I have been writing some applications for windows metro in c# and have been trying to create a twitter program, using the tweet sharp library, that will allow the user to tweet and view the tweets of the people they are following and check for updates in a background task.
The problem that I was having is I wanted to use c++ for sorted maps. The sorted maps was, at least what I found, to be the quickest way to sort through and organize the large amounts of tweeters and their tweets. Which is especially helpful because of the constraints that background tasks have when it comes to accessing the CPU.
But I found that my CLR libraries couldn't be used in my metro application because of the improper build target for the dll file.
Is it possible to use a CLR library with WinRT applications and deploy them on the app store or does anyone know of an alternative way to manage these large amounts of tweets considering the CPU constraints.
Thanks in advance.
According to this post it currently is not possible.
Apart from that, WinRT has a different system for processing metadata in apps and class libraries.
For one, you can look at .NET for Windows Store apps overview and secondly about CLR integration (C++/CX).
Related
We have an English-only Windows C++ application based on MFC. It is still being developed, with updates being periodically sent to customers.
We now have a reseller who wants the ability to translate our application into other languages as needed. I understand the standard way of translating MFC applications is by using language-specific resource DLLs.
However, this presents a problem with updating the application. When updating the functionality, we sometimes add/change/delete GUI elements and text messages. How do we "push" these changes to people who would translate the resource DLL without them having to translate the whole DLL every time? What is the best workflow for this? Are there any tools that make developing and MAINTAINING multilanguage applications easier?
Are there any frameworks that could help? The reseller would prefer to have a simple text file with all text strings in it, so dealing with a resource DLL is already an unwanted compromise for them.
Are there any good books/articles on managing multilanguage application development/maintenance?
I never worked in a multilanguage project, so I am not sure what to look for. Thanks for any suggestions :)
Surely, you would keep your content, no matter how it is eventually deployed, in a source code control system. So you can see the adds, changes, and deletes.
Only send the translater the changes that need to be translated. Then they send the translations back to you. Then you package the translation into a deployable object (e.g. DLL).
Are there any tools that make developing and MAINTAINING multilanguage
applications easier?
Our product utilizes a large contingent of worldwide resellers, so, the product is typically translated into many languages. We do not translate the resources directly. We have established a relationship with each reseller. Those that want to translate are given an English dll and a list of what has changed from release to release. Most use a tool called VisualLocalize to localize the resources. The tool produces a localized resource dll from our English dll. That dll is then returned to us, or, packaged separately. They use this type of tool because it allows them to not only localize strings, but, also resize dialog controls if needed. Control size can be an issue depending on the language translation. For example, the size of a text string may be large enough to hold an English word, but, too small for some translated languages. While it may seem “dangerous” allowing a translator to change control sizes, we’ve had enough requests to do this that it’s now standard practice. And, if memory serves me, this particular tool can import and export other files types which would potentially be of use in your particular case.
We are trying to create an Application for all mobile platforms (Android, iPhone, Windows phone). We will build the User Interface using the native development languanges for each platform (Java, Objective C, C#). For the intermediate layers (DataAccess Layer and Business Logic Layer) we plan to use C++ for all platforms.
We are going to use libraries like Curl, sqlite3, libzib. So I think a good solution would be to create two seperate C++ projects (DataAccess and Business Logic) and make references to those libraries we need. First we are going to start with Android, so I will include those two projects as prebuilt static libraries using Android NDK and in the jni folder I will add some methods that they will communicate between UI and Business Logic. Later we will do the same for the other two platforms. Since I am very new to C++ I would like to make the following questions:
Do you think that this theoretically will work?
What problems are we going to face (e.g debugging, using Curl in different operating systems)?
Are there any open source mobile projects using the same approach?
Do you think that this theoretically will work?
Yes, I've written and app for Android and iOS that uses a data access layer written in C++ on both platforms. I wrote the Android edition and a colleague wrote the iOS edition. It is not open source, so I can't show you the code.
What problems are we going to face (e.g debugging, using Curl in different operating systems)?
Debugging the shared C++ code can be a pain in the ass on Android. I've never gotten the debugger for work on Windows. I normally resort to careful reading of my code and printing messages to LogCat if it is not something I can reproduce and debug on iOS. Normally this only affects the JNI layer that links the C++ business logic and the native UI code.
You'll probably have to build 3rd party libraries separately for platform. Curl has instructions for building it for each platform so that shouldn't be much trouble.
Apart from learning JNI, the biggest problem I had was that the app had to look the same (or very similar) on each platform. I'd recommend looking into Qt Mobile Edition as
πάντα ῥεῖ suggested, however it doesn't currently support Windows phone. Still, you would be able to write one UI for two of your three platforms at least - and your shared business code would still be reusable. We are in the process of starting a second app and Qt is definitely looking like the best option for us. I don't think we'd want to repeat the experience of trying to provide the same functionality on two platforms using very different APIs.
Are there any open source mobile projects using the same approach?
I'm not aware of any off-hand, but I'm sure you can Google it.
I do computational research with a C++/CUDA library that does intensive number crunching. Recently I was thinking to set up a little showcase of my library on my webpage where people could work interactively with the library and see the results (plots, animations, etc.) in real time.
I have very limited html and website creating expertise. Are there libraries out there to link the html front-end to the C++/CUDA back-end? I'm developing in Linux environment but obviously I'd like my webpage to be accessed by anyone independent of their OS and/or browser.
So after a little bit of research I found the Wt library which is written in C++ and used for webpage development. Based on the information on their homepage, it seems to be exactly what I'm looking for:
Typical use scenarios:
High performance, complex web applications which are fully personalized (and thus cannot benefit from caching), fully Ajax enabled and at the same time entirely accessible and Search Engine Optimized.
Web-based GUIs for embedded systems benefit from the low footprint of a C++ web application server.
Web-based GUIs that require integration with (existing) C++ libraries, for example for scientific or engineering applications, or existing C++ desktop applications
I did something like this. To do this, I used a simple library I wrote called jrb_node at https://github.com/kennethho/jrb_node
There are other libraries like cppnetlib http://cpp-netlib.org/
Basically you make a small http server that based on the request will perform some computation and return the results as an http response. You can then combine that with javascript and Ajax if you want to make it more interactive.
An alternative to consider is to use WebCL. CUDA is pretty similar to OpenCL and it should be pretty easy to convert your code to the latter. If you have other C++ code, that might be a bit of problem though.
Do you want to run CUDA on server (e.g. the users will input the parameters, push a button and your server will do number crunching) or on client (e.g. it will be user GPU that does computations)?
For server-side you should be able to use pretty much any server technology - PHP, JSP, etc. They all provide a way to integrate to "native code".
For client-side you will not be able to do with just HTML - you need to use some "fat client" technology - e.g. ActiveX, Java applet. I do not know if Silverlight or Flash have access to native code. IMHO, you might as well just write a Qt application and put a download link on your site.
I'm trying to develop an ebook reader(for mobile devices) which is platform independent. Currently my focus is epub only.
As a proof of concept, we were able to make a basic epub reader for android platform, using the functionalities provided by the platform itself(using webview, Xml Parser, Unzipper etc). But now we want to make it platform independent and we want to do it in C/C++. I know we have unzippers and xml parsers in C/C++, its the rendering part I'm worried about. My questions are...
1.How can I do the rendering, without using any of the inbuilt android views, so that it will work on other platforms also?
2.Is it better to stick to webkit for epub(the platforms which we're considering all have webkit)?
As of now I'm clueless. Any pointers on where to start?
BR,
Rajeev
Most likely you will have to split your application into the cross-platform backend and a platform specific front-end.
If you want to implement indexing and searching of all e-pubs in your app, this could be part of the cross-platform part. If the epub reader contains a catalogue of downloaded/transferred epubs, the database including its access methods could probably be cross-platform as well (at least partially).
However, the presentation layer, i.e., the user interface, will probably have to be platform-specific. The best case scenario is that you can come up with an intermediate UI description language that can be automatically translated into Android / iPhone user interfaces. That is a daunting task however, and it's probably not even worth trying if you don't want to create many cross-platform apps.
The only C/C++ development environment i found was MoSync.
For a current project, we're designing a client desktop application that parses text files and interfaces with a web based database.
So far we've split the project into parts:
(Third-Party Program) -> (Our Desktop Client) -> (Our Parsing Library #1 and #2) -> (Our Web Server) -> (Our Verification Library) -> (Our Database)
We've hit confusion when it comes to choosing the correct way (and the best language) to make these pieces work together.
The third-party program's output is a simple text file, and we're just parsing it into a SQL-esque format for insertion into our database after verifying the numbers are in a certain range.
The first question we have is regarding the client language itself. We're planning on writing the parser libraries in C++ as they're just mostly text management. Our desktop client needs to be cross-platform for Windows and Mac. Currently we're leaning towards writing this in Java using Swing and the JNI. However, we realize there's a lot of hate for Java and that we'd have to worry about bundling in the JRE.
Is Java a good choice in this situation? Our other options seem to be writing this also in C++ using something like Qt for the GUI, or going platform specific and writing the windows version in .NET and then a Mac specific version. Our Windows community is the vast majority of users.
Our second issue is connecting this client with our web server. Originally we were just going to use an http POST to upload the file. We could also FTP the file which seems like overkill. We started to explore web services but were not sure if a web service could handle large amounts of text data.
Is there an easier way to do this? Everything is text, so it's no problem to send them in chunks or one giant string. If we go the web services route, will that effect our language choice for the desktop client?
There are definitely hundreds of ways to handle something like this, but most of these concepts are new for us. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Qt is an excellent choice and as it's native C++ it will be easy to integrate with your parsers too. Why write two versions when a single Qt version will run fine on both platforms with native look and feel? Depending on the license you choose you can even statically link Qt if you're concerned about deployment complexity.
A web service would generally have no problem handling large amounts of text and pretty much any language will interact with it easily assuming basic network I/O functionality. Depending on the language you will probably be able to find libraries that do most of the work for you, assuming it's not already supported natively.
As you say, there are many different ways to do what you want to achieve. There is no right or wrong way but obviously some designs will suit your needs better than others.