Dr. Dobb's Journal May 2003
Jointly developed by Sybase, SciTech, and a core team of Open Watcom developers, Open Watcom 1.0 is the first release of the Watcom compilers in over three years. It can be downloaded from the OpenWatcom.org web site (http://www .openwatcom.org/) or purchased on CD-ROM from SciTech's web site. SDK headers and libraries for OS/2, Win16, and Win32 are included, as well as a number of royalty-free and open-source DOS extenders. The Open Watcom C/C++ and Fortran compilers support remote debugging over the serial port, parallel port, or TCP/IP for all supported platforms including DOS. There are also remote debugging layers for Novell Netware networks (IPX and NetBIOS) as well as for remote debugging within virtual DOS machines. You can cross compile and debug any target platform from any host platform—Win32 applications can be developed and debugged from OS/2 or DOS. A Linux port is in the works.
SciTech Software Inc.
180 East 4th Street, Suite 300
Chico, CA 95928
530-894-8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com/
ActiveState's PerlASPX project allows ASP.NET-compliant web pages and web services to be written in Perl, thereby taking advantage of ASP.NET's early binding, just-in-time compilation, native optimization, and caching services to improve performance. PerlASPX also lets you create ASP.NET-hosted XML web services in Perl. The software requires ActiveState's Perl Dev Kit and ActivePerl, as well as either the Microsoft .NET Framework Redistributable or the Microsoft .NET Framework SDK.
ActiveState Corp.
400-580 Granville Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6C 1W6
604-484-6400
http://www.activestate.com/
Recursion Software has announced the release of its C++ ToolKit 3.0, a set of portable class libraries supporting the development of multithreaded distributed applications. The release provides support for AIX 5L with Visual Age 6.0, support for VxWorks, and improved Helper, Thread, and Network toolkits. Helper ToolKit's observable framework allows interested objects (or observers) to be notified of changes to their observed object (or observables). Helper ToolKit's singleton adapter provides a way to access a single instance of a type without creating the instance globally. Network ToolKit's acceptor/connector and dispatcher framework allows users to decouple the accept/connection strategies from the business logic and to automate service initialization and event handling. Thread ToolKit's thread pool provides system performance gain when the number and frequency of task execution is large, while dispensing with the need for resource-consuming creation of new threads. The framework class and method templates are intended to minimize the rippling effect of code changes, creating applications that are more robust and require less maintenance.
Recursion Software Inc.
2591 N. Dallas Parkway, Suite 200
Frisco, TX 75034
972-731-8800
http://www.recursionsw.com/
Openwave Systems is offering the Mobile Developer Toolkit 1.0, which provides resources such as sample code, demos, and open-source documentation, as well as the SDK used to create applications for the Openwave Mobile Browser. Also included are a WAP Push Library, a Multimedia Messaging Developer SDK, and a Location Studio SDK. The toolkit can be used in conjunction with other IDEs, and you can load, view, and debug your mobile user interface (WML or XHTML) using the toolkit.
Openwave Systems Inc.
1400 Seaport Boulevard
Redwood City, CA 94063
650-480-8000
http://www.openwave.com/
Computas North America has enhanced its Metis native XML visual modeling toolset. Version 3.3 provides a Model Browser facility for visualizing, navigating, and querying enterprise architecture models published on an intranet. All Metis model elements are XML-tagged objects with globally unique IDs, allowing them to be referenced in other XML models. The software has control features for user access, model versioning, and develop-review-publish cycles in its server-based repository, the Metis Team Server. Users updating or modifying models work only with a copy of the model residing in the repository; and once the changes are made, it is added to the repository as a new version: The original data is retained unchanged. Metis 3.3 also includes a browser-based Model Annotator tool that enables users to dynamically browse in a graphical mode and incorporate their comments into enterprise architecture models.
Computas NA
2721 226th Avenue SE
Sammamish, WA 98075
425-391-2000
http://www.computas.com/
PrestoSoft has released ExamDiff Pro 3.0, a visual file and directory comparison tool for Windows. It offers visual binary file comparison, word wrap, regular expression filters, very fast comparison, named sessions, word and character level diffs, and full-featured file editing. Other features include: print and print preview, directory snapshots for later comparison, and plug-ins that allow preprocessing files before comparing them.
PrestoSoft
P.O. Box 3611
Thousand Oaks, CA 91359
http://www.prestosoft.com/
Bare Bones Software, the maker of BBEdit, is offering TextWrangler 1.0, a programmer's text editor for the Macintosh. TextWrangler offers many of the features of BBEdit at a lower price. The editor can be launched from the command line and can be used in UNIX pipes. Other features include grep-style pattern-based search-and-replace capabilities based on PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression); syntax coloring and function navigation for ANSI C, C++, and Objective-C; the ability to diff files; Unicode and multibyte support; the ability to perform incremental searches; splittable editing windows; and extensive FTP support.
Bare Bones Software
P.O. Box 1048
Bedford, MA 01730
781-687-0700
http://www.barebones.com/
DDJ