Last week you asked Sam Lantinga , developer of the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) about SDL and other issues related to gaming. He's responded with answers about the SL port to Sony Playstation, game audio, DirectX, his new job at Blizzard, and more. He even drops some hints about some interesting gaming developments to watch out for.

Water Paradox writes: "A couple of years ago our company was firmly entrenched in the Microsoft way of doing business. All of our development was in Visual Basic and related proprietary tools. Open Source / Free Software advocates were a minority. Last week we made the switch from VB to Open Source development (Apache, PHP, my SQL, etc) on a Win32 box. This decision was made quickly, but came after eight months of evaluation. I wrote a short article about it here: Moving from Microsoft to Open Source, which may be useful to other folks contemplating the same switch. Yes, we're even proposing Win32 Apache as our default server, since it has been reasonably stable for us over eight months."

Dmitry Dvoinikov writes: "I'm very excited about the web scripting language I had to learn and use with the company I currently work for. It's absolutely unknown to public, used in may be dozen of places around the world. But it's so great, I thought it deserves more publicity. So, here is the introductory article about the BOA web scripting engine. And here is its homepage if you are interested." If you know any PHP or perl, the small "hello webreaders" comparison is interesting (and Yes, favors Boa;) ).

Joe writes: "Here's the 4th installment in a very good series of articles where Daniel Robbins( President/CEO, Gentoo Technologies ) shares his experiences as he redesigns the Gentoo Linux Web site using technologies like XML, XSLT, and Python. This article completes the conversion to XML/XSLT, fixes a host of Netscape 4.x browser compatibility bugs, and adds an auto-generated XML Changelog to the site." This is a pretty cool tutorial, especially in combination with the preceding articles -- but please don't let you site become unreadable to those on text-only browsers! :)

jarek writes "ZDNET has an article that talks about latest research data. It talks about how Java is overtaking C/C++ next year. The article also talks about developers adopting linux and putting linux to use in mission critical tasks." It's evidently taking developers from the C/C++, but also the Visual Basic camps, with strong growth overseas.

dereferenced writes: "Walter Bright, author of the original Zortech C++ Compiler and the free (as in beer) Digital Mars C/C++ Compiler, has posted a draft specification for a new programming language that he describes as "a successor to C and C++". It seems to me that most of the "new" programming languages fall into one of two categories: Those from academia with radical new paradigms and those from large corporations with a focus on RAD and the web. Maybe its time for a new language born out of practical experience implementing compilers."

Hell O'World writes: "Wow! Mob Software." A concise submitter, how refreshing. To elaborate: an essay whose author argues that large software projects should be built, well, by a mob.

JigSaw writes "The OpenGL Architecture Review Board announced the new OpenGL 1.3 specification (1.8 MB pdf). In OpenGL 1.3, several additional features and functions have been ratified and brought into the API's core functionality. New features include Cube map texturing, multisampling, new texture modes that provide more powerful ways of applying textures to rendered objects, compressed texture framework etc. Let's all hope that GL can catch up with Direct3D now, as with the latest DirectX8, Direct3D has done some big steps towards feature-set, speed and even non-bloatiness when it comes to coding for it, while OpenGL 1.2 was released more than 2 years ago and it did not offer as much."

WeaselOne writes: "Interesting Q&A with Bruce Momjian (one of the core PostgreSQl developers) on LWN.net. They caught up with him at O'Reilly where he was speaking (great intro sessions on PostgreSQL BTW). He lays out some interesting stuff about the direction of the database."

CitizenC writes: "The OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB) today announced the new OpenGL 1.3 specification. OpenGL.org will host this specification shortly. In OpenGL 1.3, several additional features and functions have been ratified and brought into the API's core functionality. You can read more about the release in general in this Yahoo news story, or go straight to OpenGL.org to view the specs yourself."

Troy writes: "This article went up today (on developerWorks) about the Open Source project called Jxta, which is a community-run attempt to build a utility application substrate for peer-to-peer applications. Anything with an electronic heartbeat can become a Jxta peer." A nice high-level overview of how Jxta is supposed to work.

LiquidPC writes: "deadly.org has a very thorough tutorial on LKM in OpenBSD, by Patrick Werner. You can check it out here. It gives you examples on writing LKMs and tells you why using them isn't the best idea."

implex writes "Interactive Week had an article called "Data Underdogs" which they compare offerings of present Open Source Databases with present commercial offerings. In one part they mention ...On the other hand, MySQL developers now have a much-needed transaction management system: NuSphere last month made its Gemini transaction manager for MySQL available as open source code on mySQL.org, a site that the company recently launched. Complicating matters, though, is NuSphere's blood feud with MySQL AB, a Swedish company that runs a competing open source development site for MySQL code at www.mysql.com. No mention of the fact that MySQL AB actually created the product was interesting."

Microsoft ISV writes: "We are beginning the next major release of our product, and we have been a Microsoft ISV for many years. In a few months Microsoft will be entering our market, and we wish to hedge our bets by supporting Linux in this next new major release. Can you ask your readership what is the best 'Visual Studio' like IDE for Linux? Especially for an ISV who will be maintaining the same product on both Windows and Linux?" Or is there even such a thing?

Saint Aardvark the Carpeted writes "Check this out for sheer genius...This guy has posted to Perl Monks a script that uses the Perl Eliza module to respond to spam. Check it and contribute your suggestions for improved vocabulary." The downside of course is that spammers never set their reply correctly (which I think is forgery, and should be treated as such) so this is probably more academic then useful, but its definitely funny.

ShoeHorn writes: "Here is a good article (1st of a 4 part series), that introduces you to the Ruby language. If you are currently a programmer coming from the likes of C++, Perl, or Python, you will see some strong similarities (especially to Python)."

j7953 writes: "The World Wide Web Consortium has released the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) 2.0 as a W3C recommendation; and the Web3D Consortium has announced they will present first browsers supporting their X3D standard (here's a draft), which is supposed to replace VRML, at Siggraph 2001."

ahto writes: "The first section of volume 4 of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is available for peer review (and the $2.56 finder's fee for every typo is still there :)." Knuth's series-in-progress made a lot of people's lists when it came to assembling the perfect collection of library books for computer science; now you have a chance to make the next one better. If you can find any mistakes, that is.

O'Reilly has put up an interesting interview with Randal Schwartz and Tom Phoenix, the guys behind the llama book (Learning Perl). In addition to all the perl stuff, Randal gives his take on Smalltalk, Ruby, and Python. And (not surprisingly) they plug the newest edition of the book.

Björn Schotte writes: "All sessions including abstracts were published today on php-conference.de. Also, online registration is now possible on the signup page. There are more than 60 sessions plus power workshops on the pre-conference day, plus an extra so-called Open Source room where Open Source PHP projects can present themselves for free. Also, a Q&A panel with nearly all members of the PHP Core Group will be organized where you can ask them about things like "What about the future of PHP?" / "Will there be an engine for PHP/Perl/Python together?" etc."