by Thelma Vance

Created on: July 30, 2008

The perl code from CPAN.org has kept many in Software QA employed!

CPAN.org has the latest version of the perl engine;s source code. There are several valuable examples and the instructions for downloading and installing the program. Note: if you do NOT know what options to select or their use just take the defaults.

Another module that is useful is "bundle-everything". This takes a very long time to run, like days and that is no joke. There are over 10,000 modules on CPAN. This module loads it all but requires human assistance. Be warned, it DOES take days to download and install all of the CPAN modules using this technique!

Onc could make a fair statement that freshmeat and SourceForge.net have provided freeware programs for the Java and C++ Engineering Community. SourceForge.net has a fairly good selection of freeware programs and the source code to modify those programs.

One of the most important site for the Web Engineer is Apache.org where not only can they obtain the Apache Web engine, they can get the modules to enhance the performance of the Web engine. There, one may find such important development tools as Ant, a java build tool, and links to AJAX packages.

Another site that many of us use is firefox.com. This browser has the power to prevent phishing and has all be replaced the IE browser. Firefox runs on all the major platforms including Mac.

There are shareware/freeware programs for the Linux system that provide some serious help to the cash strapped Start Up companies. One such is the Open Office suite that can read, and write, MS Office files. There are many sites to get this important suite of freeware APIs.

When you need a package of software, and cannot afford it, you should use the Google Search engine to locate it for you. One of the returned sites will be "2 cows" which is a site for Windows based packages. Most of the code available is Games but there are business packagaes as well.

Some freeware code comes as source code. But, you may not have a compiler. What's to do? Well, you download gcc for c code or Java from the Sun, Inc.'s web site. The GNU site does provide good compilers and debug tools that have stood the "test of time".

Java tools, C++, C, test tools such as JUNIT, CUNIT, Web development tools, Editors and text processing tools are just some of the freeware programs available for download. And, there are more programs being uploaded all the time. There is an interesting Java web site tool called "canoe". This is written in Java and is easy to adapt to a specific problem.

You can download these test tools from SourceForge.net. Information for their use may be obtained on the SourceForge.net Project page. There is information there on how to contact the Authors and, in some cases, advice on the program's use as well as update/creation date information. Well worth the time involved

End User programs such as Open Office, Firefox, Opera (a web browser), accounting suites, and business suites are also available. Just which one you select to use and deploy on your system(s) is largely up to YOU.

Operating systems can also be downloaded but the selection is not as good. You can download trial versions of Microsoft's operating systems but they will terminate at the end of the evaluation period.

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