If you were at EclipseCon last year, you may have seen the demo I gave of IBM's Rational Application Developer to build a Web app that monitored a C++ app. I used gsoap to present a web service that monitored some value. I thought this was pretty cool way to web enabling C/C++ apps and maybe bring these apps into the Internet mainstream.
Mind you, I kind of ignored the size impact that the gsoap libraries presented and the added complexity of having to figure out how to define my web service (WSDL is not for the meek and RAD helped me a ton). In the end, it was probably overkill when all I wanted to do provide access to some status data to apps on the web.
Recently I have become curious about all the hype behind AJAX and LAMP. While browsing through some tutorials on XMLHttpRequest, it struck me. Well, all this really is is a remote procedure call back to the server, the same thing I was trying to do with SOAP. The URL is simply the name of the function you want to call and the GET/POST parameters are the arguments. Could web enabling my C/C++ app be a simple as handling http requests and providing the properly formatted http responses? I'm on a mission to find out.
While I'm sure SOAP has it's purpose in the big SOA scheme of things, I am always cautious about oversolving the problem. Time will tell how big an impact AJAX and LAMP will have on the industry, but I've always found that the most successful architectures are the ones that are the easiest to learn and supported by free tools. With the recent announcements of Eclipse projects that address AJAX and PHP development and all the web presence these technologies have, they've definitely caught my attention.
(BTW, TSN is one of Canada's two main sports networks. Every game, no matter what the sport, they pick a moment that they think decided it for the winner, the TSN Turning Point).
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
December CDT Download Stats
I noticed the AspectJ guys posted their numbers, so I thought I'd go out and get the CDT's. For December we had 66,000 downloads. I think that's a healthy number, and enough for Webmaster to ask that we tell them when we are going to do our next release so that they can plan for the extra bandwidth that would be required.
Another interesting data point is the platforms that get downloaded. We are consistently showing the same numbers:
Another interesting data point is the platforms that get downloaded. We are consistently showing the same numbers:
- 64% Windows
- 30% Linux x86
- 3% Mac OS X
- 2% Linux x86_64
- 1% Solaris sparc
- less than 1% other
I find this most interesting since we really only support GNU on Windows so these people must be students or hobbyist, or my assumption is wrong and that you actually can do commercial development using MinGW or cygwin. I'd be interested in hearing what CDT users are building on Windows.
Sunday, January 08, 2006
.Net Framework SDK 2.0
So I've started getting interesting in C# again after initially looking at it when it first came out. It looks to me like a better Java than Java, although Java is starting to catch up with Java 1.5. And with support from the Novell lead Mono project, it has the potential to become another serious cross platform solution.
Looking inside the .Net Framework SDK 2.0, I notice that it includes Microsoft's C++ compiler. I was wondering if Microsoft was going to update their Visual C++ Toolkit, the free version of their VS2003 compiler. It appears that this is it, although I haven't seen it advertised as such.
Today the CDT has a lot of credibility for embedded development and on Linux. It is a little weak on Windows, despite that platform accounting for 2/3's of CDT downloads. Most of this, I assume, is by students and people kicking the tires where MinGW/cygwin is sufficient for them. Supporting a commercial quality compiler and full Windows development would definitely be a boost to the CDT's popularity there. All you need is the .Net and Platform SDKs, and DirectX SDK if you want to make games, and you'd be good to go.
Also, by adding some focus on .Net, we can look at C# as a potential addition to the languages that the CDT supports. For those who haven't heard, work is being done by the Fortran community through the Photran project to add Fortran support to the CDT. I have a feeling that C# be able to reuse more of the CDT than Photran does, especially the editor, since C# is more C-like. And it is more likely to be used than the Ada support I was thinking of adding.
As with everything open source, we'll have to see if there is anyone interested enough to work on this, but it would sure benefit the CDT's popularity.
Looking inside the .Net Framework SDK 2.0, I notice that it includes Microsoft's C++ compiler. I was wondering if Microsoft was going to update their Visual C++ Toolkit, the free version of their VS2003 compiler. It appears that this is it, although I haven't seen it advertised as such.
Today the CDT has a lot of credibility for embedded development and on Linux. It is a little weak on Windows, despite that platform accounting for 2/3's of CDT downloads. Most of this, I assume, is by students and people kicking the tires where MinGW/cygwin is sufficient for them. Supporting a commercial quality compiler and full Windows development would definitely be a boost to the CDT's popularity there. All you need is the .Net and Platform SDKs, and DirectX SDK if you want to make games, and you'd be good to go.
Also, by adding some focus on .Net, we can look at C# as a potential addition to the languages that the CDT supports. For those who haven't heard, work is being done by the Fortran community through the Photran project to add Fortran support to the CDT. I have a feeling that C# be able to reuse more of the CDT than Photran does, especially the editor, since C# is more C-like. And it is more likely to be used than the Ada support I was thinking of adding.
As with everything open source, we'll have to see if there is anyone interested enough to work on this, but it would sure benefit the CDT's popularity.
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
C++0x
Just when you thought the evolution of C++ was over, I spotted the following article discussed on Slashdot. It is from Bjarne Stroustrup, Mr. C++ himself, who I affectionately refer to as Barney (whether it has anything to do with a cuddly purple dinosaur taking care of my favorite programming language, I'll let my psychiatrist figure out). You can get the article here.
In the article, Bjarne discusses proposals to improve generic programming in C++ as well as additional libraries to fill out the offering of STL (things like even more generic containers and our beloved hash maps). The plan is to get this all together for standardization in 2009.
The part I found most interesting, being an open source project lead, is the fact that the C++ standards committee is also volunteer driven and their biggest challenge will be to get something together that is really enticing with the resources they have. Hopefully, the publicity will help.
In the article, Bjarne discusses proposals to improve generic programming in C++ as well as additional libraries to fill out the offering of STL (things like even more generic containers and our beloved hash maps). The plan is to get this all together for standardization in 2009.
The part I found most interesting, being an open source project lead, is the fact that the C++ standards committee is also volunteer driven and their biggest challenge will be to get something together that is really enticing with the resources they have. Hopefully, the publicity will help.
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Eclipse for Digital Content Creation?
At my first EclipseCon a couple of years ago, Sebastien Marineau and I met someone from the Sony Playstation development tools group. They apparently were interested in the CDT as a development environment. We're not sure what for and they didn't follow up, at least with me anyway. But we do see some bugs raised in bugzilla coming from playstation.sony.com.
That meeting got me thinking. Obviously most of game development, at least for PCs and the consoles, is done in C and C++. Using the CDT makes tons of sense in that environment. I even got an e-mail from someone in id Software, the DOOM people, who had some issues using the CDT (indexer performance, of course, what else?), but at least they had thought using the CDT would be a good idea.
So I looked around at how game development was done and gave some of the open source game engines a try, Ogre in particular. I was able to go through the tutorials and build a very simple game application using the CDT and importing all of the graphics files that were needed. I was able to bring the application up under the debugger and check up on things. It was fun and I wish that I had more time to play with game development and get something real working.
During my investigation, I ran accross shaders, which are little assembly language programs used to program graphic chips directly. Both nVidia and Microsoft have defined specialized programming languages that allow these shaders to be built using C-like languages. Of course, that pinged the parser dude in me and made me wonder if we could leverage the multi-language nature of the CDT to support writing these shaders. Of course, my real job prevented me from spending any time prototyping this out.
Then I took it one step further. What are all the artifacts that go into games. Not only is there C and C++ code and shader code, there are 3d models and 2d textures. My thinking is that it would be a pretty cool environment if we could bring editors for graphics and project management/build together under the Eclipse umbrella. The stuff we are seeing with OpenGL support in SWT makes this even easier. The only question that comes to mind is whether Java is the right language for this, but after trying out the snippets provided by the SWT gang, performance wasn't all that bad. So I really think building a complete game development environment using Eclipse and the CDT makes a ton of sense. All it takes is someone with enough interest and resources to start up a project to make it happen. And it would be very cool for Eclipse's image.
Then, why stop at game development. I thought about an old aquaintance at the University of Saskatchewan who went on to work at Pixar. Obviously they do 3d modeling there as well, so I went to their web site to look at what they were all about. To my surprise, it turns out that these guys were some of the first to use shaders. They have their own programming language for defining shaders for various things, much more than graphics boards support but very similar. And they have a super powerful rendering engine that puts it all together to make movies. I don't think it's a stretch to take a game development environment built on Eclipse and turn it into a digital movie production environment. Makes you go hmmm, no?
That meeting got me thinking. Obviously most of game development, at least for PCs and the consoles, is done in C and C++. Using the CDT makes tons of sense in that environment. I even got an e-mail from someone in id Software, the DOOM people, who had some issues using the CDT (indexer performance, of course, what else?), but at least they had thought using the CDT would be a good idea.
So I looked around at how game development was done and gave some of the open source game engines a try, Ogre in particular. I was able to go through the tutorials and build a very simple game application using the CDT and importing all of the graphics files that were needed. I was able to bring the application up under the debugger and check up on things. It was fun and I wish that I had more time to play with game development and get something real working.
During my investigation, I ran accross shaders, which are little assembly language programs used to program graphic chips directly. Both nVidia and Microsoft have defined specialized programming languages that allow these shaders to be built using C-like languages. Of course, that pinged the parser dude in me and made me wonder if we could leverage the multi-language nature of the CDT to support writing these shaders. Of course, my real job prevented me from spending any time prototyping this out.
Then I took it one step further. What are all the artifacts that go into games. Not only is there C and C++ code and shader code, there are 3d models and 2d textures. My thinking is that it would be a pretty cool environment if we could bring editors for graphics and project management/build together under the Eclipse umbrella. The stuff we are seeing with OpenGL support in SWT makes this even easier. The only question that comes to mind is whether Java is the right language for this, but after trying out the snippets provided by the SWT gang, performance wasn't all that bad. So I really think building a complete game development environment using Eclipse and the CDT makes a ton of sense. All it takes is someone with enough interest and resources to start up a project to make it happen. And it would be very cool for Eclipse's image.
Then, why stop at game development. I thought about an old aquaintance at the University of Saskatchewan who went on to work at Pixar. Obviously they do 3d modeling there as well, so I went to their web site to look at what they were all about. To my surprise, it turns out that these guys were some of the first to use shaders. They have their own programming language for defining shaders for various things, much more than graphics boards support but very similar. And they have a super powerful rendering engine that puts it all together to make movies. I don't think it's a stretch to take a game development environment built on Eclipse and turn it into a digital movie production environment. Makes you go hmmm, no?
Saturday, December 03, 2005
Welcome to my Blog
Mike Milinkovich recommended I get my own blog and start jotting down my thoughts. A brilliant man he is so I decided to finally follow up on it.
I've been the project lead for the CDT for a couple of months now but have really been heavily involved in the CDT since it was started at Eclipse, at least the QNX version, back in the summer of 2002. Back then I worked for Rational and we were looking for an Eclipse-based solution to support our C++ modeling products for markets that weren't using Visual Studio, of which of course there are many. Our needs were C++ parsing and code models for our translation frameworks. I've always been interested in programming languages and parsing so I couldn't pass up the opportunity when it floated by me in the hall one day and am very glad I did.
I've dedicated this segment of my career to the CDT, enough so that I made the move to QNX to allow me to continue my work on it and to do what ever I can to ensure it's success as an industry leading C/C++ IDE. We're getting close and I can see the point now where we will have what it takes get there and that drives me even more.
I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts here on the state of the industry, my passion for Eclipse and the community and ecosystem that drives it, and maybe some of the vision that I have on where the tools industry can go to help ensure the success of the software developers everywhere.
We've talked so much in the past about the crisis we have faced in software development as projects failed more often than they were successful. I think that tide has turned as the tools and frameworks that developers have at their fingertips today have allowed them to make smarter decisions and to react in a crisus fast enought to recover. I embrace the time when we have to try and think back to remember what all the fuss was about.
Stay tuned for more...
I've been the project lead for the CDT for a couple of months now but have really been heavily involved in the CDT since it was started at Eclipse, at least the QNX version, back in the summer of 2002. Back then I worked for Rational and we were looking for an Eclipse-based solution to support our C++ modeling products for markets that weren't using Visual Studio, of which of course there are many. Our needs were C++ parsing and code models for our translation frameworks. I've always been interested in programming languages and parsing so I couldn't pass up the opportunity when it floated by me in the hall one day and am very glad I did.
I've dedicated this segment of my career to the CDT, enough so that I made the move to QNX to allow me to continue my work on it and to do what ever I can to ensure it's success as an industry leading C/C++ IDE. We're getting close and I can see the point now where we will have what it takes get there and that drives me even more.
I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts here on the state of the industry, my passion for Eclipse and the community and ecosystem that drives it, and maybe some of the vision that I have on where the tools industry can go to help ensure the success of the software developers everywhere.
We've talked so much in the past about the crisis we have faced in software development as projects failed more often than they were successful. I think that tide has turned as the tools and frameworks that developers have at their fingertips today have allowed them to make smarter decisions and to react in a crisus fast enought to recover. I embrace the time when we have to try and think back to remember what all the fuss was about.
Stay tuned for more...
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