Dr. Dobb's Journal March 2004
Buckingham Palace has announced that Tim Berners-Lee will be made a Knight Commander by Queen Elizabeth, in recognition of his "services to the global development of the Internet." Berners-Lee proposed the global hypertext project to be known as the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. He went on to write the initial specifications for URIs, HTTP, and HTML, as well as the first World Wide Web server and the first client.
In a prepared statement, the soon-to-be Sir Tim said, "I accept this as an endorsement of the spirit of the Web; of building it in a decentralized way; of making best efforts to keep it open and fair; and of ensuring its fundamental technologies are available to all for broad use and innovation, and without having to pay licensing fees."
OpenCores.org, a consortium of developers dedicated to applying open-source principles to hardware design (http://www.opencores.org/), has passed a major milestone—its OpenRISC 1200 IP Core (called the OR 1200 for short) has been implemented in the first all-open-source system-on-chip. Flextronics Semiconductor's SoC is a 32-bit general-purpose microcontroller running at up to 160 MHz, and supporting Linux, uClinux, or eCos (http://www.flextronicssemi.com/).
According to the Freedom Technology Center (http://freedomtechnologycenter.org/), which hosted a demonstration of the SoC, "The GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) was ported, along with the GNU Binary Utilities including the assembler, linker, and debugger. An advanced simulator was built that can simulate not only the processor but an entire SoC, and of course a complete synthesizable RTL implementation was developed...The GNU development tools gdb and DDD can be used to download software code and debug it on the board."
The IFPUG Functional Sizing Method for measuring software size from a business perspective has been published as an ISO Standard under the title of "ISO/IEC 20926:2003 Software engineering—IFPUG 4.1 Unadjusted functional size measurement method—Counting practices manual."
Function-point analysis was first proposed in 1979 by Allan Albrecht of IBM. The International Function Point Users Group (http://www.ifpug.org/) was established in 1986 "to manage the evolution of the method and to provide supporting materials and training services."
The first phase of the Moonv6 project (http://moonv6.sr.unh.edu/), a test of IPv6 deployment and integration, ran smoothly, coordinators reported at a North American IPv6 Task Force summit. The Moonv6 project is "a collaborative effort between the UNH-IOL, the North American IPv6 Task Force, Internet2, and the Joint Interoperability Testing Command (JITC) along with other DoD agencies, including the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines...[It] represents the most aggressive collaborative IPv6 interoperability and application demonstration event in the North American market to date."
In Phase I of Moonv6, an IPv6 network was set up linking 11 sites from Durham, New Hampshire to San Diego, California. The deployment tested equipment and service interoperability from dozens of different vendors and institutions. The network incorporated Internet2 lines, DISN-LES (Defense Information System Network—Leading Edge Services) and DREN (Defense Research and Engineering Network) connections, and a satellite link. The second phase of the project is scheduled to begin shortly.
Sun has rejected an offer to join the IBM-led Eclipse project (http://www.eclipse.org/). As a result, the Java NetBeans IDE will not be integrated with Eclipse, though both projects seek to create an open-source Java development platform. Sun stated that business reasons rather than technical reasons led to the decision, saying in a release that "a common ground that would allow an equitable share in mutual development could not be found."
The Eclipse project, which is now in its third year, is restructuring and installing a board of directors. The Eclipse Platform is designed to be language-agnostic; the Java plug-ins were the first to be developed, and Eclipse itself is written in Java, but it now includes subprojects targeting C/C++ and Cobol.