Programming category

Currently the Eclipse packages in Ubuntu lack heavily behind other distributions like lets say Fedora.
The packages in ubuntu are outdated and so are the eclipse language plugins like CDT or Pydev.

Properly supporting this top notch IDE should give new linux developers an easier start.

Canonical currently has a big problem. It needs developers. Its a vicious cycle, developers are needed to improve development, yet to increase the number of developers, we need better development programs.

The sad reality is that whilst Canonical has a wealth of development tools available, they are barely officially supported, out of date, or have no easy way of using them (like systemtap).

We need Canonical to step up and make the development environment for 9.04 a priority, so that first time linux developers, and long time developers have a powerful environment, that is officially supported by Canonical. By improving the development environment to be easy to setup, and more updated, developers are more likely to jump on board. In fact, whilst many developers consider coding on OSX to be a privilage, I have never heard the same said of Ubuntu.

Current areas we are severely lacking include:
- Eclipse is out of date in the repos and has been for ages.. Why?
- Sun and Apple have Dtrace officially supported, with a GUI frontend that really makes things easy. We don't have any support for systemtap nor have we got any comparable profiling gui.
- Windows and OSX has a fully supported out of the box development environment with the most popular languages in 2 clicks. With ubuntu, we have to manually work out which gui's we want, which tools, etc
- Debugging? Ha.. its actually quicker to port the code to OSX and use OSX's development tools in some cases then debug currently, because it supports step-backs and such.
- QT can compete against Cocoa. GTK even with Glade is a joke still. I'm not asking you to fix this, but if you want to encourage GTK development, at least have glade/eclipse integration in a developers metapackage
- Developers centre. Ubuntu has none, so developers aren't given a simple list of changes that might affect them next release, such as the change from Alsa as backend, to Pulse, so we can prepare in time. We don't even have a centralised way of really working together with other ubuntu developers.

Some may say developers can help themselves, but first impressions count. If it takes 3000 clicks to get your development environment to the standard provided by Apple in 5, whilst requiring you to also search for equivilent tools (such as dtrace which are considered standard for many OS's now) by yourself, you certainly wont prioritise the OS. By rewarding developers, with a better development environment, the end result will be a higher quality linux environment.

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Developers need easy access to a _official_ developer package. They are free to choose but there should be a standard way to (gnome) development in Ubuntu. And it needs to be official. New developers should now that there is a easy way to start developing for gnome in Ubuntu. Supported and well documented.

Now that OpenCL 1.0 is final, prioritising support would not only inspire developers to use linux, but also prove that we have the development toolkits, guts and motivation to compete against OSX Snow Leopard and Windows 7. If we don't support it rapidly, we will only fall further behind OSX, especially since it will give their developers extra time to utilise it properly (we shouldn't be waiting until its already popular). The faster we get this implemented, the quicker developers can use it, and the faster Ubuntu will be!

For those who don't know, OpenCL is a royalty-free standard for developers to program general purpose highly parallelised applications over GPU and CPU (combining their power even). Its more advanced then CUDA in that it combines CPU and GPU power and is accessible outside of Nvidia's video cards.

In summary, OpenCL is expected to become very popular with developers and users, and will make everything damned fast (especially considering we are already seeing video cards with 1600 processing threads, and Intel CPU's with 16 virtual CPU's will be out Q3 2009). If every program used OpenCL, processing power will seem almost infinite to end users.

Activision, Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, Electronic Arts, IBM, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Apple and Samsung are all on board. All major gaming companies, CPU and GPU manufacturers are on board. So yes, it will be a slaughter without support... ATI is dropping "close to metal", and as Nvidia will support OpenCL, CUDA will probably be depreciated slowly too (at the moment they are recommending CUDA only as a higher-level development platform).

Linux offer great tools to develop software, but there is little effort to promote them to beginners.

If you look at the competitors, they offer unified development platform and associated documentation. Have a look at XCode+developerConnection and VisualStudio+MSDN, this is ideal infrastructure to get new programmers.

It would be nice to have a dedicated website to inform people about the development on Ubuntu. The website could help people to make their first software, help them to begin with the main IDEs, and give links to get further information on the official website of the language/IDE/framework.

Such a website should be very appealing and simple to help the beginners. Help in lot of language would be a plus since lots of people don't speak English.

More developers means more people to implement the idea of Ubuntu Brainstorm :)

I want an easy gui-based way of creating Deb packages.

One of the major things that attracts people to Windows is the support Microsoft give developers - yes they charge extortionate amounts of money - but being able to do everything well, and simply, attracts developers, and helps them perpetuate bug #1.

Sun have made Java ubiquitous by making development a breeze with Java. Packaging is the single most irriating thing of developing for Linux. Particularly as there's lots of different package formats.

An easy package design system would be a firm, solid piece of the jigsaw in making Ubuntu the platform to develop for in the 21st century.

Aptana Studio (http://www.aptana.com/) is a wonderful webdevelopment IDE based on the Eclipse platform (dubbed by some as the Dreamweaver killer). It's in active development and is backed by a great community. I've been using the Community Edition of Aptana Studio professionally for over a year now and I like it a little better each day.

While it's not that hard to install Aptana Studio from a deb package, it would certainly be a little easier if one could install it directly from the repos.

Sometimes when you have a unknown file, open it in a text editor can give you a hint. Even if the file is binary, you can found text in the header or somewhere.

Gedit should have the possibilities to open any kind of file. and if it's a binary file, display it in hex view with text view on a side column.

Plus, this is a good way to provide a hex editor by default without spreading the fear to new users with an additional program "WTF is that new sh*t in my application menu??"

Hi,

I suggest to the Ubuntu community, we should have a unique and complete development studio, in order to create great applications very coupled to the Operating System, in order to take advantage of the environment, standardize programming languages and not to fill up the system resources with a lot of interpreters, runtime or whatever frameworks.

For example, on Mac OS they have XCode, in Window$ Visual Studio, inclusive on KDE they have KDeveloper.

From my experience, when I try to make some software for ubuntu, I find great quantity of software development tools which makes difficult the choice.

I know that freedom comes with the liberty to choose too, and is ok, but in this aspect i thought that as a community we need to follow a North, and not everyone go to everywhere without any roadmap, each one going some on foot, some on cars, and in other parts (Mac, Win) going on airplanes...

If you want to read in Spanish go to my website

If "dive into python" is included in help then why not throw
some more free programming books in?There are plenty of good ones.

What if the API documentation and specs for all the development packages available in Ubuntu would be gathered in a common website?
On top of that, it would be possible to link articles, blog posts describing some coding example related to a given lib.

An example of the website organization:
* hardy
* gutsy
** Audio
** Kernel
** GUI
*** Qt
*** GTK+
**** API docs
**** specs
**** links to external code sample

The main goal of this idea is to lower the barrier for new contributing coders by making an easy access to all the docs, samples, specs, helloworlds in a single place.

On the server side, this should somehow be automatic, to make needed human interaction as mimimum as possible.

When I use Bazaar, Subversion, CVS, Git, Mercurial etc. I have to use the command-line or some standalone gui program. This is a lot of overhead because I usually do have a nautilus window open which is showing the working directory.
I would like to have an application which integrates fine into nautilus and has similar capabilities like tortoisesvn has for windows - see http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ExplorerIntegration.html for some screenshots.
Of course this new application should not be installed by default because it confuses new users. It would be nice if there could be one single application that supports many backends for different version control systems.

I would love to see the PDT-Plugin in the repositories. (Even if PHP is "shitty" blabla... ;))

As there is almost no lightweight IDE for C++ in ubuntu (and for sure anjuta and kdevelop are not good ones!) i suuggest to add code::blocks IDE to ubuntu repositories. The project already distributes ubuntu-specific compiled versions. It also has a 6-month-release period with date-month versioning system. (like ubuntu)

Just Published Version 1.0 Monodevelop I think we can do a package deb and stop using the beta 3 that there are currently repositories Ubuntu hardy. Surely will be more stable and more functionalities. (google translate xD)

FreeMat is an open source project that tries to implement a free Matlab equivalent. It's homepage can be found at http://freemat.sourceforge.net/.

In contrast to octave it contains it's own GUI. In my opinion this is much better than the octave approach of having one command line program and many different GUIs. Especially for plotting it is an advantage to have a plotting engine designed for being Matlab compatible than having an external plotting engine. Another advantage is it's simplicity. There is only one program.

For me as a student FreeMat is an important program and I would like to see it added to the main repositories. Currently there are only outdated deb-packages available at http://ppa.launchpad.net/pdenapo/ubuntu/pool/main/f/freemat/

What do you think?

Launchpad needs a Wiki unrelated to Ubuntu. When we opened our open source project (ubuntu related, in a way) i was uncertain about being allowed to use Ubuntu wiki to fill one (1) page about the project.

I really think you should provide a wiki to every project in launchpad (maybe with the chance to choose to have an external one).

The rationale is:
- having an own wiki requires hosting. Why use launchpad for bugtracking and buying hosting space just for the wiki ?
- Ubuntu wiki is inherently unrelated for many of the projects.
- Launchpad's blueprints require an external site. This shouldn't be necessary

The version of the java-gnome bindings in the repository is currently at 2.x. The package description text says:

"Please be aware that this package is part of java-gnome 2.x series which is deprecated"

The web site says:

"In 2006, a complete re-engineering of the bindings was initiated, and that work has resulted in: java-gnome 4.0"
http://java-gnome.sourceforge.net/

Ubuntu should provide java-gnome 4.x

Why can't all Linux distributions work together and add the features and good parts of one another so they are all awesome? Why can't they share code, exchange it, improve it, pass it on, and continue?

I've heard OpenSUSE has a good installer, Linux Mint has nailed the "polish" factor of the theme, Fedora has this or that, DSL is light as a feather, etc.

Why can't all the code be shared among distributions? I know there are different window managers and different languages, but for distributions that share the same language in an aspect, why can't the two be combined into something awesome and implemented in both? Even if a different language or system is used, why can't certain features be implemented in the distro's own way?

The advancement of Linux would reach a speed untouchable by proprietary software if this happened; it's already faster but why can't we make all of this as good and fast as possible?

I know different distributions have different goals and philosophies and all, so I'm not saying copy everyone by everyone else. I'm saying if a feature or system would fit in well with another distribution than the original, then why is it not implemented immediately and re-fitted to work perfectly with the original distro?

I know I'm being very general but plenty of people have talked about distro A having this while distro B should share it- it would work well, etc.

I want to try to begin write simple programs for Ubuntu with GUI. I carefully read help pages comes with Ubuntu, and find that Anjuta IDE recommended for this. But there is no examples. Please provide an ready-to-use examples of simple 'hello world' programs with some buttons and dialogs. It is effective way to show how simple compiling for Ubuntu, and get new programmers.