NEWS Software
%Komodo Becomes Easier
ActiveState Komodo is the professional
integrated development environment
Software News
(IDE) for open source languages, provid-
ing a powerful workspace for editing,
%P4V Running at LinuxTag debugging and testing applications.
While Windows users have been able to P4V can be downloaded free for use Komodo is optimized for Perl, PHP,
use a graphical user interface to the Per- with a licensed or two-user Perforce Python, Tcl, and XSLT.
force version-control system for quite a Server for RedHat Linux (7.2 or 7.3) or The new version 2.3 adds improved
while, a Linux GUI was not available Mac OS X (10.1 or higher). usability, performance, and easier PHP
before the LinuxTag expo (see p85). As P4V is an end-user application configuration to the IDE.
There, Perforce Software presented P4V, designed for software developers, it does The aim of Komodo is to produce
the Perforce Visual Client for Linux and not support operations that require Per- higher quality code faster. This is
MacOS X. force superuser, admin, or review achieved by using editing and debugging
Having a standard graphical interface privileges. This means that you can t use features to save you time and effort.
across a range of Operating System plat- P4V to create new user specifications With broad language support and cross-
forms means that developers can easily explicitly. However you can open a con- platform implementation you can
switch from one to another without the nection as a new user and then edit the standardize on a single IDE for all open
need to retrain. The new P4V allows specification for that user. % source language development, thus sim-
developers to access file states and http://www.perforce.com/perforce/ plifying IT development strategies.
change their history more easily, thus products/p4v.html The Komodo IDE allows for team co-
reducing the number of errors operation by using Source Code Control
usually made in this area. integration (CVS and Perforce) to let you
Workspace operations such as safely and securely control your develop-
updating files and carrying out ment. It includes a visual interface for
mergers are handled by the new almost effortless creation and debugging
interface which also allows of regular expressions.
three way mergings and com- The new version uses the cutting-edge
bines built in differencing of XSLT debugging technology, making it
development code. simple to find problems in both input
To operate the P4V requires data and code. %
the use of a Perforce server to http://www.activestate.com/Products/
hold the code. Komodo/
%Mandrake in a Cluster %DTP on Linux
Mandrakesoft is now producing its own being just a click or two away, including Wondering why even Linux Magazine is
cluster-oriented distribution to allow it jobs like adding and removing nodes produced using non-Linux (that is:
a foothold in the ever-expanding mar- from the cluster and creating virtual par- MacOS) software? There simply is no
ket of supercomputing, especially in titions. There is a graphical monitoring professional Desktop Publishing soft-
research and development laboratories. tool, which goes by the name Ganglia. ware around on the Linux platform. A
MandrakeClustering has been put to use Two networks occupy the system, one first step has been made however with
in risk analysis, seismic modeling and for the administration chores, the other the release of Scribus 1.0, a Qt-based
crash simulations making the most out for the much more worthwhile job of layout-software, at present sufficient to
of AMD Opteron processors, with sup- passing the actual data around the clus- create newsletters, corporate stationery
port for IA-64 later in the year. ter. This helps to avoid bottlenecks. and other smaller documents.
Much use is made of Wizards, like Mandrake has always been able to It supports Unicode, manual kerning,
Clusterautosetup and kdeploy. These boast about its role in hardware recogni- CMYK color, EPS and PDF export (fonts
allow complete deployment of a cluster tion and that knowledge has been  version 1.0 makes use of TrueType and
system in just a few minutes, thanks to transferred into this solution. Each node PostScript Type 1  can be embedded),
technology provided by PXE. The system in the cluster can adapt itself to its hard- and color separation. Using a plug-in,
is kept up to date by calling on the ser- ware, meaning that clusters could be tasks can be automated with Python
vices of URPMI, which has been built out of mixed hardware. Support for scripts. In addition to major languages,
parallelized to allow automated software 16GB of RAM is available to those the software  speaks Russian, Nor-
updating of all nodes simultaneously. machines running Opterons. % wegian, Polish, Czech and a couple of
Graphical tools help out with the con- http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/ others. %
figuration of the cluster, with most tasks clustering http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid/
6 September 2003 www.linux-magazine.com
Software NEWS
%SGI Training for Irix and Linux %Mathematica 5
SGI has launched their new training pro- administration and software develop- Available for Linux x86 and Alpha,
gram, designed to ensure customers are ment. Customers can learn about Mathematica 5 introduces new function-
able to use SGI products to their full troubleshooting system problems, how ality, much of which is based on
potential and achieve the highest return to configure and verify system opera- algorithms that are not found in other
on their investment. The courses, also tions, gather status information and products or that cost much more. Key
available to prospective customers, will trace the flow of data. new technologies enable Mathematica 5
increase knowledge and understanding By providing this training, SGI will be to outperform dedicated numerical sys-
of current Linux based SGI technology. able to increase the number of technical tems in raw computational speed.
Held at SGI s European Headquarters users for its Altix 3000 computers and so
in Theale, the schedule covers IRIX, Altix provide a larger pool of knowledge to
and Open GL products. Courses will increase customer potential. It should
assist system administrators, system also allow SGI to have greater insight on
maintainers and graphics programmers the needs and requirements of its cus-
to gain knowledge about SGI systems, tomers so they can develop products
including training on the IRIX and Linux more tailored to their exact needs. %
system architecture, system network http://www.sgi.co.uk/custeducation
%Zeus with Optimum Opteron
The task of load balancing a group of The Zeus Load Balancer is a powerful
servers is a vital job, one process too far traffic management tool, and as such, is
and you could see your system go down. complimented by the scalability now
Zeus Technology has been forefront in being shown by using Opteron proces- Over 100 new algorithms for symbolic
the field of mission-critical hosting and sors. The conclusion of Ben Williams, and numeric computation have been
Web infrastructure solutions. They have the director of the server/workstation implemented by in-house developers,
recently announced that their Zeus web business segment, is that with commod- including major new algorithms for solv-
Server and Load Balancer products will ity hardware running at these speeds ing equations and inequalities
both be optimized for the 64-bit technol- there is no longer the need for people to symbolically over complex numbers,
ogy in the AMD Opteron processor. purchase dedicated hardware load bal- reals, and integers. %
Using a 4p 4-way AMD Opteron ancing solutions. http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica
processor-based server, Zeus Web Zeus runs in a request-aware traffic
Server scored a SPECweb99_SSL score of management mode, which optimizes the
3,498. This is shown to provide better movement of data through a network %WebSphere Upgrade
performance than six four-processor regardless of the servers it contains. % The Linux version of IBM s WebSphere
UltraSparc III-based servers. http://www.zeus.com/ Software Development Kit has now
moved to version 5.0.1. With it you will
be able to create and test web services
%Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules developed from an integrated package,
O Reilly has released a new tome on be read in just an hour or two, ending which includes a simple Web application
Perl. with a series of exercises to help you server, along with the tools needed to
One slogan of Perl is that it makes practice what you ve learned. make it tick. Documentation and sample
easy things easy and hard things possi- Learning Perl Objects, References & applications will show you how to make
ble. Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules is about learning to use Perl as the most of the package. The samples
Modules is aimed at making the leap a programming language, and not just a will show you how to create a secure
from the easy things to the hard scripting language. This web service that meets the WS-Security
ones. is the book that separates specifications. The tools are designed to
Topics include: the Perl dabbler from the help create and test your Java-based web
" Packages and namespaces Perl programmer. % services efficiently.
" References and scoping The development kit will give you
" Manipulating complex data Learning Perl Objects, access to an embedded version of the
structures References & Modules IBM WebSphere Application Server,
" Object-oriented programming By Randal L. Schwartz which has support for Orb and EJBs. In
" Writing and using modules With Tom Phoenix addition, you get an entry-level JDBC
" Contributing to CPAN 0-596-00478-8 database to provide you with enough
Each chapter in the book is 205 pages data while developing your services. %
designed to be small enough to US $34.95, Ł24.95 http://www.ibm.com/
www.linux-magazine.com September 2003 7