Elsewhere there are things that we all miss, yet it takes just one to notice...

Author: csnorwood

It’s been a while

Yes, most definitely it has been some time since I last posted anything on my blog. That’s because this last month I have hardly had any real chill time to myself. Well, I have had some, but it never lasts for long enough.

Anyway, I’ve still been faffing about. I recently purchased CopperCube so that I could delve deeper into WebGL. Plus I’m familiar with Irrlicht, and CopperLicht makes working with 3D graphics a doddle.

I’ve also found that I can actually call myself a full-stack developer considering recent projects I’ve been working on. One project involves a C/C++ TCP/UDP server for communications, A Java TCP server to use Java AWT graphics, GWT for a web interface instead of installing software. The server does many things, too many to mention, but I’m well chuffed with it.

Setting up the server involves freshly installing Linux. Then installing Apache Tomcat. Making a few modifications to the system and then installing the software.

Device connect on the network via ethernet or wifi and will automatically detect the location of the server because of the UDP heart beat. Clever stuff really. Probably not, but all the same, it works great.

I’ve also played around with having a home TCP server which can be made use of from my mobile phone while I am out, my tablet or a PC, as well as a GWT web interface.

After playing around with all of this, there’s lot’s more I want to play with. Maybe Vaadin or similar. Move on to desktop 3D graphics again instead of openGLES 2.

I’ve also finally got myself an i7 laptop with nVidia graphics. Cheap off eBay! So I can develop on the go. That’s if the battery is good in it.

There’s other things over this last month that have tickled my fancy, but I won’t mentioned that here. Tempting though.

Hopefully this weekend I will have a long one as I’m booking Friday and Monday off because I seriously need to relax a little.

Until next time…

Online GL shader editor

Just so I don’t lose or forget about it, I’ve found a very handy online openGL shader editor…

ShaderFrog

From basic shaders including texturing and lighting right up to procedural shaders and more.

All I need now is to run a sample project in Qt to test out some of these and then transfer them to GWT and Parallax. Good stuff can now be done.

Good and bad for embedded and Android

Embedded Linux is the bees knees for doing a lot of things, especially when you really don’t want the Android overhead on top of it. For a device such as the Odroid range which can be used as a headless server providing and IPTV gateway and a web interface for controls, linux is the better option.

When it comes to graphical applications, for example decoding video streams and openGL rendering, it always becomes a toss up between Linux and Android. A lot of people who are familiar with Java will automatically pick Java and I have to say, I do actually like the Java Virtual Machine. The JVM is handy whilst developing because a crashed application just gets cleared out.

Qt can also be used for developing mobile applications and has a very extensive framework and because it’s C++, time critical code isn’t a problem.

The only issue I have with Qt is that when it comes the day when I do want to release and application for whatever it is I finally do, packaging it up for all OS’s becomes a pain.

Qt for Android is easy, just build the project and get the APK. Just one file and it can be copied to any Adroid device.

Qt for Windows is a nuisance because you have to faff about with the terminal (which is awful in Windows) to package all the required libraries, and then it’s not guaranteed to run straight out of the box. For Windows you have to use a dependency walker to find the missing libraries.

Qt for Linux isn’t too bad unless you want the latest libraries. At this moment you can install Qt5.5 from the Linux repositories and away you go. Unfortunately, the latest version of Qt is 5.7 with some very nice additions so it’s back to packaging stuff up.

For embedded Linux it would have to be Qt from the Linux repositories.

For Android it is still a toss up between Qt and Android Studio + NDK. Although if I could get away with it I would use Qt and Linux unless it was going to be an application for the Android market.

Re-install PC

I’ve recently upgraded from Linux Mint 17.3 to 18 and although everything else is working just fine, the tomcat server doesn’t. The client side of a web application works but there’s no joy from the server side so zero RPC calls are working.

A fresh install will be good anyway as it will clear a lot of junk out.

Ah well, should be about 30 minutes to an hour installing most of my software back. It’s handy having a nice 480Gb SSD and decent download speeds.

Eclipse update and GWT

After upgrading from Linux Mint 17.3 to 18, I found that the minimum Java available was 8. For GWT projects, up to 7 is allowed because there are issues running with Java 8.

So, I deleted Eclipse ready to install the latest. It installed fine. Still some issues along the way with Java 7 and 8 with GWT.

Eventually I installed Oracle Java 7. So far so good.

After finding that there is no longer support for Android in eclipse and installing all the Android stuff I cleared eclipse again. Actually I removed Eclipse a few times until I got Java 7 and 8 and all the GWT web stuff. Including Java EE version of eclipse.

Now I’ve figured out how to run a GWT project straight out of Eclipse without needing to upload onto the Apache server too. This makes for much faster build times. However, one cavaet is that I will have to create a linux group and add my user to the group next so that Tomcat7 and my user can read/write to the servers home directory.

Having sped up the build times, development of GWT projects will be so much easier and less time consuming. I will only need to deploy to the Apache main server when it has all been done. All I need to do is to save all files that I’ve been editing, click refresh in the server pane in Eclipse and go to the page in the browser. The browser will then tell the project to build itself the changes made.

Good stuff for a few hours of headaches.

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