Linux® Bible 2011 Edition: Boot up to Ubuntu®, Fedora®, KNOPPIX, Debian®, openSUSE®, and 13 Other Distributions

Chapter 25. Programming Environments and Interfaces

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Developing applications for Linux

• Using graphical programming tools

• Using command-line programming tools

• Programming for GUI interfaces

• Programming for command-line interfaces

• Using application programming interfaces

You can slice and dice the topic of Linux programming tools, environments, and programming interfaces in a variety of ways. For example, a list of the programming languages known to have compilers that target or run on Linux easily runs to three single-spaced, typewritten pages. You could also examine the literally hundreds of programming libraries that exist for Linux. Alternatively, you can organize the discussion of programming tools by dividing everything into three categories: graphically oriented applications, command-line applications, and complete programming environments.

To some readers, a "programming environment" means a graphical, point-and-click integrated development environment (IDE) such as that provided by ActiveState Komodo or IBM's Eclipse. Yet another way to approach the subject is to look at Linux's development support for certain academic and computing subjects, such as graphics, databases, mathematics, engineering, chemistry, text processing, physics, biology, astronomy, networking, and parallel computing.

Unfortunately, there's no single definitive taxonomy on which everyone agrees, so this chapter takes the easy way out and divides things into environments and interfaces. For the purposes ...