.net, php, java, actionscript (as3) and ruby,python.
Python 3000
