OStatic

Development of YUI 3.0, the latest version of Yahoo's User Interface toolset and widgets for Web development, is now available as a preview release. YUI has long been a popular choice for client-side Web development, both because of its liberal BSD license, and because of the number of features that the library includes. YUI 3.0, when it is released, will offer a variety of new JavaScript classes and widgets. However, this will come at a price, namely compatibility with YUI 2.x APIs.

Members of various open-source database communities will get together in mid-November for the first-ever OpenSQL camp. The free conference, which has room for 150 attendees, will be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is meant to help the members of all open-source database projects to learn from one another. Potential participants are encouraged to register on the Wiki, as well as to propose conference talks. Organizers want the camp to make it possible for participants to learn, to participate, to contribute, and to write code.

Adium, an open-source instant-messaging client for OS X, has released its latest version (1.3). Adium, like the Pidgin IM client, makes it possible to use a single IM program, rather than run multiple clients simultaneously for AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and several other networks. Adium's latest release includes support for the Facebook IM client, providing desktop access to this otherwise Web-only communications channel.

A major problem with the officially distributed version of Perl on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has led to a firestorm of complaints among developers. The problem, which also manifests itself on some versions of the Fedora and CentOS Linux distributions, means that some programs will take more than 100 (yes, one hundred) times longer to execute under Red Hat than other distributions. A Red Hat engineer has indicated that it will fix the problem in its next release (i.e., Red Hat Enterprise 5.3), but has not said when that update will arrive.

John Resig, a member of Mozilla's Firebug development team, announced yesterday that the final version of Firebug 1.2 had been released. Firebug is a debugger for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that sits within the Firefox Web browser. It has become an essential tool for Web developers, particularly those who use the modern technique known as Ajax ( asynchronous JavaScript and XML ).

JavaScript has become an increasingly important part of the Web application ecosystem. JavaScript is the key to many of the Web's most interesting applications, using the Ajax paradigm ( Asynchronous JavaScript and XML ). This has led to a renaissance in the use of JavaScript, as well as a flurry of libraries aimed at making it easier to use and cross-browser compatible. It was thus with a great deal of excitement that several JavaScript developers announced late last week that a new JavaScript engine, known as Tracemonkey, will be a part of Firefox 3.1 when it is released. The Tracemonkey engine is dramatically faster than the existing JavaScript engine, with some actions running 20 times faster.

One of the keys to the success of Firefox, the popular open-source browser produced by the Mozilla Foundation, is its extensibility. Earlier this summer, the Mozilla Foundation sponsored a contest, dubbed Extend Firefox 3, that offered prizes to the best add-ons that developers would submit. Last week, contest judges announced the winners.

I just spent several days helping to upgrade an organization's servers from Red Hat Enterprise 3 to the latest version, Red Hat Enterprise 5.2. One of the most important, and impressive, issues we dealt with during this upgrade was SELinux, or security-enhanced Linux. SELinux offers a great deal of functionality, and helps to protect Linux boxes from a variety of threats. It forces system administrators to learn a new vocabulary, as well as permissions, logfiles, and programs with which they were previously unfamiliar. Fortunately, there are many good tutorials for SELinux on the Web.

Apache fans in the Ruby community were delighted several months ago, when Phusion released Passenger, an Apache module for deploying Rails applications. I have been working with Passenger over the last few weeks, and am pleased to report that the module is extremely easy to install, use, and configure. Passenger has succeeded in bringing me back into the world of Apache after several years of wandering in the HTTP server desert.

The developers of PHP announced last week that PHP version 4.4.9 is now available. This would not be remarkable in and of itself, except that the developers also indicated that this would be the last release of PHP 4.4. If PHP were commercial software, its end of life would be cause for panic in some quarters. The end of life of an open-source project works differently, of course. It does mean that the official development group will no longer spend time and energy fixing bugs in these old versions. But that's where the similarities between proprietary and open-source software ends.