In the early days of the Haiku project, a debate raged concerning one of the projects primary goals: maintaining binary compatibility with BeOS R5. The idea was that the only way an effort to rewrite BeOS would be successful was if folks could continue running the apps they already had.
Certainly, a lot of software available for BeOS is open source or actively maintained -- these apps could just be recompiled if necessary. Others -- PostMaster, Gobe's Productive suite and a few other crucial apps -- weren't likely to get rebuilt, either because the original author had stopped maintenance without being kind enough to release the source, or because it just wouldn't be commercially feasible.
BodyI will go out on a little bit of a limb and say that the single most important and beneficial step that you can take to improve your code is to test first. Yes, I know. I hate testing, too.
I picked up a few books on Extreme Programming several months ago. There are far more useful tidbits of knowledge in there than I can explain in a short article, but one of the most simple and useful is to take what you *hate* and do it *more*.
BodyNote: this article was written by Daniel Reinhold.
I remember several years back (about spring '96) when I first discovered the joys of the internet and was amazed at the sheer number of goodies to be plucked. This was well before BeOS Intel, so I spent alot of time downloading Windows shareware programs. After a few months, however, the excitement died down considerably when I discovered an unfortunate truth: most of those shareware programs were complete crap.
The web has certainly become one of the most ubiquitous and important publishing spaces around. What defines the web, technically, is html and http. Html is the publishing format and http is the transport protocol.
Let's consider http. This protocol is so simple. Some would say simplistic — it certainly has it share of detractors. While it may not be the most sophisticated protocol around, it gets the job done.
BodyWith this article I hope to explain the basics of scripting using BeOS and how it can enhance the Haiku project. To try out several examples mentioned in this article, you'll have to download a program called hey, which enables you to script BeOS applications from a Terminal.
The program hey was developed by Atilla Mezei, an early BeOS developer, who unfortunately seems to have left the BeOS community. He created this tool to have a good testing tool when implementing scripting in BeOS applications.
BodyThe Framework If one is to believe the books and magazine articles, websites, and game developers one talks to these days, there seems to be a general consensus that the bare-metal, code-it-from-scratch mentality just doesn't cut it any longer when developing games. Software engineering practices long appreciated elsewhere in the software development world are finally making an appearance in the last bastion of the garage-hacking, caffeine-swilling coder. This is for a lot of reasons.
Virtual instances of operating systems are perfect for all kinds of testing purposes that need to be done in a safe and isolated environment. Installing Haiku in a virtual machine is a solution for people who do not want to install it on their physical computers, but wish to become familiar with it.
In this guide the Haiku operating system is being run under virtual circumstances using FreeBSD and Bhyve.
Virtual instances of operating systems are perfect for all kinds of testing purposes that need to be done in a safe and isolated environment. Therefore, installing Haiku in a virtual machine is an ideal solution for people who do not want to install it on their physical computers but want to become familiar with it.
The guide was tested on an Ubuntu Linux installation, but it should work on any Linux distribution that supports Xen.
