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I just posted this as part of a reply to a question about the "best" bug-tracking software...
Well, a tool on its own is just a tool. And while all speak of a toolchain, most just mean a loose collection of tools. Why not look for a problem tracker that "plays well with other children"? That is to say, interfaces well with your IDE, your build tool, your version control system ...
In fact, I think I'll go now and ask a question about the best linked toolchain ...
So, any comments? I would prefer replies for developing C/C++ on Linux and using FOSS (but don't let that prevent you posting Windows based answers if you think that it would help someone else). We don't need a complete chain, but maybe a few groups of linked tools are still better than totally separate "links" in the chain)
I use
Eclipse - for coding and debugging, also its plug-ins for
Doxygen for auto code-documentation
Splint and CppCheck for static code analysis
CppUnit for automated testing
Bugzilla, et all for bug tracking
CVS, Subversion, etc, for version control
Hudson - for automated builds, with plug-ins for
Doxygen for auto code-documentation
CppCheck for static code analysis
CppUnit for automated testing
Bugzilla, et all for bug tracking
CVS, Subversion, etc, for version control
I seem to be missing a tool for project management which interfaces with other "links" in the toolchain. How complete can we make it, end to end, and is there a "best" chain (or, at least, one with the most links)?
Edit: Let's not forget requirements tracking and project planning & tracking - end Edit
And has anyone every diagrammed the relationship between various tools (i.e., which interfaces to which, and in which direction; which can export in the import format of another, etc)?
G'day,
In my experience, I have found that trying to come up with a "definitive" tool chain can cause problems.
One of the worst is that it tends to force people into the "everything looks like a nail" approach to projects. That is, You've done the work to select the tools you think are suitable and you now have your tool suite.
In my experience, it is very difficult to get people to change their "canonical set" of tools for other projects once that tool set has been selected and annointed as such.
I've been doing this for over twenty years now in a variety of projects that ranged from on-board submarine sonar simulators to air-traffic control display systems to helicopter control systems. Even within the same company, different projects need different tool sets to address the various problems that are going to be encountered.
You might think that once you've selected a tool for a particular purpose then you can re-use that tool for all projects, e.g. your selection of BugZilla for bug tracking. But what if there is no suitable SMTP server available because you've got a distributed team and your mail server is internal, locked down, secure, for example.
I'd suggest that it would be better to establish a suite of possible tools from which you can select your project's tool suite from. For example, adding Trac or FogBuzz as a possible bug tracking mechanism.
A lot of things can affect your choice of tools. Off the top of my head I've got:
geographical distribution of teams,
internal lock down, i.e. no public access, of servers e.g. email, source repository, test platform, etc,
having to interface to some existing system because of a desire to reuse aspects of that system, e.g. previous teams had had VisualSourceSafe inflicted upon them,
customer insistence on the use of a particular platform,
the management team for a new project having requirements that differ from the previous management team for regular management type reports,
etc.
Having a suite of possibilities minimises the effect of "trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole".
Anyway, you might find that you're able to trim down your suite of possibilities after a while because you can demonstrate a successful approach and so get enough traction within the company for the support of doing things the way you've previously done them.
HTH
I think the Unix philosophy militates against these kinds of tightly integrated toolchains. It's no accident that Eclipse, the first thing you mention, came from the Java world. Unix (and by extension, Linux) tends to believe less in things called "plugins" and more in sets of tools that share data stored in flat text files.
By "project management" I'm not sure if you mean something like Make or something to keep track of your team's progress. If you mean something like Make, the Unix world sorely needs a reusable Make that supports "smart recompilation" and will work with multiple compilers. The closest thing is Glenn Fowler's nmake, but that's not very close.
Regarding integrate toolsets more generally,
The best set of tools I've seen are the Advanced Software Technology tools built at AT&T. There's a most excellent book Practical Reusable Unix Software, free to download, which describes the state of play circa 1995. Since then the toolset has only gotten better and richer, but to get an overview of what the hell is going on, you really need the book. These guys started with the Unix group at Bell Labs, and what they've created is not so much a toolchain but a way of life. Joe Bob says check it out.
The other ubiquitous element in many Unix toolchains is (and this is likely to make you laugh or puke) Emacs. Although Emacs Lisp is not anyone's favorite way to write plugins or extensions, sheer accumulation over time has made Emacs into a very rich, powerful programming environment—and it talks to all sorts of other tools. I'm into simplicity, not complexity, so I try to keep to shallow water, but if you're serious about investigating toolchains for Unix, it's something to know about.
I'm looking forward to seeing more answers to your question.
Well its not FOSS but Rational supplies a complete tool chain (except for the compilers!),
You get IDEs, Class diagrams, use cases, requirements tracking, test tools, problem logging tools which integrate well all for a few thousand (or hundreds of) dollars.
None (aprt from the modeling tools) is best of breed, but, they are all pretty good and integrate well with each other.
Disclaimer:-
My "toolset" of choice is vim,make, ddd, gmail and a moleskin notebook for modeling.
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I'm planning on developing mobile application for both iOS and Android and I want to use C++ for the development.
Which cross-platform framework is available for building mobile application using the C++ language.
I'm sure a lot of people have this question as well, so read this if you'd really like to know the answer. Marmalade is probably the BEST solution. Code once, deploy to mobile devices, desktops, even some TV's. Many popular games have been created with Marmalade.
Extensive games like:
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
Call of Duty: World at War Zombies
But also simple games like:
draw something.
Doodle Jump
They've added a free package. You can create your game for free and if you want to get rid of the ad splash screen, it's $150,- per year for mobile devices or $500,- per year for other devices as well.
A big advantage is the native speed. It doesn't matter what people claim about other languages like javascript or java (and unfortunately Qt, which of course isn't a language but you know what I mean) running as fast as C or C++. It's simply not true. For simple applications this is of course not important, but when you're looking at (simple) games, this is crucial.
At the moment version 7.3 is available, but this version has a problem with the ARM emulator. I would download 7.0.
Whether you choose Marmalade or not, make sure you read the documentation. You don't want to end up missing some functionality and switch to another option when you're almost finished.
I've looked into portable code between Android and iOS before and I don't think it's possible.
To release apps into the Android market it needs to be in Java, and anything with a GUI on iOS needs to use Objective-C.
You might be able to have partial portable C++ layer, but in reality it's probably quicker to write the same app twice in Java and Obj-C than it would be to write it once in C++ as a portable solution.
Qt or Wx-Widgets might have some support, but I have not looked into mobile platforms for these, and I suspect the reality is that Apple, Microsoft and Oracle want you to be tied into their technologies these days and have no incentive to make things portable.
C# and Java provide a complete framework that allows code to be written much quicker using well documented classes and libraries, especially when dealing with user interfaces.
C++ on the other hand relies on many open source projects that take a lot of effort to get functioning on multiple platforms, and much time is spent dealing with subtle platform problems.
My suggestion was simply that it might be easier to pick a language better suited to the platform you are dealing with, as C++ tends to be lower level than other languages, the syntax can seem verbose and many hours can be wasted trying to make things work that you would expect to just work, and unfortunately documentation for many open source projects is poor.
Maybe this can be considered to be an opinion, but then the shift from C++ to C# or Java commercially might also indicate that I'm not the only one believing this.
You can take a look on openFrameworks, maybe it fits on your needs:
http://openframeworks.cc/about/
There ARE solutions for C++ cross-platform development for Android and iPhone, despite what other answers say here.
The best is probably Marmalade, but it's expensive, so only useful for commercially viable apps: https://www.madewithmarmalade.com/
Then there's MoSync, which you can use for free. Unfortunately they went bankrupt last year, so there's no ongoing support. Still, might be worth a look depending on your needs. http://www.mosync.com
OpenFrameworks is one I hadn't seen, so thanks Rodrigo for that answer: http://openframeworks.cc/
There is no cross platform solution using C++, unless you're interested in making games. There are a few options available if you don't mind using another programming language. Take a look at Titanium SDK (Javascript), Xamarin (C#) or the multitude of HTML5/CSS/Javascript frameworks (Phonegap comes to mind).
Look for the DragonFire SDK it allows you to write apps and games in c/c++. Not cross-platform and never used it but looks good. It uses Visual Studio and has its own simulator for iOS development.
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I'm looking for an IDE that I can collaborate with other people. I'd like to have real-time editing and color coordination (meaning if Bob is online and changes some code it will high lite his changes, similar to sharing a Document on Google).
I've tried searching via Google but I can't find anything that actually suits my needs. I'm currently a college student and have projects to do with other class mates, but using Pastebin is a bit cumbersome as I have to have an IDE open + a web browser, then copy paste, share etc.
Is there any IDE out there that will compile for C/C++, C#, .Net etc with real-time collaboration? If I have to set up a server on my desktop to make it work I have no problems doing so
I believe that in practical terms, using a distributed versioning system (like git, perhaps thru gitorious or github) is a wiser idea, at least for usual programming languages like C (and you need a social convention, at least like Bob is working on file foo.c or on function foofoo while Alice focuses on bar.c or on function barbar). You may want to communicate in real time using IRC, chat, pastebin, etc .... in addition of git. You probably won't edit the same line (or perhaps even the same function) two distant people at a time.
The semantics of programming language like C is not fit to the idea of a simultanous edition of a single source at the very same time. (Defining languages friendly to this co-development idea is still a research topic).
BTW, you don't need an IDE to code in C or C++ (especially on Linux, which gives you a lot of other tools emacs or perhaps vim or gedit or geany, grep, make, ctags, git, awk, ... to use together). A big lot of very large C or C++ free software programs (GCC, the Linux kernel, Gnome/GTK, Qt/KDE, LibreOffice ....) are coded by many qualified people without IDEs. This is IMHO quite significant.
I suggest to try:
http://moonedit.com/ - simple real-time editor
http://www.saros-project.org/DemoVideo - real-time editor for Eclipse (so you could use C++ there)
at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_real-time_editor there are plenty suggestions.
This is an old thread but in case others are still interested in this topic/capability there are a bunch of web based IDEs nowadays. If you Google "web ide", you'll get a decent list of collaborative web IDEs. For completeness, I'll list one that I've used and liked:
Cloud9 IDE
Aside from small homework assignments, you are better off using a version control system like GIT or Hg. Though they are overkill for most small homework assignments; especially if it's an intro class and most students are already having a hard enough time learning the programming material by itself.
One other note is that a web based IDE is not necessarily mutually exclusive to using VCS. You can use GIT inside of Cloud9 IDE.
Save yourself the trouble and use version control of some sort. Be it git, hg, svn, or what have you. Pick your poison, but this is a large part of what version control exists for. For communication? AIM, IRC, Skype, it doesn't really matter.
In this case, you can either have good version control, a good IDE, and a good Chat program or you can have one program that syncs your code, allows you to chat, and allows you to edit code, but does all of the above poorly.
Check out Squad:
http://squadedit.com/
Hosted service so setup is easy, and it supports C++ syntax highlighting.
Have a look at EFC, http://www.eclipse.org/ecf/.
More specifically Cola, http://vimeo.com/1195398.
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I'm a student and i want make a build tool as a side project for myself because none of the current build tools seem to attract me. There's ant, but i really dislike looking at XML (i don't know why, but i really don't see the appeal of tags; it puts me off visually and cannot be made neat in my eyes). There's maven, but i really don't want to be working on a project just to have it fail all of a sudden (this is based on the research I've done where people say that there are times that maven fails to build all of a sudden. This could just be total BS but i'd rather not find out the hard way), plus there's some XML involved. I really liked make, but it isn't portable, and even though the chances of me using a non-Windows PC are next to nil, I am unfortunately, a computer science student who has been properly trained to always assume the worst case.
Currently, i am looking into Gradle. I'm still trying to figure it out (i am a really slow learner) but i like the syntax. It might also be beneficial to note that i am so shallow that i don't really care about the back end stuff or any of the advanced features cause i don't really understand dependency management and stuff just quite yet. All i care about is that the configuration syntax or make file looks clean, that it works without requiring internet access, absolute paths, or anything of the sort, and that it works consistently and doesn't take too long. I believe that the syntax is important because, like all code, if it looks ugly, you won't want to read it.
I want to make a build tool that is simple, functional, and portable (i'm gonna be running it off my External HDD with Java in it). I'd really appreciate any suggestions this community has to offer, such as "It really is better to just stick with ant or maven cause they work already" or "be sure to avoid make's dependency issue". This will just be a side project so i can work on my Java and maybe learn something new so even if i fail, i still might learn something new so no need to comment on that.
If you haven't already tried it, try Automated Build Studio. We have used if for a couple of years now and it works fine for us.
Another existing tool you might choose to ignore is SCons. It's written in Python and has some very nice features including, possibly relevant to you, easy extensibility.
And yes, I think you are going to crash and burn. Far better to learn one of the existing tools properly than to reinvent this particular wheel. Use your creative urges and time to write something truly new.
Furthermore, and since you are a student allow me to stand on my soap-box: one of the lessons that new entrants to the IT profession have to learn is to use the tools you are given, not to expect to be allowed the time and money to develop a new one. Don't expect to be able to rock up to work on day one and try to make a case for writing 'MyMake' because GNU Make (or whatever) doesn't float your boat.
Here's just an idea:
ant is really not such a bad tool. Maybe you could consider building a front end for it that translates a DSL (Domain Specific Language) of your own design into ant's XML, and hide the XML from your tool's users?
You may also want to take a look at Rake. Someone recently ranted in his blog about how terrible Maven is (and the debate goes on) and he much, much prefers Rake.
I started one, some 7 years ago. I am still using it. No one else uses it. http://gna.org/projects/maker/
I started on some same ground than you: multi platform (was Linux, DEC Alpha, and Windows at the time) with a new shiny lanquage: Python. I was getting ideas from Miller's Recursive Make Considered Harmful in the sense that I had a source file for each executable (same for shared library, or static library) that was listing the C/C++ source files, and dependencies on other libraries. The main feature was to generate on the fly a makefile that is fed into gmake (that does a perfect job, provided it has a perfect makefile) to build all the binaries in one call, managing all the dependencies (with gcc -MD options).
Over time. it evolved mostly into a tool that can use Visual Studio C++ project and solution files to compile on Linux. And I am struggling to keep it up-to-date with new versions of Visual, and new values of project parameters and project properties that my coworkers use.
I wouldn't recommend starting a new tool.
Why would using Maven mean that your build fails "all of a sudden"?
I would advocate always using continuous integration (e.g. cruise control for ant or Hudson for maven) regardless of the build tool you use. This should eliminate a build failing "all of a sudden"
There's maven, but i really don't want to be working on a project just to have it fail all of a sudden.
What does that mean?
Anyway, if you're into Groovy, I recommend Gant.
Cobbling together your own build tool doesn't sound like a great use of your time, especially when established tools such as ant and maven exist and have such vast user bases that are finding (and fixing) bugs with those tools.
I don't understand your comment about maven causing build failure all of a sudden.
XML will haunt you everywhere you go. Invest in an excellent XML visualizer / editor, and go to town with Ant anyhow!
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I'm looking for recommendations for open-source projects written in C++ that will help me "get my chops back". A little background:
I've been working heavily in Java for the last three years, doing a lot of back-end development and system design, but with a fair amount of work in the presentation layer stuff, too.
The last C++ projects I worked on were a Visual C++ 6 project (designed to interact with Visual Basic) for mobile devices and several projects using the GNU toolchain circa gcc versions 2.x to 3.2
I'm looking to get back up to speed on the language and learn some of the popular frameworks, specifically the basics of boost (although boost seems fairly sprawling to me, similar to the kitchen-sink feel of Spring in the java space) and test driven development in C++.
What I'm looking for:
Specific recommendations for small to mid-size open source projects to poke through and perhaps contribute to as I level my C++ skills back up. The problem domain isn't important, except that I would like to work on something in a new area to broaden my experience.
Edit:
A few people have commented that it's difficult to provide a recommendation without some indication of the problem domain I'd like to work in. So, I've decided that I'm most interested in graphics applications or games, two areas which I haven't worked in before.
If you like visual stuff, openFrameworks is a C++ Framework for doing Processing-type applications. http://www.openframeworks.cc/ I'm not sure how viable it still is, but it looked pretty cool.
It's hard to suggest something like this, you really don't have any itches you want to scratch??
I would personally be working on Unladen Swallow if I wasn't absurdly busy starting my own personal venture. Dynamic language optimisation looks pretty cool to me.
You could also look at Wt
Why not Boost itself? It's a very active project, it's right at the core of what C++ is about, and it could need some help.
You mentioned test driven development. The Boost Unit Test Framework, for example, is powerful, but IMHO suffers from extremly bad documentation. That'd be a place to start, would teach you everything there is to know about that particular part of Boost, and I am sure you could find your way into one of the Boost modules from there.
I think you're going to have to be more specific. As a quick check, I did an apt-cache showpkg libstdc++6 on my Debian squeeze system, to find all the packages that depend on the C++ library — and found 4,537 of them. Obvious examples include:
most of KDE
Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.
apt-get itself
It'd really help if you specified what field you're interested in.
You can find many projects on GitHub. If you find a nice project, you can fork it (it's like creating a local copy you can work on) and start coding. Once you have done something nice, you can make a "Pull request" to ask the guy you made your fork from to merge your work.
I like being able to commit without having to ask for an access and be able to make smalls contributions to many projects without having to contact anybody, simply with a couple of clicks.
You can also check Gitorious and Bitbucket, both site work a bit like Github.
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I hope this question does not come off as broad as it may seem at first. I am designing a software application that I would like to be both cross-platform and modular. I am still in the planning phase and can pick practically any language and toolset.
This makes things harder, not easier, because there are seemingly so many ways of accomplishing both of the goals (modularity, platform agnosticism).
My basic premise is that security, data storage, interaction with the operating system, and configuration should all be handled by a "container" application - but most of the other functionality will be supplied through plug-in modules. If I had to describe it at a high level (without completely giving away my idea), it would be a single application that can do many different jobs, all dedicated to the same goal (there are lots of disparate things to do, but all the data has to interact and be highly available).
I find myself wrestling with not so much how to do it (I can think of lots of ways), but which method is best.
For example, I know that Eclipse practically embodies what I am describing, but I find Java applications in general (and Eclipse is no exception) to be too large and slow for what I need. Ditto desktop apps written Python and Ruby (which are excellent languages!)
I don't mind recompiling the code base for different platforms as native exectables. Yet, C and C++ have their own set of issues.
As a C# developer, I have a preference for managed code, but I am not at all sold on Mono, yet (I could be convinced).
Does anyone have any ideas/experiences/ specific favorite frameworks to share?
Just to cite an example: for .NET apps there are the CAB (Composite Application Block) and the Composite Application Guidance for WPF. Both are mainly implementations of a set of several design patterns focused on modularity and loose coupling between components similar to a plug-in architecture: you have an IOC framework, MVC base classes, a loosely coupled event broker, dynamic loading of modules and other stuff.
So I suppose that kind of pattern infrastructure is what you are trying to find, just not specifically for .NET. But if you see the CAB as a set of pattern implementations, you can see that almost every language and platform has some form of already built-in or third party frameworks for individual patterns.
So my take would be:
Study (if you are not familiar with) some of those design patterns. You could take as an example the CAB framework for WPF documentation: Patterns in the Composite Application Library
Design your architecture thinking on which of those patterns you think would be useful for what you want to achieve first without thinking in specific pattern implementations or products.
Once you have your 'architectural requirements' defined more specifically, look for individual frameworks that help accomplish each one of those patterns/features for the language you decide to use and put together your own application framework based on them.
I agree that the hard part is to make all this platform independent. I really cannot think on any other solution to choose a mature platform independent language like Java.
Are you planning a desktop or web application?
Everyone around here seems to think that Mono is great, but I still do not think it is ready for industry use, I would equate mono to where wine is, great idea; when it works it works well, and when it doesn't...well your out of luck. mod_mono for Apache is extremely glitchy and is hard to get running correctly.
If your aiming for the desktop, nothing beats the eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) framework: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Rich_Client_Platform.
You can build window, linux, mac all under the same code and all UI components are native to the OS. And RCP wins in modularity hands down, it has a plug-in architecture that is unrivaled (from what I have seen)
I have worked with RCP for 1.5 years now and I dunno what else could replace it, it is #1 in it's niche.
If your totally opposed to java I would look into wxWidgets with either python or C++
If you want platform independence, then you'll have to trade off between performance and development effort. C++ may be faster than Java (this is debatable FWIW) but you'll get platform independence a lot more easily with Java. Python and Ruby are in the same boat.
I doubt that .NET would be much faster than Java (they're both VM languages after all), but the big problem with .NET is platform independence. Mono has a noble goal and surprisingly good results so far but it will always be playing catch-up with Microsoft on Windows. You might be able to accept its limitations but it's still not the same as having identical multiplatform environments that Java, Python, and Ruby have. Also: the .NET development and support tools are heavily skewed towards Windows, and probably always will be.
IMO, your best bet is to target Java... or, at the very least, the JVM. If you don't like the Java language (and as a C# dev I'm guessing that's not the case) then you at least have options like Jython, JRuby, and Scala. With the JVM, you get very good platform independence, good performance, and access to a huge number of libraries and support tools. There's almost always a Java library, port or implementation that will do what you need it to do. I don't think any other platform out there has the same number of options; there's real value in that flexibility.
As for modularity: that's more about how you build the software than what platform you use. I don't know much about plugin architectures like you describe but I'm guessing that it will be possible in pretty much any modern platform you pick.
If you plan on doing python development, you can always use pyrex to optimize some of the slower parts.
With my limited Mono experience I can say I'm quite sold on it. The fact that there is active development and a lot of ongoing effort to bring it up to spec with the latest .Net technologies is encouraging. It is incredibly useful to be able to use existing .Net skills on multiple platforms. I had similar issues with performance when attempting to accomplish some basic tasks in Python + PyGTK -- maybe they can be made to perform in the right hands but it is nice to not have to worry about performance 90% of the time.
For desktop applications, writing it in an interpreted language, and using a cross-platform UI toolkit like wxWidgets will get you a long way towards platform independence (you just have to be careful not to use any other modules that aren't cross-platform, use things like Python's os.path module, in place of doing things like config_path = "/home/$USER")
That said, to make a good cross-platform application, you will have to do some things differently on each platform..
For example, OS X is probably the most different - preferences are usually stored in ~/Library/Prefernces/ as .plists, UI's are generally based around floating windows, with a single menu-bar docked at the top-of-screen.
I suppose this is where the modularity comes into play.. With the preferences example above, you could have a class UserConfig, of which you have OS-specific versions of. The Windows one stores config data in the appropriate Application Data folder, or the registry. The Mac OS one uses .plist files on ~/Library/Preferences/, and the unix'y one uses ~/.dotfiles.