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By Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz Welcome! This is Regular Expressions, or, more precisely, its early-September 2008 installment. Regular Expressions is a column we've written around a hundred times already, stretching back to the late '90s. We're excited to bring it now to Linux Developer Network (LDN), which will publish two installments each month.

Part one of this article, Cloud Computing and Open Source, presented an overview of several cloud computing solutions available today that are friendly to open source. In this article we'll focus on one of these solutions, Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and walk through the development of an open source mashup for EC2. Amazon EC2 is a top player in the cloud computing space and gives organizations the ability to leverage world-class compute resources on a pay-as-you-go basis.... [more]

Once upon a time, Java was persona non grata on Linux distributions.

Creating applications with a visually appealing graphical user interface (GUI) requires some type of foundational toolkit to make the job practical. The leading candidates for Linux are the toolkits behind the two most popular desktop environments--namely GNOME and KDE. While they represent similar functionality, they are two totally different entities with different design philosophies and structure.

2008 marks the tenth anniversary of the birth of Eclipse. It got its start in life as a proprietary development tool, but in 2001 IBM decided to change that and make it available under an open source license (Eclipse Public License).  Most people connect Eclipse with Java development, although with appropriate plug-in modules it is now much more than that.... [more]

Application development for Linux is, without question, a wide open opportunity. Some might say Linux has everything a person would need to get virtually any job done. Developing custom applications for Linux is tells a different story. Microsoft's Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) offers a wealth of tools for serious application development and deployment. A number of fine development tools do exist for Linux, but none of them seem to have the comprehensive level of feature... [more]

This tutorial will give you a basic idea how to debug a program in Linux using GDB. As you are aware, Visual Studio doesn’t run on Linux so you have to use some of the tools provided on the command-line.

Ask just about any programmer what task they enjoy the least and more than likely you’ll hear documentation. There are even some programming styles (see agile programming) that actually adhere to a minimal documentation approach, putting the emphasis on working software. While cutting back on the documentation might be a good approach for getting an application out the door, it probably won’t help someone trying to maintain or modify it down the road.

So you want to be one of the few, the proud, the Linux kernel developers do you? Well, it’s not easy. But, if you’ve got the right stuff, Linux is looking for a few good programmers.

If you look under the hood of the majority of today’s Web 2.0 applications you shouldn’t be surprised to find Linux all over the place. Since a Web app runs in the browser, by definition it doesn’t matter what your host operating system happens to be. What does matter to the user is the responsiveness of the interface and how well it does the job.