FileMaker is a popular and powerful desktop database application toolkit. Recently, FileMaker, Inc. released a beta version of the FileMaker API for PHP, which allows PHP to more easily talk to the FileMaker Server Advanced product. Learn how to leverage FileMaker’s strengths to deliver complex Web applications in a fraction of the time it would take using a typical SQL database.
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Answers to \Which programming language is the best?” can ignite fierce arguments among zealots who see no reason for any language other than the one they use. Fortunately, most programmers do not hold such extreme opinions, and often would like to see a rational evaluation of different languages from which they can draw their own opinions. Many researchers have proposed methods for comparing and evaluating languages 2, 9, 10], but they tend to focus more on the languages than on the needs of language users. Although languages are intrinsically worthy of study, their real purpose is as tools in problem solving.
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In 1991, a group of Sun Microsystems engineers led by James Gosling decided to develop a language for consumer devices (cable boxes, etc.). They wanted the language to be small and use efficient code since these devices do not have powerful CPUs. They also wanted the language to be hardware independent since different manufacturers would use different CPUs. The project was code-named Green.
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The Java language has revolutionized the way we program applications for the Internet. Two great ideas make this language so promising:
• Applications written using Java run on multiple different platforms.
• Automatic memory management or garbage collection (GC) comes as a great relief for developers.
Other than these two issues, most of the remaining Java features can be implemented using the majority of other languages. Since its first public release in 1995, the Java language has been maturing and consolidating its position in the market as an increasing number of organizations realize its built-in strengths.
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This paper explains our efforts to add Ada to Microsoft’s family of .NET languages. There are several advantages to weaving Ada into the Common Language Environment provided by the .NET environment. This paper explains our approach and current progress on the research. We provide the means to extract Ada specification files from Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) code and compile Ada programs into MSIL.
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There is an ongoing information war raging in the software world. Despite free software developers’ best efforts, new proprietary software continues to proliferate. Improved techniques must be developed to reverse engineer efficiently closed data formats so that free, interoperable solutions can be deployed under Linux.

Software reverse engineering occurs on various levels. It may be necessary to study a piece of poorly written, poorly commented code developed in a high-level language such as C++ and understand what the original program was supposed to accomplish. It may also be necessary to disassemble a program that has been compiled into machine language and express it as a higher-level language. In doing this, the underlying algorithms can eventually be expressed as higher-level concepts in a human language. After obtaining an algorithmic description via reverse engineering, the algorithm can be reimplemented for any language on any computing platform.
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Virtual Observatory (VO) is a collection of interoperating data archives and software tools. Taking advantages of the latest information technologies, it aims to provide a data-intensively online research environment for astronomers all around the world. A large number of high-qualified astronomical software packages and libraries are powerful and easy of use, and have been widely used by astronomers for many years. Integrating those toolkits into the VO system is a necessary and important task for the VO developers.
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As weird as it might sound, you are reading a book that was born almost accidentally. When we began to work on this material, we weren’t even thinking of writing a book. Our initial, quite unpretentious goal was to define a list of guidelines for internal use in Code Architects, the software company we founded in 2002.
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