David Kennedy contributes the review below of Richard Hightower's new book Python Programming with the Java Class Libraries, subtitled A Tutorial for Building Web and Enterprise Applications with Jython, writing "This book tries to be suitable for both new and experienced programmers, and suffers from this decision. However, it presents all the central programming concepts clearly and is a decent primer on Jython. It is illustrated with copious code, and covers plenty of advanced topics. Worth reading if you're interesting in the Jython language. Oh, and ignore the sub-title."

scorp1us asks: "I'm working on a project which was coded in C/C++ to use a MySQL database. I've since been ordered to make it work with other databases as well. I found one that was close to what I want, SQLAPI++, but it is not database agnostic. You end up using the same function calls but you also end up having SQL for each database. I'm looking for a product that looks like DirectX, but for databases (DirectX emulates features in software if no hardware acceleration is present.) PHP's ADOdb is what I want, but I need it in C/C++. Has anyone seen something like this? My last requirment that it must work for MySQL, MS SQL server, and Informix, and work under Win32 and Linux."

zeno_lee asks: "Over the weekend, I spoke to a successful man in his 50s. He works in finance, but has had jobs in construction, trucking, and accounting. All throughout he has had concrete goals and pursued them vigorously. In his 20s he set a goal to be an expert in his field in finance, and achieved it successfully. I'm in my 20s and he advised me to envision what I want to do when I'm in my 50s, set my priorities and goals, and achieve that vision. He mentioned that success (career wise) depends on carefully planned goals with a vision, not a haphazard obstacle course with no end in sight. Beyond receiving a paycheck in the short term and steadily gaining expertise in my field, I have not given my long-term career any concrete thought. I don't have a vision of what I will be doing when I'm 50. Has anyone thought of their long-term career thoroughly and are working towards it? By this I don't mean the usual vague response 'I'll probably be in management one day.' I'm looking to hear from both junior 'careerists' in their 20s who have concrete goals, and the older folks in this field who have established careers and have an opinion about this."

Philippe Fremy writes: "After interviewing the Koffice team and Guido van Rossum, the Freehackers team now offers you the first part of an interview with the KDevelop team. Discover the founders of the project and the differences between Gideon and KDevelop, and more."

death00 writes: "GameDev has an interesting story about the success of Garage Games Torque engine (the engine behind Tribes 2). I especially find it interesting to see the number of developers working on high-quality games based on the Torque engine. The basic premise is that Garage Games gives a full license of the Torque engine to a team for a project for $100 USD per developer. The only caveat is that you must publish any finished works through Garage Games. Perhaps id software might consider doing this with the Quake III engine once the Doom III engine comes out. From my understanding, the Quake III engine currently licenses for significantly ($250,000 USD) more than that. Instead of waiting 2 more years and GPL'ing the full source, why not license it for cheap after Doom III comes out, then GPL later?"

skojt writes: "I saw on the Swedish site gnuheter.org that Tord Jansson has announced that he discontinues development of BladeEnc. He says that he is tired of lawyers, that Lame does a better job for the average user and that Ogg Vorbis is a better choice." BladeEnc fans need not worry too much, though -- Jansson also says on the site "My devotion to the free software movement is as strong as ever and I just love to tinker with code, so you can be quite sure that you haven't seen the last of me yet."

Internet Ninja writes: "Since Google released their API for keen developers, some people have come up with some interesting stuff. Two that caught my eye the Touchgraph Google Browser which uses the 'similar pages' option to build relationships among URLs. A further extension of this is based on the sets functionality from Google Labs. I took the liberty of producing two screenshots. One based on Larry Wall and the other on Linus Torvalds. If Google isn't you there's also a similar browser based on the Amazon API as well"

prostoalex writes "Three-dimensional graphics for the Web always seemed like a great concept that's not there yet. Five years ago many publications saw a great future in 3D-Web, but somehow things just haven't been moving in that direction. Apparently, the status quo is not making companies in this field happy and so the big guys, including Intel, Macromedia, AutoDesk, EDS et al. formed a 3D CAD working group. They claim that 'the need for a common 3D format becomes clear in a simple perusal of the Web, where the volume of 3D content is minuscule -- well under 1 percent.' The article is published in the latest issue of Intel Developer Update magazine, which is also available as a PDF."

Pivot writes: "Carl Worth and Keith Packard have started building a PostScript-like API for drawing using the X Render extension. There are two modules, called 'Xr' (the "rendering part") and 'Xc' (the "compositing part", which is a layer on top of Render which will eventually grow to a client-side Render emulator). The API supports only cubic Bezier splines, leaving other splines out of the library, similar to PostScript. Check out the initial announcement on the Render mailing list, and some example shots. Shurely this will remind some of NeWS, cowritten by another well known character."

jejones writes "Kristen Nygaard, co-creator of Simula 67, a variant of Algol 60 designed for writing simulations that is considered to be the first object-oriented programming language, died of a heart attack on August 10, 2002 in Oslo, Norway. An AP article, truly astonishing in its errors (e.g. "the programming language Simula...laid the basis for MS_DOS and the Internet"?!), can be found here."

Desert1 writes "Carnegie Mellon's renowned computer science department has developed a system which allows for conversation between two different languages called Tongues. Currently this has been used between Croatian and English, perhaps one day they will be able to develop one that will allow politicians to talk to normal folks and be understood." It's been in development for a while.

RpiMatty1 writes: "Apparently the Linux Kernel has been booted on the Xbox. No mention of it on the Xbox-Linux Home page yet. Here is another posting of the same messages at Xboxhacker.net." I wonder if the recent security code change rules this particular development out for Xboxes purchased in the near future.

jschauma writes "'IRIX Binary Compatibility', the first paper of a series on IRIX binary compatibility on NetBSD by Emmanuel Dreyfus has been published by ONLamp.com. The paper goes into the details of the implementation in the NetBSD kernel. As it explains how things are implemented, the paper documents various kernel susbsystems and reverse engineering techniques."

Lumpish Scholar writes "ActiveState founder Dick Hardt has quit. Or, as the press release puts it, "ActiveState Expands Board & Founder Steps Aside." No reason for the resignation was given, unless you count, "The company is looking to become a $100 million company, and they're looking for someone ... that [sic.] has that experience." ActiveState (profitably!) distributes its own proprietary products, and also both free and commercially supported versions of Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and XSLT, having given back significantly to the free / Open Source communities associated with those languages."

ZahrGnosis writes "TRN Mag Online is carrying an article titled Programming tool makes bugs sing. '[The researchers] set up software that mapped pitch and melodic contour information to structural elements in the programming language Pascal. "[We] aimed to see if information about the structure of Pascal programs could be communicated using such musical phrases".' They even found a practical application for software debugging."

prostoalex writes "Steve Anglin, author of such O'Reilly books as "C# in a Nutshell" and "VB.NET Core Classes in a Nutshell" from recent Java Virtual Machine Symposium. Among the questions discussed are intelligent garbage collection, faster implementations of Java bytecode, getting JVM's for even smaller and lighter devices and stopping thinking outside the box."

tarun asks: "I am creating the next version of my open source UDDI registry and decided to use an XML database backend - if I can find any good ones. The reason to make this choice was that I was impressed by oracle and db2's xml capabilities in my past lives. However, when I tried looking for an open-source alternative it seems there is nothing around except perhaps xindice -which clearly is less then perfect. I am looking for something that can work with more than one existing databases (I will ship my software with MySQL but if a large organization wants to deploy it, it should be able to do it using Oracle, DB2 or whatever they want to use) and xindice currently only works with Berkley-DB. Also, I am looking for something that can create database tables for me given an XML schema (I can tweak it later to create indexes, stored procedures etc) and given an XML document - write it to these tables. If it supports something standard like Xupdate or XQuery, that is even better."

davorg writes "In the dim and distant past when I first started doing web development, there was a book that everybody had a copy of. It was called 'How to Set Up and Maintain a Web Site' and it was by Lincoln Stein. The reason why everyone owned (and, more importantly, read) it was that it contained a complete high-level snapshot of everything you needed to know in order to run a web site at that time. Unfortunately, after a second edition in 1997 the book hasn't been updated. I suppose that the subject area has grown so much that no-one thought that a complete overview would be too high-level to be useful. They were probably right." davorg's review continues below.

byrnereese asks: "It seems that every organization I have worked for has been plagued with the same problem: 'how do you effectively manage multiple environment configurations for the various development, staging and production environments that exist.' For example, each application at our company requires a different set of database credentials for each environment we deploy it to. For a long time we have maintained different config files for each environment and checked them into our SCCS; but that has proved incredibly error prone because a different build is required for each environment. Each company I have worked for utilizes a different systemology to make config file management a little easier, but none of them have stumbled upon anything that is any less error prone, or any easier to manage than any other solution to choose from. So I am curious, how does your company manage environment specific application configuration? And what does your change management process for these configurations look like?"

Order writes "Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, one of the founding fathers of computer science and the author of the famous "Go To Considered Harmful", has died on Aug. 6, 2002 after a long struggle with cancer."