Bitwise Magazine

Building your own Language – without tears

Dermot Hogan looks at what’s required to build your very own computer language using two new – and remarkable – tools. Microsoft’s Dynamic Language Runtime and ANTLR3 by Terrence Parr from the University of San Francisco.

Monday 18 August 2008

It’s a been a couple of months since I last looked at the DLR and ANTLR3 – somewhat longer than I’d anticipated. There are two reasons really – one is that I’ve been busy (ok – that’s not a reason, it’s an excuse: the dog ate my homework, Miss). The other is that both ANTLR and the DLR have been evolving and, with the DLR, at a rapid rate.

First, ANTLR. This is now close to the final 3.1 release – as it has been for the last few months to be honest. But hopefully, by the time you read this, ANTLR 3.1 will be out in its full glory. The main changes have been in the syntax for tree grammars (tighter) and, no doubt, numerous bug fixes. But with the DLR, it's been all change. My original calculator examples just don't work with the latest DLR. They don't even compile. The internal structure of the DLR has been moved around an awful lot – not really what you would expect in a transition from a first beta to a second, but it has. I suspect this has more than a little to do with the impact that Iron Ruby and Silverlight have had on a DLR originally designed to run Iron Python. Still, if we end up with a DLR that's (...)

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Learning Flex 3

Book Review

Thursday 14 August 2008

$39.99 / £24.99
By Alaric Cole
Pages: 304
O’Reilly: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517328
Book Web Site: http://www.greenlike.com/flex/learning
ISBN 10: 0-596-51732-7
ISBN 13: 9780596517328

Most programming frameworks of any complexity take time and effort to get to grips with - and Adobe's Flex is no exception to the rule! Comprising a massive class library and various tools such as the compiler and debugger, Flex not only requires that the developer should be at ease with the ActionScript language but also with Flex graphics programming, MXML formatting and a variety of techniques and technologies to deal with events, styles, data-binding and so on. Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that the learning curve for a beginner is pretty steep. Other books such as Essential ActionScript 3.0 cover some of the topics you'll need to master but may assume some prior knowledge of the subject. Flex 3 Training From The Source is a more complete guide for a beginner (...)

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Secure Your PC - Free eBook

Protect Your Privacy

Saturday 9 August 2008

Howard Fosdick has just released the latest version of his excellent eBook, ‘How to Secure Your Windows Computer and Protect Your Privacy — with Free Software’.

The newly updated eBook has been substantially expanded, revised and illustrated. If you want to know how to keep your data secure, make sure that your deleted files really are deleted and prevent your PC from suffering the attacks of malicious software, this book will tell you what you need to know. It's free and available now from the Download Page.

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Add A Runtime Form Designer To Your Delphi Apps

How can you save and load different form layouts while a Delphi application is running? Huw Collingbourne didn’t know either. But he eventually figured it out…

Thursday 7 August 2008

Following a couple of years of uncertainly, the venerable Delphi Pascal-based visual programming language/environment has finally found a new home. While Delphi may not have quite such a high profile in the development community as it once had, there is no doubting that it is still a powerful tool. In this article, I’ll explain how you can use Delphi For Win32 to create on-the-fly customizable user interfaces...

The Delphi 2007 IDE

It is always a nice feature to be able to customize the look and layout of an application. With a bit of work - and a few devious tricks - it is actually possible to let users alter the layout of a Delphi application at runtime. For example, they can drag buttons around on a form, resize them and save the finished design to disk so that it can be reloaded at a later stage. Similarly, they could change and save the buttons' captions, fonts, colours and other properties. Download the Source Code Delphi itself already knows how to save a form to disk. It does this every time you create a user interface. Look in any of your Delphi project directories and you will see a file with the extension '.DFM'. This is a file containing the form description. When you next load your project, Delphi (...)

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Essential ActionScript 3.0

Book Review

Wednesday 23 July 2008

$54.99 / £38.99
By Colin Moock
Pages: 946
O’Reilly: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596526948/index.html
ISBN-10: 0-596-52694-6
ISBN-13: 9780596526948

Lots of books call themselves ‘essential' but very few of them live up to that claim. This is an exception to the rule. ‘Essential ActionScript 3.0' is exactly what it says: whether you are a beginner who wants to learn ActionScript from the ground up or an old hand who needs an authoritative reference work, look no further - this is it! I should probably add, however, that this is big and complex book and even though it is suitable for a programmer moving to ActionScript from some other language it may be intimidating to somebody with little or no previous programming experience. There was a time when ActionScript might have been described as a ‘simple' language used for controlling animated graphics using Adobe's Flash. While it is still at the programming heart (...)

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Encapsulation, OOP and Sapphire

Modularity and Objects

Tuesday 22 July 2008

I’ve just posted an article about some of the mysteries of encapsulation and why this means different things to different people.

In object oriented programming, the word ‘encapsulation' is used a great deal. But not everybody uses it to mean the same thing. In my article, I try to clarify what I mean by encapsulation. You'll find the article on the blog I write on my software company's web site: What is Encapsulation? (and does it matter?) The central theme of this article is a discussion of the idea that encapsulation implies not only the hiding of data hidden but also of behaviour - that is, there should be no way in which the implementation details of an object's methods have any effect upon code that uses that object. While this was one of the fundamental ideas of OOP in the ‘old days', encapsulation of this type is now extremely rare… There is a good reason why I am so obsessive about (...)

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The Essential Guide to Flex 3

Book Review

Friday 18 July 2008

$54.99 / £33.99
By Charles E Brown
Pages: 600
Friends Of Ed: http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=9781590599501
ISBN-10: 1-59059-950-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-59059-950-1

Adobe's Flex 3 framework, for ‘rich internet applications' is becoming increasingly important for developing both Web-based and (when using the new AIR runtime) desktop applications. In order to master Flex you will need to be comfortable with quite a range of cooperating technologies including the ActionScript 3 programming language, the MXML formatting language, Adobe's Flash graphics and the huge code library comprising the Flex and AIR frameworks. The Essential Guide To Flex 3 covers the basic features of all of the above. It also includes a simple guide to using Adobe's Flex IDE, Flex Builder 3, and designing applications with the various ‘containers' and controls installed into the Flex Builder toolbox. It has chapters on XML processing, formatting and cascading (...)

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Get To Grips With Python

part one

Wednesday 2 July 2008

Over the past few years I’ve been so involved with the Ruby language that I’ve been guilty of ignoring an important alternative, Python. The two languages have much in common - they are both dynamic, object oriented languages with a simple syntax far removed from the ‘curly-bracket’ C-like languages which are so dominant. In this new series, I plan to explore the basics of the Python language. If you are interested, you may want to follow my progress...

First you will need to grab a copy of a Python interpreter and an IDE or editor. The main Python site is here: http://www.python.org/. Here you can navigate to the download page and choose a version of Python for your operating system. Alternatively, you can download ActiveState's ActivePython - a complete distribution with a number of useful extensions and documentation. ActiveState also has a multi-language editor, Komodo Edit, which is free and includes Python support. The screenshot below shows The Komodo IDE, which is a more powerful commercial alternative to Komodo Edit. More information and downloads can be found on the ActiveState site. With Komodo, you can load all the source files as a single project and interact with the program in the window seen here at the bottom-right (...)

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Microsoft Office Word 2007 - Essential Reference for Power Users

Book Review

Tuesday 17 June 2008

$74.95 / £39.95
By Matthew Strawbridge
Pages: 628
Software Reference Ltd: http://www.swref.com
ISBN: 978 0 9554614 1 5

Word 2007 is both a powerful and an exceptionally annoying word processor. Its huge range of features combined with an eccentric user interface make it hard work - even for a long-time Word user like me - to find half the things you are looking for. Add into this mix the odd inscrutable bug and you have a recipe for confusion. Things might be better if it came with a decent manual - but it doesn't, so I guess you just have to grin and bear it. Alternatively, you could buy a copy of Matthew Strawbridge's ‘Essential Reference' to Word. This is a book that lives up to its title. It is a massive and compendious reference to Word - printed on A4 paper spanning more than 600 pages and weighing over 3 and a half pounds! Suffice to say this is not a book that you can carry around in (...)

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Practical Artistry: Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers

Book Review

Thursday 12 June 2008

$29.99 / £18.50
By Harold Davis
Pages: 176
O’Reilly http://www.oreilly.com
ISBN 10: 0-596-52988-0 | ISBN 13: 9780596529888

A long time ago I used to take photographs professionally with cameras that contained (rather quaintly!) spools of actual film. I had some pretty serious kit in those days and I took things like lighting an exposure with due seriousness. These days I use a digital camera and I generally let its electronics take care of all the technical stuff for me. After all, if the exposure isn't quite right, I can always fix it in Photoshop later on, can't I... Well, no, not according to Harold Davis, anyway. He tackles the Photoshop myth head on in his Introduction - “It is,” he says, “fundamentally flawed to assume that incorrect exposures can be ‘fixed in Photoshop.' Photoshop, and other digital darkroom programs, can do great things, but are best used as creative tools (...)

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Now We Are Three

Yup, It’s the third birthday of Bitwise! So what’s changed...?

Sunday 1 June 2008

Well, time really has flown! The first issue Bitwise went online in June, 2005. At that time, I was recovering from a long (10 year) stint as the Delphi programming columnist for PC Plus magazine in the UK - which may explain why the content of that first issue of Bitwise had a decidedly Pascal-like flavour.

There was a an article by me all about writing a screen capture program in Delphi and another article by Bob Swart all about writing a Blog application in Delphi. Just for good measure, we also carried an interview with marc hoffman about the Rem Objects' Pascal language, Chrome, and another interview with Anders Hejlsberg who, before becoming the architect of C# had been the chief architect of - yup, you guessed it! - Delphi! Issue One did cover other topics too - including software reviews, articles about learning foreign languages online, Smalltalk and C# tutorials and Dermot Hogan's guide to serial communications using Visual Basic 6 - an article which (much to my surprise) continues, month on month, to be one of the most popular features on the entire Bitwise site even now. And (...)

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Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source

Book Review

Tuesday 27 May 2008

Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source
by Jeff Tapper, Michael Labriola, Matthew Boles, James Talbot
Adobe Press: http://www.adobepress.com/
Computer Manuals (UK): http://www.compman.co.uk
ISBN-10: 0321529189
ISBN-13: 978-0321529183
$52.99 / £42.99

One thing you can't accuse Adobe of is being skimpy with documentation. There is a huge amount of free documentation on the Flex framework and associated technologies such as AIR, Flash and Adobe's Flex IDE, Flex Builder. So what, you might wonder, is the point of yet more Adobe documentation, this time in the form of 670+ page paperback? To be honest, most of the information in this book is available elsewhere - either somewhere inside Adobe's PDF technical documentation, online in its Flex Developer Centre or, well, somewhere out there on the Internet. The point of this book is not that it contains unique or difficult-to-find material but that it presents that material in the form of a well-structured tutorial, leading the user through the basics of Flex development and onto ever (...)

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The Book Of Ruby - Free Ruby eBook

Ruby Programming Tutorial

Thursday 15 May 2008

I guess quite a few Bitwise readers (in the UK, at any rate) know me best for the innumerable programming tutorials which I’ve written over the years in PC Plus, PC Pro, PC Answers, PC Magazine, Computer Shopper and various other magazines...

I now have a software company to run and spend much of my time actually writing software instead of writing about it. Even so, I haven't completely given up writing programming tutorials. A while ago, I released a free eBook called The Little Book Of Ruby, which covers the essential features of Ruby programming in ten chapters. I am now going through the final revision of a much bigger book called, simple, The Book Of Ruby. In over 400 pages and 20 chapters this will take you from ‘Hello world' right into some of the inner details of Ruby metaprogramming, threads, blocks and iterators, Rails, regular expressions and all manner of other things besides. I am releasing the book for free and it will go online one chapter at a time (the first draft of the entire book already exists (...)

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The Ruby Programming Language

Ruby Reference Book

Friday 9 May 2008

The Ruby Programming Language - $39.99 (£24.99)
by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto
O’Reilly http://www.oreilly.com/
444 pp.
ISBN 10: 0-596-51617-7
ISBN 13: 9780596516178

There has been a glut of Ruby programming books in recent months. However, The Ruby Programming Language is different. It is co-authored by Yukihiro Matsumoto (‘Matz') the creator of the Ruby language itself. So, if you want to get the lowdown on the language from the really authoritative source, this is the place to look. By the standards of programming books, The Ruby Programming Language is reasonably slim. It is divided into just 10 chapters spanning around 400 pages of actual text. It admits to being modelled on the well-known book, The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie - which many people still believe to be one of the best language references ever written. It is, accordingly, not a beginner's tutorial. It assumes either a moderate knowledge of the Ruby (...)

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CodeGear Sold!

Borland Developer Tools is Borland No More...

Wednesday 7 May 2008

The Developer Tools group of Borland - the people who make tools such as JBuilder and Delphi - will henceforth be a part of Embarcadero Technologies, a cross platform database company.

Borland first announced its intention to sell of the Developer Tools group in February 2006 but, in a surprising twist of events, decided to hang onto them in November of the same year. Ever since that date there has been widespread speculation about the future of the group. That speculation has today come to an end with Borland's announcement of: ”...a definitive agreement to sell the assets of its individual developer tools unit, CodeGear, to Embarcadero Technologies. The purchase price for CodeGear is expected to be approximately $23 million. Borland will also retain CodeGear's accounts receivables with an approximate value of an additional $7 million. The transaction is expected to close by June 30, 2008.” Borland's announcement On its web site, Embarcadero states : (...)

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Adobe AIR - Going Native (ish)

Is Adobe’s AIR really the best choice for desktop applications?

Monday 5 May 2008

RIA (Rich Internet Applications) is a fashionable acronym which has now been reversed by Adobe to create AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) - a collection of code and utilities aimed at creating desktop applications using a mix of technologies (HTML, XML, ActionScript and Flash) which had hitherto been confined (well, mostly) to web browsers.

I say ‘mostly' since, in fact it is perfectly possible to embed Adobe's Flash player into a standalone application written in C#, say, or Delphi and program its behaviour using Adobe's Flex framework. But AIR applications don't need to be embedded into other programs in order to operate ‘standalone'. They can be packaged up inside AIR-powered windows so that, in principle, an AIR application can be completely self-contained. Native Desktop Integration The advantages of AIR will vary according to who you ask, I guess. here is my own list: AIR apps look nice (when using Flash graphics for the front end) AIR apps are cross-platform AIR apps may be partially compatible with Flex apps. In other words, you can share much of the same code-base across standalone (AIR) and (...)

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Love The Office Ribbon?

Um, How Polite Would You Like The Answer To Be...?

Tuesday 29 April 2008

After all this time I still don’t know my way around the ‘ribbon’ in Microsoft Word 2007...

Above: a slogan from Microsoft Labs. Someone there has a very dry sense of humour, I think! ...so, I was pleased to discover a new tool to help lost souls like me find our way around the new-style Office applications. Search Commands from Microsoft Office Labs is an add-in that “helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just type what you're looking for in your own words and click the command you need.” The Search Commands group changes itself to match your search term So, for example, if you can't find the word counter, you can go to the Search Commands tab on the ribbon, enter the text ‘word count' and - as you are typing - the ribbon itself changes before your very eyes, adding ‘Show (...)

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Visual Ruby On Rails

As Olivia Newton-John says (more or less) Let’s get Visual!

Monday 21 April 2008

When I began programming with the Ruby language and the Rails web framework ( ‘Ruby On Rails’), a few years ago, the first thing I tried to find was a visual IDE. I’d assumed that every programming language worth its salt had one of those these days. I searched and I searched but none could I find.

The Visual Rails Workbench Well, if you can't find one, there really is no option but to write one yourself. That, fundamentally, was the impetus behind the creation of my company, SapphireSteel Software, and our Visual Studio-hosted IDE, Ruby In Steel. Before going on, let me put all my cards on the table. I've designed and programmed a fair bit of Ruby In Steel myself and I admit to being totally and utterly biased. Today we launched a new visual design environment for Ruby On Rails but I'm not going to review it here - even I am not that shameless! What I will do is tell you a bit about what we have been doing and why we are so utterly determined to make the darn' thing visual - a heck of a sight more visual than any other Ruby IDE on the planet. Ruby programming has, up to now, (...)

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Morfik M2 - Ajax, The Next Generation

Visual Ajax Builder

Thursday 17 April 2008

Just when you think you’ve seen everything there is to see in application development tools, along comes Morfik! In some ways, Morfik’s visual Ajax IDE, WebOS AppsBuilder, is bucking all the trends. All the most fashionable web developers tell me that the best tools for application development are a simple text editor and a command prompt. Morfik’s IDE is way out there at the other extreme - it lets you create Ajax applications by dragging, dropping, coding and debugging all inside an elegant ‘visual’ environment.

Morfik's visual design environment has been given a slick makeover in version 2. Here is a view of the form designer with the new Office-style ‘ribbon' at the top of the workspace. Suffice to say, you'll either love it or loathe it. If you don't want ‘no stinking IDE' then you definitely won't want the Morfik IDE. If, on the other hand, you long ago put the command prompt behind you in favour of visual design tools such as Delphi, Visual Basic or C# and feel that the usual code-centric way of Ajax development is like taking a step back in time, then the Morfik IDE will be like a breath of fresh air. Note: I wrote about version 1 of Morfik AppsBuilder in July 2007. See HERE. Morfik is currently working towards the release of version 2 of the IDE (called ‘M2' for (...)

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Mindjet MindManager 7

Brainstorming and project planning

Monday 14 April 2008

Mindjet MindManager 7
$349/£199 (other editions from $99/£49)
Free Trial Available
http://www.mindjet.com/

“MindManager Pro 7 enables companies and individuals to work smarter, think creatively and save time by revolutionizing the visual capture and management of information.” - Call me a cynic, but when I hear that some piece of software is going to make me a better, smarter, more productive human being, my first inclination is to put it back in the box and reach for the snake-oil.

Drag, drop, click and map - the MindManager way to plan a project My cynicism no doubt derives from experience with numerous programs over the years which claim to offer a shortcut to creative thinking. Invariably my initial high expectations have rapidly given way to the realisation that clever software packages do not make me think clever thoughts. That being so, you might suppose that I would have nothing positive to say about MindManager. Not so. Having overcome my initial scepticism, I now find that I not only like this software but I also find it darn' useful. Maps and Projects In spite of the name, there is more to MindManager than ‘thought processing'. By all means, if you find it useful to jot down random thoughts and then make creative connections between them, you (...)

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