The new book Debugging with GDB/DDD by Norman Matloff and P.J. Salzman, published by No Starch Press, highlights the importance of debugging to successful software development. Focusing on GDB, a popular open-source debugger, the book shows developers how to reduce the time they spend finding and fixing programming errors. Debugging's approach is to apply a range of real-world coding errors, from simple typos to major logical blunders, to illustrate how to manage memory, understand core dumps and trace programming errors to their root causes. The book also covers topics missing from other debugging books, such as threaded, server/client, GUI and parallel programming.
Fresh out of beta is Cohesive Flexible Technologies' Elastic Server On-Demand (ESOD) Community Edition virtualization platform. The product is a free Internet platform for independent developers and individual enterprise developers to take advantage of virtualization and cloud computing utilities like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. Users can “take their application stack 'recipes', capture them, and reproduce them as virtual servers rapidly and automatically”, says CohesiveFT's CTO. The firm claims to be the “first service to offer developers and operations complete control of their server assembly, independent of which virtualization or cloud technology they require.” The ESOD Community Edition is free to use and is intended for individual developers and noncommercial, nonproduction use.
Adding to its rich portfolio of debugging tools, TotalView Technologies has released Workbench Manager, an application that allows developers to create an integrated, cohesive view of the development and debugging work-flow process. One can manage any version of TotalView Debugger, MemoryScape memory debugger and any third-party application used for development and debugging, all from a single dashboard-like GUI. As a result, you easily can integrate both commercial and open-source tools in your toolchain. TotalView Technologies' products can be used to debug Linux, Mac OS X and UNIX applications running on development machines with single, dual-core, multicore or multiple processors.
A book on a specific Linux topic typically means it's on the cusp of breaking out. Such is the case with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the focus of the new book Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools by Gary E. Sherman and the Pragmatic Bookshelf. The book's purpose is to help you deal with the issues involved in assembling your GIS toolkit, such as choosing the right platform and tools, dealing with integration issues and getting support. Sherman introduces the main open-source applications, such as GRASS, Quantum GIS, uDig and others, and also delves into scripting with various languages. The author is the founder of the Quantum GIS Project.
New on the development scene are SoftIntegration's Ch 6.0 and Embedded Ch 6.0, interpreters for cross-platform scripting, 2-D/3-D plotting, numerical computing, shell programming and embedded scripting. New features in v6.0 include debugging capability, a user-friendly IDE for teaching/learning programming (in the Professional Edition) and new plotting features, including multiple coordinates and new plotting types. Ch and Embedded Ch are available for Linux x86, Linux PPC, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, HP-UX, FreeBSD and QNX Neutrino RTOS.
ADLINK Technology has just beefed up your options for network security, adding the ALS-3206 Rackmount Network Security Platform to its solutions palette. The ALS-3206 series is billed as a flexible, mid-range, cost-effective solution for IDS, IPS, UTM, firewall, VPN gateway, load balancing and traffic-mining applications. The line further supports several Intel processors and chipsets and provides six gigabit Ethernet ports, one PCI extension slot and two configurable PCI-X slots. One of the PCI-X extension slots can be configured to extend a four-port gigabit Ethernet card and the other to extend a network security accelerator. This combination of features is suited, says ADLINK, for antivirus software security, content security and PKI software applications.
You can feel the trembling emanating from Redmond after Open-Xchange's announcement of its newly GPL'd Open-Xchange Community Edition (OXCE). Open-Xchange calls OXCE “the only remaining independent open-source alternative to Microsoft Exchange” and offers the necessary tools to facilitate communication and teamwork: e=mail, calendaring, contacts, tasks and document sharing. The company further cites its intuitive tools and intelligent features, such as smart links between calendar appointments, task lists, contacts, documents, bookmarks, knowledge articles and Ajax-based mashup capabilities by Netvibes' Universal Widget API (UWA). Initially, OXCE is available for Debian and Ubuntu, with additional Linux distribution support coming later.
If downtime ain't an option for your database, Sybase hopes you'll deploy its new Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) Cluster Edition. The technology enables enterprises to deploy database environments across shared servers in a cluster, which offers the added benefit of optimal service through events such as system failures, peak loads and planned maintenance. In addition, Sybase's product allows for savings in hardware and power costs through optimal resource utilization. Another technology, Virtualized Resource Management, supplies application workloads with a virtual view of the physical cluster that can be changed dynamically on demand. ASE Cluster Edition is available for Red Hat and SUSE Linux, as well as 64-bit Solaris.