Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Ajax, Startup Your Build!
LINUX NEWS FROM O'REILLY NETWORK
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The Latest from http://www.linuxdevcenter.com and http://ONLamp.com
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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the weekly Linux newsletter, a
thin-but-convenient ploy to get you to visit the O'Reilly Network to learn
more about open source and free software administration, usage, advocacy,
and development. Here's what we have to offer this week.
Keeping a series of similar machines up to date can be easy or it can be
difficult. If you use a source-based operating system such as FreeBSD,
building your own packages as necessary with the proper compilation
options may seem easy for one machine, but try replicating that build
across your entire farm. Bjorn Nelson did. In his "Building a FreeBSD
Build System," he explains how he automated the update process on one
machine and pushes the updates out to the other machines. He's done the
hard part. Now you can enjoy the benefits. (Note that similar processes
apply to other operating systems.)
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2006/04/13/freebsd-build-system.html>
Solaris 10 changes a lot of things. One of the earliest and most visible
changes is to the startup process. While other Unixes use one or many
autonomous shell scripts, Solaris 10 introduced a new process called the
Service Management Facility. It has several advantages, but it's
different. Fortunately, Chris Josephes has written "Using Solaris SMF" to
explore the new system and to explain how it works, how to use it, and how
to add your own processes.
<http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/sysadmin/2006/04/13/using-solaris-smf.html>
How do the editors of the O'Reilly Network choose what to publish? How do
they identify good new subjects while giving solid established subjects
enough attention? Where can you learn practical information about AJAX?
Your editor answered all three questions at once (let no one say he has
little ambition!) in a recent weblog addressing our editorial policy:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/how_we_publish_and_why_an_ajax.html>
In other weblogs this week, brian d foy laments the closing of The Perl Journal:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/the_perl_journal_stops_publish.html>
Your editor continues his series on refactoring a legacy web application:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/refactoring_everything_day_6.html>
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/refactoring_everything_day_7.html>
<http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/refactoring_everything_day_8.html>
Juliet Kemp enables Vim keybindings in Firefox 1.5:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/04/firefox_with_vim_keybindings.html>
Lyx Krumbach explores her favorite text-based communication applications
for Linux:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/04/textbased_communication_in_lin.html>
Gregory Brown explains Ruby hash initialization and the memory
implications of using Symbols:
<http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/04/nubygems_hash_initialization_1.html>
<http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/04/nubygems_symbolic_starvation.html>
Note that the great weblog improvement has continued, with an update to
the venerable <http://weblogs.oreillynet.com/> page showing a better
overview of exactly what we talk about.
See you at the MySQL UC next week,
- c
chromatic
chromatic@oreilly.com
Technical Editor
O'Reilly Network
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ONLamp.com and Linux Devcenter Top Five Articles Last Week
1. Building a FreeBSD Build System
Keeping a single BSD system up to date is relatively easy. Keeping a whole
business full of servers fresh with patches and new applications and
updates is more work--unless you take advantage of the ports system. Bjorn
Nelson walks through the design and implementation of a build system
usable to push fresh binaries to as many servers as you have.
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2006/04/13/freebsd-build-system.html>
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2. Ajax on Rails
XMLHttpRequest and Ruby on Rails are two hot topics in web development. As
you ought to expect by now, they work really well together. Curt Hibbs
explains the minimal Ajax you need to know and the minimal Ruby you need
to write to Ajax-ify your Rails applications.
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/09/rails_ajax.html>
***
3. Installing Software on Debian
Debian GNU/Linux is a powerful and popular community-developed Linux
distribution--and the basis for several other useful and usable
distributions. One of the reasons for its popularity is the ease of
installing and maintaining software. Edd Dumbill, Debian developer and
GNU/Linux advocate, shows how to use Debian's tools to find and install
software packages.
<http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/04/06/aptitude_and_apt_get.html>
***
4. PHP Form Handling
If your PHP program is a dynamic web page (and it probably is) and your
PHP program is dealing with user input (and it probably is), then you need
to work with HTML forms. David Sklar, author of Learning PHP 5, offers
tips for simplifying, securing, and organizing your form-handling PHP
code.
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2004/08/26/PHPformhandling.html>
***
5. Regular Expressions in C++ with Boost.Regex
Searching and parsing text can be a messy business, especially in C++.
Instead of building your own token-based state machine, spend an hour
learning regular expressions and use a good package such as the regular
expression library from the Boost library. Ryan Stephens demonstrates how
to match, search, and parse text with Boost.Regex in C++.
<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/04/06/boostregex.html>
***
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