Category: Scripting
November 5th, 2009
New Epic 3D game engine toolset: Fabulous, fun, and free!
This is big: Epic Games just announced the release of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), a free edition of the Unreal Engine 3. It’s available to anyone interested in using 3D game engine technology, including game developers, students, hobbyists, researchers, creators of 3D visualizations.
The Unreal Engine is the technology behind popular PC and console games such as Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, Bioshock, Medal of Honor, Army of Two, and Batman: Archam Asylum. It’s one of the best game engines available today. See the UDK features page for more details on all of its capabilities.
Previously, if you wanted to use the Unreal Engine in your programs you had to enter into a very expensive agreement with Epic for access to the technology. A few years ago, Epic reportedly asked for up-front payments of as much as $8 million before your game was even developed! Now anyone can download the PC version of the UDK and immediately try it out without paying a cent or signing anything. As a former professional game developer, this is just amazing to me.
The Unreal community was going nuts this morning after the announcement. Some were shocked that Epic chose to release the entire engine and not just a crippled subset. As one poster put it,
“Man, one thing I hope you guys realize is that this is almost EXACTLY the engine build that we’re using here at Epic! You get every single feature that we’ve been using here that aren’t even in any games yet! We only got some of these features last week!”
Use of the new UDK is free for noncommercial purposes, but it can be licensed cheaply for commercial uses. For example you can use it to write a commercial PC video game and pay nothing up front and no royalties until your sales go over $5,000. See the licensing page for all the details. Currently, the free kit is only offered to PC users but Epic says console support is “under consideration”.
“Unreal Engine 3 has been used to create games in a wide range of genres, as well as military simulations, 3D architectural walkthroughs, animated movies and more,” said Epic VP Mark Rein. “Users are only limited by their imaginations. Go ahead, make something Unreal!”
Related articles:
May 29th, 2009
Google Wave: Catching the Big One
Google unveiled a new online communications tool Thursday at its annual Google I/O Developer’s Conference. Called “Google Wave“, the new system sets its sights pretty high: replacing email, instant messaging, wikis, blogs, and static documents. If anybody can do it, it just might be Lars Rasmussen, creator of the wildly popular Google Maps application.
“We tried to imagine what email might look like if it were invented today,” said Lars during a keynote address to a packed house of developers. And what an imagination it is. After a masterful series of demonstrations, Lars and his team received a standing ovation that even Steve Jobs would be envious of.
Observing this from the front row I could tell he was moved and energized by the reaction. Heck, *I* was moved and energized by it, as you could probably tell if you followed my twitter feed.
So what is Google Wave?
Read the rest of this entry »
January 27th, 2009
PDT 2.0: New tools for PHP developers
Recently, version 2.0 of the PHP Development Tools (PDT) project was officially released. PDT is one of the more popular projects at eclipse.org, with over 1 million unique downloads to date. I caught up with Roy Ganor, the project lead for PDT and Zend Studio for Eclipse to ask him a few questions about the release.
[Ed] What exactly was announced and why should developers care?
[Roy] There is an active community helping evolve PDT. Version 2.0 is the result of this momentum and activity. PDT 2.0 features are focused on creating better usability for developers creating applications. PDT is a great example of how Eclipse works with and handles dynamic languages. Eclipse is truly now a great platform for developing apps in any target language.
With the announcement of the Eclipse PDT 2.0 major release, we have really set new standards for PHP developers that are aligned with “the Eclipse way”. For example, many static type language developers who are switching to new, popular dynamic languages like PHP will find this version very similar (feature-wise) to what they are used to in their native environment, with features such as Type Hierarchy, source editing capabilities and behavior, and similar navigation options. Aligning with Eclipse standards also opens up new opportunities with other projects and vendors that have already enhanced their Eclipse environments based on these standards.
July 29th, 2008
JavaFX Preview SDK to be released this week
Sun will release a preview version of the JavaFX Software Development Kit later this week,
fulfilling a pledge made at JavaOne this year. Joshua Marinacci writes:
I’m excited by what we’ve put together but also exhausted. We’ve done an incredible amount of work during the last year. Now I know what it was like in the early days of Java. Since JavaOne 2007 we’ve built (from scratch), a compiler for a new language with many non-trivial features, a GUI runtime with a new graphics and animation stack, new Netbeans plugins with code completion, utilities for graphic designers, a new kind of Javadocs (rewritten from the ground up), plus docs, samples, and demos. And that’s not even counting the many improvements that are going into JavaSE 6 update 10. Whew! It’s been a long year.
According to Simon Brocklehurst, a few features will not make the preview release but will be coming in version 1.0 due out later this year. These include: 3d vector graphics, the ON2 VP6 codec, streaming video, and local file system access. However all the basics are there including standard UI elements, regular and key frame animation, 2d graphics, and export from Adobe Illustrator to JavaFX.
That last piece is important to Sun if it wishes to compete against Adobe’s Flash and Flex products. People working on a particular rich internet application have different skill sets. Artists need a way to develop content, such as the skin of a video player, in a tool like Photoshop or Illustrator which is optimized for their creative talent. Then they need a way to pass that content to programmers to add the behavior behind the art. Flash has had this capability for years. Instead of trying to create artist tools from scratch, Sun will try to piggyback on top of the Adobe tools through exporters. The preview version will export from Illustrator, and the final 1.0 version will export from Photoshop.
Will JavaFX be enough to unseat Flash/Flex? At this point, I just don’t see it. Flex 3 is growing like gangbusters, and Adobe controls the whole tool chain. They have the workflow covered, and they have years of experience bridging the gap from designers to developers. More importantly, Adobe has earned the trust of those same designers and developers. It’s a shame, really, but after 10+ years of leaving Java applets to wither on the vine, it’s going to take many more years for Sun to prove that it understands rich internet applications and that it can deliver a compelling vision of the future. Tellingly, even the JavaFX home page doesn’t actually use JavaFX; it uses Ajax and Quicktime movies.
There are some niches, however, where JavaFX may flourish. In particular, consider environments like certain TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, and mobile phones that already have Java running (sometimes as the only way to run programs). A scaled back JavaFX Mobile running on top of Java Mobile Edition (ME) will give JavaFX an instant base that can’t be ignored. It remains to be seen how much of the speed and functionality that we see on JavaFX Desktop will translate over to the mobile and embedded side, but Sun has a definite opportunity there.
June 5th, 2008
GWT fireside chat
I’m still wading through all the notes I took at the Google I/O 2008 conference last week. If you want to see pictures, check out my flickr photoset (183 photos).
While I was there, I went to two sessions called “fireside chats”. Although there was no fire involved, both were great; in fact I think these chats were the highlight of the whole gathering. The first one was hosted by 4 engineers on the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) project:
From left to right: Bruce Johnson, Robert Vawter, Miguel Mendez, and Rajeev Dayal.
Everybody else sat around on bean bags and regular folding chairs. Most of the meeting was taken up by Q&A interaction with audience members, but I’ll start with a list of GWT 1.5 features. As you may know, GWT 1.5 release candidate was announced on the first day of the conference.
Features of GWT 1.5
The most visible change in GWT 1.5 is support for all the Java 1.5 syntax and semantics, including generics, parameterized wildcards, and so forth. This had to be supported not just in the compiler, but in the Generate subsystem and the RPC. All the @gwt.typeargs stuff from 1.4 is unnecessary in 1.5; in fact you get a warning asking you to remove that.
GWT 1.5 adds rules and states to widgets for accessibility. This lets screen readers for the blind do something more interesting than reading out table TD tags.
Another new feature is…
March 4th, 2008
Python's future looks bright
It always warms my heart to see good programmers get the recognition they deserve. This week, Sun announced they were hiring Ted Leung (long-time Python developer), and Frank Wierzbicki (lead implementer of the Jython project). They’ll be working full-time on Jython and in particular paying attention to developer tools.
Ted and Frank join Charles Nutter, Thomas Enebo, and others who have been cherry-picked in recent months by Sun from the open source community to a) work on the things they love, and b) actually get paid for it.
Wierzbicki writes:
I don’t think I can overstate just how excited I am about this. For a long time now I’ve been obsessed with Jython. Now I will be able to let my obsession take over completely.
In his blog, Leung noted:
I have not written about it much, but I’ve been very impressed with how Sun has handled the JRuby project. Tim told me that Sun was interested in ramping up their support for Python in a similar fashion, and asked if I would be interested in coming to Sun to lead such an effort. After a bunch of talking and interviewing and so forth, it turns out that I was very interested.
Both developers credited Sun’s Tim Bray for making this happen. “As anybody who watches this space knows,” says Tim, “we’ve been pouring increasing amounts of love on dynamic languages recently. Well, er, on Ruby, to be precise. But you know, Ruby’s not the only game in town.”
CPython and Jython will continue to be completely open source, same as before. Sun has applied for membership to the PSF and the PSF will continue to be the steward of Jython’s code.
December 5th, 2007
Microsoft creates GWT clone
While the GWT conference was going on in San Francisco, Microsoft announced its own take on the concept: Volta. GWT compiles Java source code into Javascript, and now Volta does the same thing for C# and other .NET languages. “JavaScript is just an assembly language,” says Live Labs product manager Alex Daley.
Erik Meijer goes into more detail in an OOPSLA paper called “Democratizing The Cloud” (pdf):
We pick the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) as our universal computation model. We prefer, of course, to use the already available CLR implementation on each respective tier: SQLCLR on the data-tier; regular CLR on the middle-tier; and Silverlight for Web-clients, or the regular CLR for desktop clients.
When no CLR is on hand, we use the materials already available in the room. On the data-tier we compile MSIL to SQL. This is the approach currently taken by LINQ-to-SQL and LINQ-to-Entities. On the client-tier we compile MSIL to JavaScript or Flash. This is the approach taken by Volta. The upshot is that we uniformly provide (the illusion of) the .NET platform on each tier, in effect stretching it to cover the Cloud. Application programmers only need to care that they can run MSIL everywhere, not about how this is technically accomplished under the hood.
Getting Started
To use Volta, you first need to install Visual Studio 2008. Create a new Volta project using the wizards provided, design a regular-looking HTML web page, define your business logic in C#, and then add some boilerplate code that associates your web components (such as an Input box) with C# variables. If you publish the project at this point, all the object code produced by the C# compiler (MSIL) will be converted into Javascript resulting in a client-only application that runs in the browser. Like GWT, Volta provides a subset of the standard class library for code running on the client.
To split the program between client and server tiers, you flip a switch and add the “[RunAtOrigin()]” annotation in the source code to indicate which classes that you want to run on the server. Then just rebuild and poof, all the RPC/Web service stuff is taken care of for you. This is one area where Volta differentiates itself from GWT. In GWT, the client/server split is explicitly written into the code by the programmer. Another difference is that remote calls in Volta are synchronous by default but GWT’s remote calls are asynchronous by default. Asynchronous calls require a little extra code to implement but result in a better experience for the user.
By setting another option you can have your Volta application cut trace records for later analysis in the WCF Service Trace Viewer Tool. This tool gives you an easy way to view, group, and filter traces so you can diagnose and repair issues in a multi-tier environment.
Microsoft labels Volta as “experimental” at this point so there are a few rough edges. For example, every class used in your application will be a separate download from the server. This means currently you can expect Volta apps to be much slower than GWT apps, at least the first time you run them. When I tried the online WordWorm sample, Firefox 2 put up a dialog saying the script was unresponsive (see above). On Internet Explorer it worked but took over a minute to start up. According to Microsoft they plan to make this smarter in future versions.
Analysis
If Volta had been released two years ago it would have been revolutionary. At this point, though, Microsoft is playing catch-up with Google and Adobe. Volta also sends a confusing message to .NET developers targeting the browser. Silverlight 1.1 is supposed to include a full .NET environment inside the browser for multiple platforms. Now with Volta you can get “the illusion of” the same thing without a plug-in. So why do you need Silverlight?
Another concern developers will have is Microsoft’s commitment to browsers other than Internet Explorer. If, for example, a new browser or operating system came out that broke GWT, then the source code is available so you could fix it yourself if Google’s GWT team wasn’t fast enough. That’s not an option with Volta.
The Volta technology preview is available for download now at Microsoft Live Labs. The current version supports Internet Explorer and Firefox only.
August 29th, 2007
Supercharge your Ajax development with Google Web Toolkit (GWT)
If you develop web applications and haven’t looked at Google Web Toolkit (GWT), this would be a great time to do it. The product is now out of beta, and the latest version (1.4) adds a ton of new features and performance enhancements.
“In addition to making debugging far easier, GWT’s unique compilation-based approach to Ajax rewards developers for good software engineering practices,” says Bruce Johnson, a member of the GWT team. “Java source code that is clear and organized can be easily optimized by the GWT compiler,“GWT will really save you time in maintenance” which is a nice antidote to the frequent hack-and-slash approach that’s all too common in JavaScript development.”
Maintaining a complex Ajax application over time without GWT is a major challenge, says Johnson. “If you are currently working on an ambitious Ajax project and haven’t yet come to this conclusion, please re-read this post in six months when you’re further along!”
[Read: Book review: Google Web Toolkit Solutions]
“GWT will really save you time in maintenance (try and refactor browser dependent javascript if you dare!),” writes GWT user Reinier Zwitserloot, who calls it “a great tool for scaling your server, because it allows you to ship off a lot of state info to the client.”
GWT, which has been downloaded over a million times so far, has attracted the interest of numerous developers and writers. The Google Web Toolkit discussion group has nearly 10,000 members and over 35,000 posts. gwtpowered.org lists over 160 articles, widgets, and other resources for GWT developers (BTW, I’m looking for someone to take over that site because I’m having trouble giving it the time that it deserves).
[Read: Google Web Toolkit 1.4: “Have to see it to believe it”]
So before you write another line of Javascript, take a few hours to get to know the Google Web Toolkit. It’s free, open source (Apache license), runs on all major systems (Linux, MacOSX, Windows), and it’s just waiting there to accelerate your Ajax development times. Here are some resources to get you started:
Tools:
- GWT Designer for Eclipse (commercial)
- Cypal Studio for GWT (formerly Googlipse)
- GWT Tooling for Eclipse (from Gunnar)
- GWT Studio for IDEA
- GWT Support Plug-in for NetBeans
July 31st, 2007
10 days from report to patch for new Firefox exploit
Looks like the protocol handler problems just won’t die. On July 20th, Jesper Johansson reported that Firefox 2.0.0.5 didn’t quite get all the bugs out of passing strings to external programs registered as protocol handlers. 10 days later, Mozilla has released a patch in version 2.0.0.6. The first version of the patch was actually coded on July 21st, finalized on the 23rd, tested and reviewed, and released to auto-updates on the 30th. You can see all the gory details in bug 389106 .
Ironically, FF appears to have been doing the same thing that IE was doing, which Window Snyder called a “critical vulnerability in IE” on the 18th. Snyder gave Microsoft a hard time because they were not planning a fix, but on the 23rd he she had to eat crow, saying:
We thought this was just a problem with IE. It turns out, it is a problem with Firefox as well. We should have caught this scenario when we fixed the related problem in 2.0.0.5. We believe that defense in depth is the best way to protect people, so we’re investigating it now.
(By the way, the problem is still unpatched in Internet Explorer - see comments in the IE blog.)
I’ll bet most people never heard of protocol handlers before July so don’t be surprised if more issues are discovered around this mostly-forgotten feature now that people are looking at it (like this one). If not carefully implemented, protocol handlers can be a potential attack vector on any browser and OS, not just FF and IE on Windows. Sigh.
July 19th, 2007
3 critical flaws fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.5
An automatic update to Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.5 last night closed 8 security holes, 3 of which were listed as “critical”, according to the release notes. Fixes include:
Critical
- MFSA 2007-23 Remote code execution by launching Firefox from Internet Explorer
- MFSA 2007-21 Privilege escalation using an event handler attached to an element not in the document
- MFSA 2007-18 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption
High
- MFSA 2007-24 Unauthorized access to wyciwyg:// documents
- MFSA 2007-19 XSS using addEventListener and setTimeout
Moderate
- MFSA 2007-25 XPCNativeWrapper pollution
Low
- MFSA 2007-22 File type confusion due to %00 in name
- MFSA 2007-20 Frame spoofing while window is loading
Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
Subscribe to Dev Connection via Email alerts or RSS.
SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- Three Steps You Need to Know to Stop Data Loss Varonis Sensitive data exposed to misuse or loss... it is the stuff of nightmares ... Download Now
- The True Costs of Virtual Server Solutions VMware In an economic environment that is repeatedly heralding the message "do ... Download Now
- Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
Essential Topics 
- Top-ranked Novell support for Red Hat at 50% less
- Get top-ranked Novell support for Red Hat when you switch
- Move to SUSE Linux Enterprise. Get 3 years of Red Hat support
- More interoperability, plus 3 years. Red Hat support, only from Novell
- Red Hat support, patches, updates with the interoperability of Novell
- Unrivaled Red Hat support now available from Novell
Recent Entries
- New Epic 3D game engine toolset: Fabulous, fun, and free!
- Skype open source? Ain’t gonna happen
- Android 2.0 (Eclair) FAQ
- Motorola DROID on Verizon: Is this the iPhone killer you’re looking for?
- What’s new in Android 2.0? Part 2: Developer features
Blogs From Our Sponsors
Most Popular Posts
- Android 2.0 (Eclair) FAQ
- What's new in Android 2.0? Part 2: Developer features
- New Epic 3D game engine toolset: Fabulous, fun, and free!
- What's new in Android 2.0? Part 1: User features
- Motorola DROID on Verizon: Is this the iPhone killer you're looking for?
- Skype open source? Ain't gonna happen
Top Rated
- Android 2.0 (Eclair) FAQ+13 votes
- What's new in Android 2.0? Part 1: User features+12 votes
- What's new in Android 2.0? Part 2: Developer features+7 votes
- New Epic 3D game engine toolset: Fabulous, fun, and free!+6 votes
- Skype open source? Ain't gonna happen+4 votes
- Motorola DROID on Verizon: Is this the iPhone killer you're looking for?+3 votes
Premier Vendor Content Whitepapers, webcasts & resources from our Power Center Sponsors
- The best support in the Linux business
-
If Linux is going to power your mission-critical applications, you'd better have the best support known to business. Novell was rated the top provider of Linux technical support.
- Learn more >>
- The more you simplify, the more you save
-
When you transition from your existing Red Hat environment to SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell, you can recognize dramatic cost savings, perhaps as much 50%
- Learn more >>
- Reduce risk. Reduce complexity. Increase reliability.
-
A simplified IT environment isn't just less complex. It's also more reliable. Standardize on a single Linux platform with SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell, and get the world's most interoperable Linux
- Learn more >>
- Keep Up With The Latest In Document Management with The DocuMentor.
-
Doc delivers the scoop on today's enterprise content management, printer maintenance, and all other issues related to document management. It's the DocuMentor Blog.
- Learn more >>
Archives
Favorite Links
ZDNet Blogs
- All About Microsoft
- The Apple Core
- Between the Lines
- BriefingsDirect
- Collaboration 2.0
- Dev Connection
- Digital Cameras & Camcorders
- Ed Bott's Microsoft Report
- Emerging Tech
- Enterprise Web 2.0
- Forrester Research
- Googling Google
- GreenTech Pastures
- Hardware 2.0
- Home Theater
- iGeneration
- Irregular Enterprise
- IT Project Failures
- Laptops & Desktops
- Lawgarithms
- Linux and Open Source
- Managing L'unix
- The Mobile Gadgeteer
- On Sustainability
- Rational Rants
- The Semantic Web
- Service Oriented
- Smartphones and Cell Phones
- Social Business
- Social CRM: The Conversation
- Software & Services Safari
- Software as Services
- Storage Bits
- Team Think
- Tech Broiler
- Technology and the Global Supply Chain
- Tom Foremski: IMHO
- The ToyBox
- Virtually Speaking
- The Web Life
- ZDNet Education
- ZDNet Government
- ZDNet Healthcare
- Zero Day
White Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Iinfrastructure VMware VMware virtualization software has been adopted by over 120,000 enterprise ... Download Now
- Three Steps You Need to Know to Stop Data Loss Varonis Sensitive data exposed to misuse or loss... it is the stuff of nightmares ... Download Now
- Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
Enterprise Applications
- Check out some of the easiest and most powerful ways to boost productivity while saving money on your application infrastructure. See ZDNet's comprehensive Enterprise Application resource center, now!
- New Online Dashboard
-
- Read about top issues IT decision-makers face every day, plus get cost effective solutions to real life IT problems. Oracle Topline
-
