We are evaluating easyXDM for reading 3rd party cookies with http://easyxdm.net/wp/2010/03/17/sending-and-receiving-messages/ (i.e. following socket based messages).
We have observed that easyXDM uses flash for communication. I would appreciate your letting me know that would easyXDM will continue to work on browser or system that do NOT have flash plugin installed.
Also, we understand that newer version on Windows 8 would not officially support flash therefore if any new user having windows 8 without flash installed with browser, would easyXDM continue to work?
Easyxdm has multiple transport streams, and uses flash for only one of them (for ie 6 and 7 support). I suggest you read https://github.com/oyvindkinsey/easyXDM#readme and dig through it's documentation a little more.
And windows 8 ships with two browsers. One that supports external plugins (like flash) and one that does not.
Related
I am developing an application on Windows 10 that interacts with custom device drivers, the NTFS filesystem and DirectX 12. The app is a Windows Universal App written in C++, WRL, XAML and DirectX. For DirectX I have chosen a SwapChainPanel control and the DirectX portion of the app works great. The app is Sideloaded so I have a bit more freedom than an app that needs to go through the store
Unfortunately the Windows Universal Apps have a number of restrictions with regards to API calls. WinRt APIs are favored.
Here are a list of WinRt APIs to call to replace Win32 APIs:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh464945.aspx
In addition Windows Universal Apps can call Win32 APIs that are partitioned to the application (however not the ones partitioned to the desktop) as indicated in the documentation of each function and in the header file. Here is a link:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br205762.aspx
In addition the Winsock APIs are now allowed from Windows Universal Apps
However I am still left without my favorite (and necessary APIs)
CreateFile()
ReadFile()
WriteFile()
DeviceIoControl()
CloseHandle()
In particular I need to read and write files to all locations without user interaction (and not to the locations restrict by the Windows Universal App Sandbox). In addition I need to send IOCTLs to my multiple device drivers.
I could abandon Windows Universal Apps and go with WPF. However I have a touch intensive application and I need touch to work really well. In addition I have to wonder about the lack of fixes and commitment to WPF on the behalf of Microsoft. I have considered other UI frameworks but none have been as promising as a Windows Universal App.
Microsoft has allowed two paths in Windows 10 for Universal Apps that will allow calling all Win32 functions (For side loaded apps).
Brokered Windows Runtime Component
and IPC though TCPIP
I have written a brokered windows runtime component and it works well. However the solution requires a C# app to be in the mix and I do not need/want that as I need fast load times of the app and do not want to pull the CLR in.
The next option is IPC through TCPIP. I would use Fast TCP Loopback as explained in the blog post: Fast TCP Loopback Performance and Low Latency with Windows Server 2012 TCP Loopback Fast Path. I would link to it but I am at my (very generous) two link limit for a first post.
I have a couple of questions:
1) If I go this route should I place the IPC between the XAML controls/buttons and the rest of the App? This would allow the rest of the app to be strictly Win32. Or should I just place the IPC between the app and calls to the specific functions I need that fall outside of the those allowed by Win32.
2) I have looked for a library or paper that has code and/or ideas for implementing IPC with TCPIP. However so far the papers that talk about IPC with TCPIP seem to simply describe winsock programming which is something I already know how to do. I would enjoy coding up IPC but would prefer a solution that has been tested. This needs to work flawlessly and I would rather have code with some time on it. Has anyone used or heard of code and or a design for IPC over TCPIP that is available to share?
I am writing an application using Qt and want to try and deploy it as a web-application. I want user's to be able to use my application by accessing it through a web browser. I'm guessing that's what a web-application is? What kind of options do I have? I've never looked into doing anything like this but I'd like to learn something new.
EDIT: What if I deployed my application on a Linux server and had users access/run it through a terminal? I think writing web application is going to be more complicated than I had originally thought.
If all you have is a Qt application, then the best you can do is use Qt 5 and run it using a remote visualization package:
Use WebGL streaming, introduced in Qt 5.10. Qt exposes a browser-connectible interface directly, without need for third-party code.
For Qt 5.0-5.9, you can use the vnc platform plugin. Then connect using a web-browser based vnc client.
For many uses it might be sufficient, and certainly it's much less effort than coding up a web app.
You're looking for Wt which provides a different set of drawing routines for many Qt GUI elements, turning them from lines on screen to HTML controls.
http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt
It also handles websocket calls to provide interactivity. It seems a great idea, let us know how it works in practice.
For the case of QML there is QmlWeb which is a JavaScript library that is able to parse QML-code and create a website out of it using normal HTML/DOM elements and absolute positions within CSS, translating the QML properties into CSS properties.
QmlWeb is a small project by Lauri Paimen that he’s already developing for a few years now. QmlWeb of course doesn’t yet support everything Qt’s implementation of QML does, but it already supports a quite usable subset of it. It supports nearly all of the most basic QML syntax. Moreover it has support for HTML input elements (Button, TextInput, TextArea are currently supported, more to come).
Well, QmlWeb is not finished. I hope Digia help with this project to make it ready with mature features.
Interestingly, it is possible to compile Qt applications to javascript using emscripten-qt. These run fairly fast with Firefox's asm.js interpreter:
http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/projects/emscripten-qt/wiki
Try "Qt for Webassembly".
Webassembly allows the C/C++ code to be compiled and run natively inside majority of the browsers:
WebAssembly (Wasm, WA) is a web standard that defines a binary format and a corresponding assembly-like text format for executable code in Web pages. ... It is executed in a sandbox in the web browser after a verification step. Programs can be compiled from high-level languages into Wasm modules and loaded as libraries from within JavaScript applets ... Its initial aim is to support compilation from C and C++, though support for other source languages such as Rust and .NET languages is also emerging.
To run a Qt application unchanged over the web so users can operate it in a browser, you can compile it for Android using the x86 Android ABI, run it inside an Android emulator on a server and supply the Android Cast videostream to users' browsers. You'll also need to have JavaScript in place that records the keyboard and mouse events on the web clients and relays them back to the server.
I had previously tried Qt WebGL streaming and found it to be good over the local network but too slow over the Internet. A 10 s application startup time is acceptable, but 3 s to show a new screen is rather not. I had the exact same experience with the Qt VNC platform plugin. Compared with that, the Android Cast streaming based appetize.io solution (see below) was much faster, providing a well usable user experience even over my 8 Mbit/s connection.
Existing solutions
Here is an overview of commercial products and open source software components that I found that can help you with this approach:
appetize.io. This is a commercial product to run Android applications over the web for demo and testing purposes. I have just done this with a Qt QML based application and liked the outcome. When choosing an Android 9 / 10 device you can see that the "Screencast" setting is on; which is why I believe that this solution uses the Android Cast technology.
runthatapp.com. This is another commercial offer. Not as sophisticated (yet) as appetize.io, but providing a nice pay-as-you-go scheme.
ScreenStream. An open source Android app that provides a web server to view the screen of one Android device in a web browser, also relying on the Android Cast technology. That Android device could be an emulator running on a web server. And to make this multi-user capable you can employ a small load balancer similar to a technique that I developed for Qt WebGL streaming. The ScreenStream README shows that the application might consume up to 20 Mbit/s per client in short bursts.
Ideas for future improvements
Serving your Qt app as an interactive live video stream seems a promising idea to me, given that I found it already less sluggish than VNC and similar solutions. There are ways to make this even faster, such as using a hardware H.265 video encoder to create a video stream with very little delay. By operating multiple such encoders on a single server, the server could serve multiple clients and still keep its CPU load low. Maybe there are even better video formats for such a purpose, given that user interfaces of programs lend themselves well to lossless compression.
Some hints for appetize.io
Finally: since I used the appetize.io product for a Qt application over the last few days, here are some tips from that experience:
It is necessary to compile your Qt application for the x86 Android ABI. The default armeabi-v7a ABI will not work because most appetize.io devices are actually server-based Android emulators and the only ARM based device ("Nexus 5 Physical") failed to start any Qt application I tried to use with it.
The x86_64 ABI may also work, but you might then have to also compile Qt yourself for it, as not all versions of Qt come pre-compiled for that architecture.
All appetize.io links (both for standalone pages and embeddable iframes) support GET parameters to configure the app presentation format. Especially relevant here is screenOnly=true to show the app without a picture of a phone or tablet around it.
Features that rely on phone hardware (camera, position etc.) will not work or only show dummy data. But if you really wanted, you could create a hybrid application combined with client-side JavaScript. It would run device-dependent code in the user's browser, for example to take a photo with the webcam, and then provide the results to the Qt application via the appetize.io cross-document messaging protocol. The following message types seem suitable to build a simple communication protocol: pasteText(value), keypress(key, shiftKey) and openUrl(value).
In the default appetize.io standalone app demo pages, only the key events of ordinary letter keys are sent to the app, not keyboard shortcuts or function keys like F2 and Esc. This might be possible to fix with JavaScript on an own page embedding the appetize.io iframe, as their cross-document messaging protocol provides the keypress(key, shiftKey) message type.
Qt does not support writing browser based web applications. Unfortunately.
You need to use common web programming technologies for this. There are a lot of ways, but Qt is not one of them.
I would like, from a native Windows application using C++, to receive video/audio data sent from a browser located in a remote location. It seems like WebRTC is the way to go for this.
Most information I find is about how to interact with the browser to write WebRTC apps, but it may case the data would be received by my C++ app. Is it correct that I would need to use the WebRTC Native Code package for this, which is described as being 'for browser developers'? Document is located here: http://www.webrtc.org/webrtc-native-code-package
And what if I want to send video/audio data that I generate (ie not directly coming from a webcam and microphone), would I be able to send it to the remote location browser?
Any sample code out there which does something like I'm trying to accomplish?
The wording in that link is a bit misleading. They intend people that are developing browsers to use the native code, and advise those that are developing "applications" in a browser to use the WebRTC API.
I have worked with their native code for over a year to develop an Android application that is capable of performing audio and / or video calls between other Android devices and to browsers. So, I a pretty sure that it is completely possible to to take their native code and create a Windows application (especially since they have example code that does that for Linux and Mac -- look at peerconnection client and peerconnection server for this). You might have to write and re-write code to get it to work on Windows.
As for as data that you generate. In the Android project that I worked with, we didn't rely on the Android device / system to provide us with video, we captured and sent that out our selves using the "LibJingle" / WebRTC libraries. So, I know that that is possible, as long as you provide the libraries with video data in the correct format. I would imagine that one would be able to do the same with audio, but we never fiddled with that, so I cannot say for sure.
And as for example code, I can only suggest Luke Weber's gitbug repositories. Although it is for Android, it might be of some help to look at how he interfaces with the two libraries. Probably the better code to look at is the peerconnection client stuff that comes in the "LibJingle" second of the native code. [edit]: That is located in /talk/examples/peerconection/client/ .
If you get lost from my use of "LibJingle", that will show you when I started working with all of this code. Sometime around July of 2013 they migrated "LibJingle" into the WebRTC "talk" folder. From everything that I have seen, they are the same thing, just with the location and named changed.
I am writing a cross-platform c++ application that needs to connect to Exchange servers and download mails using ActiveSync.
Is there any library available for ActiveSync (preferably open-source)?
I can't use Windows APIs as they won't run in Linux & Mac.
I used to work with the SynCE project on supporting Windows Mobile devices connected to desktop Linux machines so can offer a few pointers.
Do you mean ActiveSync or AirSync? AirSync is the protocol that used over the air and by ActiveSync to actually shift the data, ActiveSync is the whole stack for syncing a WinMo device connected to your computer. SynCE is the only open source "full stack" equivalent to ActiveSync that I know of, from driver to AirSync to GUI's and integration with OpenSync, and I don't know any open source projects that present themselves as a WinMo device to ActiveSync.
I don't know of any C or C++ implementations of AirSync, but I believe that the Samba and OpenChange teams have made good progress at supporting Exchange servers natively. About a year and a half ago I was told that even supporting the HTTP(s) transport wasn't far away in terms of work needed (but i'm not sure if its been a priority).
While not in C++ and while not even a client library, the SynCE project has open source python code which might be a useful reference if another library cannot be found.
Here is an example of a push mail server that was written by one of the SynCE developers: SynCE Airmail
And the main sync engine can be found here: SynCE SyncEngine
Within that code, I think SyncEngine/airsync.py will be most useful to you.
Digging around the SynCE wiki http://www.synce.org and their mailing list archive is a good way of finding out about problems encountered and surprising details about what the protocol is and isnt sensitive about.
You may find http://libwbxml.opensync.org useful - after the wbxml layer has been decoded AirSync is just XML passing.
And finally, Microsoft do provide documentation for the protocol:
ActiveSync HTTP Protocol Specification
Open Specification Support Team Blog: More ActiveSync
TechNet wiki Exchange ActiveSync Overview
Z-Push might provide you with the start you need.
I have emailed Entrek and they seem to be asleep.
Does anyone else here use Entrek CodeSnitch? If so, have you found a way to use it with Windows Mobile 5, 6, or 6.1 ?
I really need to verify my application doesn't have any memory leaks, etc. And CodeSnitch does a great job of it. But only with Windows Mobile 2003. :/
Thanks.
What's not working? Is it a client connectivity issue?
The older version used PlatMan for a communications layer, which is problematic from a Visual Studio standpoint (which ships with CoreCon), but if you have any tool installed that has Platman (eVC, Platform Builder) then that should still work fine since WinMo 5.x and 6.x are still based on CE 5.0.
I do know that Entrek has a newer version in beta (I have it) so you might try pinging them again. They tend to be pretty busy, but I've always gotten responses (though I know them well and personally, so that might not be any indicator for you).
I also see that they have their phone number posted on their web page. I'd give them a call. I do recall them saying the new version is supposed to address WinMo issues (I rarely use WinMo proper) so it's definitely worth a try.
I've not used CodeSnitch. But I have had success using the Application Verifier Tool to identify my leaks in WM5 and 6.
Getting it up and running can be a bit of a pain. But I find it to be a good tool and the price is right.
Here's a tutorial to get you started.
I've used CodeSnitch on windows mobile 5, 6 and 6.1 devices with no problems.
Make sure you have the v1.4 installed and applied the v1.4 patch which is referenced here.
Like ctackle says, you need an older communications layer called CoreCon. I've also found CETK has CoreCon in it as well and it's not as big as eVC or Platform builder.
You need to setup the device connection settings to use ActiveSync (both transport and startup server), it does not seem to matter what the connection is called so something like Pocket PC will work fine.
The other gotcha I found is that you need to edit the codesnitch and procman shortcuts and add "/targetcpu:armv4i" to the command line arguments for them to work on WM devices.
I have also found them recently to be non-responsive to support emails as well :(