In this interview with Artima, Terence Parr, creator of the StringTemplate template engine as well as the ANTLR parser generator, talks about the importance of separating business logic and presentation.

Aptana released RadRails 1.0, an Eclipse-based IDE for Rails and Ruby development.

NetBeans is Sun's open-source, multi-language IDE. The latest release, a beta version of which was made available this week, includes support for JavaScript, Spring, Rails 2.0, and includes many performance improvements. In an interview with Artima, three NetBeans evangelists discuss these new features.

The main themes for the next release of the Java EE framework are extensibility and modularity, two concepts JSR 316 spec lead Roberto Chinnici discusses in a recent blog post.

I've posted the slides from my PyCon 2008 keynote on python.org. Here are the URLs, plus a warning against the temptation of changing your APIs at the same time as porting to Py3k. This is really important!

One of my main objectives at Pycon 2008 was to hear about experiences regarding existing tools for parallelizing Python programs, and also to find out more about mathematical programming with Python.

Closures are sometimes used as control structures in code. The latest update to the Java Closures JSR proposal includes support for such control abstractions, as well as for restricted closures and function types. Neal Gafter explains these updates to the Closures for Java proposal in a recent blog post.

Scala makes it straightforward for developers to specify new control structures that feel like natural parts of the language. Function currying is one technique that allows Scala to provide such natural programming constructs. Daniel Spiewak discusses function currying and its uses in a recent article.

John Rose, a lead designer of Sun's HotSpot JVM and project lead of the java.net Multi-Language JVM project, discusses supporting headerless objects in the JVM, illustrating the key concepts with Ruby's Fixnum type.

Rich text editors are a staple of Ajax Web applications. WebDistortion, a Web development consultancy, recently reviewed nine of the most popular Ajax rich text editor components.

A frequently called-upon task of rich-client applications is image manipulation. Flex, Adobe's open-source UI framework that targets the Flash runtime, provides a large set of classes for image manipulation. Andrew Alderson reviews the most important ones in a recent article.

Damien Katz is lead developer of CouchDB, a non-relational document database, and one of the most visible open-source projects using Erlang. Based on his experience using the language for CouchDB, Katz reviews some of his Erlang grievances in a recent blog post.

I propose the term "superlanguages" to describe languages with extensible syntax, designed for the implementation of domain-specific embedded languages and to support language-oriented programming, because they effectively provide a superset of the syntax and semantics of other languages.

VisualVM is an open-source Java VM monitoring and performance reporting tool that provides visual feedback about running Java applications. The project released its first beta version on java.net.

Rvalue references is a small technical extension to the C++ language. Rvalue references allow programmers to avoid logically unnecessary copying and to provide perfect forwarding functions. They are primarily meant to aid in the design of higher performance and more robust libraries.