I was at the beach today and somehow this came to my mind.

When the Apache Software Foundation was born back in 1999, its sole purpose was to support the development of the Apache HTTP server. One foundation, one project, more or less like the KDE eV and KDE until very recently.

Over the years, many more projects have been born inside the ASF (Tomcat, Xerces) , or have been “adopted” by the ASF (Subversion, OpenOffice).

For many years, KDE eV has been focused only on KDE.

Recently, Necessitas, the port of Qt and the Qt SDK to Android, joined under the umbrella of the KDE eV: mailing list, git repositories, announcements, etc.

Today I had this vision: should KDE eV go further and become “the Apache Software Foundation of the Qt-related world”?

A few projects that in my humble opinion would fit very well under this new umbrella:

  • MeeGo
  • The community ports of Qt to iPhone, webOS, Haiku, etc
  • PySide (the Python Qt bindings that nearly killed PyQt are being killed by Nokia, what an irony)
  • A Qt “target” that compiles to an HTTP server that generates AJAX, like Wt does but implemented in terms of Qt (yes, I know about QtWui, creole, etc — all dead)
  • … others you propose?

I think that would also make the Akademy’s more interesting, because we would have a lot of conferences on many totally different topics. Lately, when I see the program of Akademy, I feel like “same, again” (maybe because I’m subscribed to many mailing lists and I keep an eye on everything? I don’t know).

What do you think? Should the KDE eV widen its scope and accept other Qt-related projects, even if they are not directly related to KDE?

I have been programming for a number of years already. I have seen others introduce bugs, and I have also introduced (and solved!) many bugs while coding. Off-by-one, buffer-overflow, treating pointers as pointees, different behaviors or the same function (this is specially true for cross-platform applications), race conditions, deadlocks, threading issues. I think I have seen quite a few of the typical issues.

Yet recently I lost a lot of time to what I would call the most stupid C bug in my career so far, and probably ever.

I am porting a Unix-only application which uses tmpfile() to create temporary files:

            else if (code == 200) {     // Downloading whole file
                /* Write new file (plus allow reading once we finish) */
                g = fname ? fopen(fname, "w+") : tmpfile();
            }

For some awkward reason, Microsoft decided their implementation of tmpfile() would create temporary files in C:\, which is totally broken for normal (non-Administrator) users, and even for Administrator users under Windows 7.

In addition to that, the application did not work due to another same-function-diffent-behavior problem.

To make sure I did not forget about the tmpfile() issue, I dutifully added a FIXME in the code:

            else if (code == 200) {     // Downloading whole file
                /* Write new file (plus allow reading once we finish) */
                // FIXME Win32 native version fails here because Microsoft's version of tmpfile() creates the file in C:\
                g = fname ? fopen(fname, "w+") : tmpfile();
            }

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I will be teaching a short (4 hour) training seminar on the topic of mobile development using Qt Quick at University Miguel Hernández, Elche (Spain) on Thursday 21st April and Friday 22nd April. It’s one of the activities of the 7th LAN Party Elx. There will be t-shirts and stickers for the attendants, and a grand prize of a Nokia C7 phone, all of it courtesy of Nokia (thanks Alexandra and Thiago!). Free access.

El jueves 21 y viernes 22 de abril impartiré un cursito (4 horas) sobre desarrollo de aplicaciones para móviles usando Qt Quick en la Universidad Miguel Hernández de Elche. Es una de las actividades de la VII LAN Party Elx. Habrá camisetas y pegatinas para los participantes, y un gran premio de un teléfono Nokia C7, todo ello cortesía de Nokia (gracias Alexandra y Thiago!). Acceso libre.

The deadline for accepting student proposals for Google Summer of Code was reached an hour ago, which means we are not accepting any new proposal and students cannot modify already-submitted proposals.

I have skimmed over the list and I am impressed: 8 proposals were received for 5 of my “wishes“! :-O

There was 1 proposal for libQtGit, 1 proposal for single applications for KDE Windows, 3 proposals for a new KDE Windows installer, 2 proposals for KDE Demo and 1 proposal for KDE Dolphin “Previous versions” support.

Not bad! It’s a pity I didn’t start this series earlier, because I still have a dozen more “wishes” waiting.

Mentors: go to Melange and vote, and also follow the instructions Lydia sent to kde-soc-mentor.

CMake is a unified, cross-platform, open-source build system that enables developers to build, test and package software by specifying build parameters in simple, portable text files. It works in a compiler-independent manner and the build process works in conjunction with native build environments, such as Make, Apple‘s Xcode and Microsoft Visual Studio. It also has minimal dependencies, C++ only. CMake is open source software and is developed by Kitware(taken from Wikipedia)

But you already know that because CMake is the build system we use in KDE 🙂

When I started to use CMake at work to port a large project from Windows to Linux, I needed to write a lot of modules (“finders”). Those modules had to work on Windows and Linux, and sometimes with different versions of some of the third-party dependencies. Parsing header files, Windows registry entries, etc was often required.

If you have ever parsed text, you know you powerful regular expressions are. If you use old software, you know how great Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) are because you do not have them available :-).

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Microsoft Windows has supported a feature called Shadow Copy since Windows Server 2003, using Windows 2000 or newer as the client.

Shadow copies, better known as “Previous versions”, by many users are kind of snapshots of a filesystem (“drive”, for Windows users) taken every so often. It is not a replacement for backups or RAID, just a convenient method to access old versions of your files. Thin of it as a revision control system for any file, save for “revisions” are taken at time intervals instead of evey time there are changes, which means not all the changesets are “captured”.

Samba implements the server part of shadow copy since version 3.0.3, released in April 2004, and makes them available to Windows clients.

On the Unix world, you can get more or less the same features, albeit only locally (not for NFS or Samba shared folders), by using filesystems such as ZFS, HAMMER (apparently, only available on DragonFly BSD), Btrfs, Zumastor and many others. The main problem being adoption of those solutions is marginal, and not available through the network (“shared folders”).

Sun (now Oracle) implemented a “Previous versions”-like feature for ZFS snapshots in Nautilus in October 2008:

KDE once had something like that but for the ext3cow file system. It was an application called Time Traveler File Manager (user manual, interface design and details) by Sandeep Ranade. Website is down and ext3cow is effectively dead now.

By this time you probably have guessed my wish for today: implement “Previous versions” support for Samba, ZFS, etc in Dolphin, the KDE file manager, or even better: in KIO, so that it is available to all KDE applications.

When Stephen Elop announced Nokia was adopting Windows Phone 7 as its main development platform for the future, many of us felt a mix of fear for our jobs, incredulousness (are they committing suicide?), anger for betraying open source, then curiosity. What’s this WP7 about and what’s up in regards to development?

The canonical development platform for WP7 consists of Visual Studio 2010 and managed applications developed in .NET 4 using C# as the programming language and a WPF for the user interface. If you are not into .NET, you may be a bit lost now.

Windows Phone 7 is an embedded operating system by Microsoft. It is the successor to Windows Mobile 6.5 but it is incompatible with it and it is targeted at mobile phones.

Visual Studio is Microsoft’s development environment, including IDE, compiler, debugger, profiler and much more. In my opinion, it is one of the finest applications Microsoft has developed. It is many years ahead of QtCreator, KDevelop, Eclipse or anything else.

.NET is a framework Microsoft started more than a decade ago. It includes libraries, a language independence infrastructure, memory management, localization and many more features. Applications can be compiled as native code (for x86 or x64), or as managed code (bytecode). .NET also includes a bytecode JIT compiler. You can target the .NET platform in many languages, including but not limited to, Visual Basic .NET, C#, F#, C++/CLI (it’s NOT the C++ you know!), etc

Interestingly, you can also compile normal C++ to .NET but it will have unmanaged code (i. e. code where memory allocations/deallocations are performed by you instead of the runtime, and pointers). WP7 requires that all code that runs on it be managed. This means that Qt cannot run on WP7, even though it may be compiled targetting the .NET platform and it would run on desktop operating systems.

C# is a multi-paradigm programming language developed by the father of Delphi. It is very powerful and looks a lot like C++2011. When I was learning C#, I couldn’t but think what the actual implementation of C# features were behind the scenes, in C and C++.

WPF is Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly known as Avalon), the technology (library) used for the GUI. In plain terms, it’s a library which provides accelerated everything for Windows applications: widgets, 2D, 3D, scalable graphics, etc

When developing UIs in WPF, you can either use C# code:

// Create a Button with a string as its content.
Button stringContent = new Button();
stringContent.Content = "This is string content of a Button";

// Create a Button with a DateTime object as its content.
Button objectContent = new Button();
DateTime dateTime1 = new DateTime(2004, 3, 4, 13, 6, 55);

objectContent.Content = dateTime1;

// Create a Button with a single UIElement as its content.
Button uiElementContent = new Button();

Rectangle rect1 = new Rectangle();
rect1.Width = 40;
rect1.Height = 40;
rect1.Fill = Brushes.Blue;
uiElementContent.Content = rect1;

// Create a Button with a panel that contains multiple objects 
// as its content.
Button panelContent = new Button();
StackPanel stackPanel1 = new StackPanel();
Ellipse ellipse1 = new Ellipse();
TextBlock textBlock1 = new TextBlock();

ellipse1.Width = 40;
ellipse1.Height = 40;
ellipse1.Fill = Brushes.Blue;

textBlock1.TextAlignment = TextAlignment.Center;
textBlock1.Text = "Button";

stackPanel1.Children.Add(ellipse1);
stackPanel1.Children.Add(textBlock1);

panelContent.Content = stackPanel1;

or use XAML, which is an XML-based language for WPF:

<!--Create a Button with a string as its content.-->
<Button>This is string content of a Button</Button>

<!--Create a Button with a DateTime object as its content.-->
<Button xmlns:sys="clr-namespace:System;assembly=mscorlib">
  <sys:DateTime>2004/3/4 13:6:55</sys:DateTime>
</Button>

<!--Create a Button with a single UIElement as its content.-->
<Button>
  <Rectangle Height="40" Width="40" Fill="Blue"/>
</Button>

<!--Create a Button with a panel that contains multiple objects 
as its content.-->
<Button>
  <StackPanel>
    <Ellipse Height="40" Width="40" Fill="Blue"/>
    <TextBlock TextAlignment="Center">Button</TextBlock>
  </StackPanel>
</Button>

 

More or less, WPF is to .NET what QML is to Qt.

Ouch. This WP7 is completely different to what we are used to. Maybe we can make them less different?

People tend to believe WPF and XAML are the same thing. They are not. XAML is one of the languages (which happens to be used by 99.99% of the people) to write applications in WPF but it is not the only one. You can write WPF applications in C# code (it’s not unusual to mix XAML and C#, what we call “code behind” in WPF parlance), or you could create your own XAML-equivalent language.

Or you could make my wish for today true: create a compatibility layer for QML to be able to develop WPF applications in QML, effectively replacing XAML. It is technically possible. This will also require a glue-layer for C#, similar to what we have now to bridge QML and C++. This would make porting applications from C++ and QML to C#, QML and WPF a relatively easy task, and may provide realistic path to convert Qt applications to WP7 withouth a full rewrite.

Update Fixed XAML vs C# code, thanks ‘aa’. Also, please note using C++ with QML WPF would be straightforward

April Fools’ passed, it’s safe to blog again 🙂

My last wish was born when Koen Deforche (one of the best software developers I know) made an innocent comment at my talk at FOSDEM talk this year.

Koen happens to be the guy who created Wt (pronounced ‘witty’), a C++ library and application server for developing and deploying web applications. The API mimics Qt‘s: it is widget-centric and offers complete abstraction of any web-specific application details. Where Qt has QObject, Wt has WObject; where Qt has QPainter, Wt has WPainter; both provide a very similar Model-View architecture, both have signals and slots (Wt’s being based on Boost), both provide an OpenGL widget (WebGL in the case of Wt), both allow for language translations, and in fact you can combine Qt and Wt code thanks to the wtwithqt bridge.

If you know me, you know I love Wt. Developing webapps like they were desktop apps (thinking of “widgets” instead of “pages”) is very powerful. In fact, I gave up on Rails after I discovered Wt because Rails has become a spaghetti of Ruby, Javascript, CSS, HTML and whatnot, with so many conventions that make it very difficult to follow the code unless you know very well every library involved (not to speak of performance and memory consumption, where Wt beats everything).

Wt is not without its problems, though. In my opinion, the main needs of Wt are more widgets and an IDE. Today I’m going to talk about the IDE.

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A while ago I said Koen from Emweb made an interesting proposal at FOSDEM about emerge, the KDE Windows build tool.

Yesterday, Jarosław Staniek and I reaffirmed our commitment to ’emerge’. Today, I’d like to go a bit further: let’s bring more developers to emerge by opening it up to other projects. Keep reading!

What is emerge, why is it important and what was Koen’s proposal?

Fact: Microsoft Windows is very different to Unix in regards to development.

On Unix platforms -that includes Linux and Mac OS X-, software is usually installed to /usr: applications in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, libraries in /usr/lib, headers in /usr/include, common resources in /usr/share, etc. Also, dependency management is usually something you can count on: when you install kdelibs5-dev in Ubuntu, it will automatically install libqt4-dev, kdelibs5-data, libfreetype (runtime), etc That makes setting up a development environment a very easy task: look for shared libraries, header files, etc in the common places and you will probably find them.

On Windows there is nothing like that. When you want to compile an application, you need to provide (build and install) all its dependencies, and you need to tell Visual Studio where to find everything. Even CMake usually needs some help in the form of a hint for CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. As you may imagine, building KDE, which has more than 200 third party dependencies and tens of modules (and with the move + split to git, many more) becomes an almost insurmountable task.

‘Emerge’ to the rescue: inspired by Gentoo‘s emerge, Ralf Habacker, Christian Ehrlicher, Patrick Spendrin and others (yours faithfully included) developed a tool which downloads the source, configures, builds, installs and packages KDE and its dependencies. It makes a world of difference when building KDE. Actually, it makes building KDE on Windows possible. Once more: thank you very much guys, impressive tool.

There are two well-differentiated parts in emerge, the ‘engine’ and the ‘recipes’.

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This is another idea that has been in my mind for months, and I’m so thrilled that I added it to the KDE Google Summer of Code 2011 KDE Ideas wiki: a new installer for KDE on Windows.

Currently, KDE on Windows can be installed using either emerge or the end-user installer. The installer is Cygwin-like, which means it is very different from the normal InstallShield, NSIS, MSI, etc installers Windows users are used to:

Have you seen Apple’s Mac App Store?

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