Tools
Tools Feature Articles
Working with Dropbox
Dropbox client applets allow only basic functionality for interacting with the file storage service. To get the full breadth of capabilities, you'll need to use their SDK and write your own code
Project of the Month: TestNG
Not every coder uses xUnit frameworks for testing. Many prefer TestNG, which gets around xUnit limitations, supports testing at multiple levels (unit, functional, integration, end-to-end), and greatly facilitates data-driven tests.
Using Bluetooth
Trying to communicate with a remote device with no other familiar protocol? Bluetooth provides an easy answer with well-documented specs and straightforward programming APIs.
Windows 8 and Metro: The World Without Browser Plug-ins
Abandoning plug-ins will make browsers better and coding easier
Low-Cost, Low-Power Servers Begin Their Ascent
As the cloud is quickly demonstrating, small, seemingly underpowered servers are quite enough for most development tasks. Buying one of these low-cost, low-power units makes clear how much developer-friendlier they are than datacenter solutions
Tools News
DataStax: New Windows and OS X Support For Cassandra
Cassandra healthy due to linear scalability, multi-data center support, and dynamic schema capabilities
Hydra 4 Sharpens Its Teeth, Breathes New Fire
Major new release for .NET/Delphi cross-platform application framework
Compuware Updates Mainframe Workbench
New programmer tools for development and testing in mainframe arenas
New C/C++ Interpreter: Ch 7.0 and Embedded Ch 7.0
SoftIntegration releases interpreter for cross-platform scripting
Canadian Dragons: Komodo 7 Is Snappy IDE
Collaborative editing and cloud development in Mojolicious and many others
Massively Parallel Automated Debugging On IBM Blue Gene
Rogue Wave delivers early access version of TotalView
Is SmartBear Smarter Than The Average Code Review?
New GUI and flexible workflow technology with streamlined automation
Nvidia Speeds GPU Computations For Geophysicists
Automated performance for CUDA C/C++/Fortran application acceleration with extra signal processing
AT&T Developer Diagnostic Tool Tunes and Tweaks
Deep insight optimization that works as a two-part tool
Zend Server 5.6 Now Supports Mac OS X
New Apple developer tool for RAD web programming using PHP
Events of Interest
February 13-16, Santa Clara, CA. Cloud Connect
February 26-29, San Francisco, CA. SPTechCon (Sharepoint Technology Conference)
March 5-6, London, UK. QCon London
March 5-9, San Francisco, CA. Game Developers Conference
March 19-23, Denver, CO. DrupalCon
March 24-28, San Jose, CA. CGO '12. 10th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization.
March 25-30, Potsdam, Germany. AOSD '12. Aspect-oriented Software Development.
March 26-29, Reston, VA. EclipseCon 2012
April 2-3, London, U.K. Moblie 360 Live
April 2-4, San Francisco, CA. O'Reilly Where Conference
April 10-12, Santa Clara, CA. Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo
May 7-11, St. Petersburg, FL. SEI Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) Conference 2012
May 14-17, Bay Area, California. AnDevCon III (Android Developer Conference)
May 29-31, Fluent 2012: JavaScript and Beyond, San Francisco, CA.
June 4-6, Nashville, Tennessee.Magic Software Users Conference
June 11-14, Orlando, FL. Microsoft Tech-Ed
June 18-20, New York, NY. QCon New York
June 27-29, San Francisco, CA. Goole I/O Conference
July 16-20, Portland, OR. OSCON
August 20-24, Munich, Germany. DrupalCon Europe
September 23-25, St Louis, MO. StrangeLoop
September 30 - Oct 4, San Francisco, CA. JavaOne
October 22-24, San Francisco, CA. Windows Phone DevCon
October 24-25, New York City. The Strata Conference
November 7-9, San Francisco, CA. QCon
Best of the Web
Triple Buffering as A Concurrency Mechanism
Triple Buffering is a way of passing data between a producer and a consumer running at different rates. It ensures that the consumer sees only complete data with minimal lag.
Embedding GDB Breakpoints in C Source Code
Have you ever wanted to embed GDB breakpoints in C source code? Something like this:
printf("Hello,\n");
EMBED_BREAKPOINT;
printf("world!\n");
Writing Kernel Exploits
Why attack the kernel? Because it has a huge attack surface with potential for very interesting bugs. This presentation (pdf) takes a code-level dive into recently reported Linux-kernel exploits.
Compiling the JavaScript Engines
With growing demand for out-of-browser JavaScript (e.g., server JavaScript), a good knowledge of JavaScript engines is becoming more important.
