[Lintouch-announce] Lintouch Development Weekly News - December 19th, 2003

[Martin Man]

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Lintouch Development Weekly News
http://lintouch.org
December 4th, 2003
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Welcome to the third issue of the Lintouch Development Weekly Newsletter.
This is the last issue for this year, and I (as the editor) of this
newsletter would like to wish to all of you merry Christmas and happy new
year 2004.

Transition to pkg-config[1] took place during the last week[2]. On unix it's
quite common when compiling a piece of software to have all the dependencies
resolved automatically, i.e., if your software depends on library A, the
configuration process of your software is able to determine whether you have
library A installed, whether it does have the right version, where it is
installed, etc. Though this configuration process is well managed using
autoconf[3] and automake, one must usually invest quite some effort to
provide detection macros for its own software. That's the area where
pkg-config helps and we are proud to use it as the default detection
mechanism for all lintouch libraries.

    1. http://freshmeat.net/projects/pkgconfig/
    2. http://lintouch.org/pipermail/lintouch-dev/2003-December/000251.html
    3. http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/

New stable releases for swaloun-framework[4], libwtngio, libwtngfsm,
libwtngvars, libwtngzip and libwtngvfs[5] are available for download. The
most interesting ones are probably libwtngzip and libwtngvfs which provide
uniform access to .zip archive and which are core components for project
loading/saving in our Runtime and Editor implementations.

   4. http://lintouch.org/blog/projects#swaloun
   5. http://lintouch.org/blog/projects/lintouch

Lintouch Server written in Python[6]? Though not documented in a mailing
list, we discussed the possibility to write the Lintouch Server in Python
while merging in timely-critical parts as Python extensions written
in pure C. Basic idea looks cool and from the real point of view we have to
provide swig[7] generated extensions for our basic lowest level libraries
such as libwtngio (BIT, NUMBER and STRING values handling), libwtngvars
(variables defining requested/real value which mimic PLC-like I/O addresses)
and libwtngcp (Lintouch TCP/IP communication protocol flow[8]).

   6. http://www.python.org
   7. http://www.swig.org
   8. http://lintouch.org/cvs/lintouch/docs/specs/lintouch-cp.html

Library of legacy Wintouch templates almost complete. Patrik is now working
on Rectangular and Round skin for Button Template. The features that are
still missing due to incomplete design (work in progress) are the hypertext
capabilities (click-to-open-another-panel) and reaction to IOPin value
changes.

jbar started to profile the ProjectAsyncBuilder[9] to have some real numbers
for huge projects rather sooner than later. However we still lack any
real-world project with lot of panels and templates so he meanwhile used the
dummy project generated automatically using Ruby[10] by Patrik for testing
purposes[11].

    9. cvs:lt.o:lintouch/libraries/libwtngproject/src/ProjectAsyncBuilder.cpp
    10. http://www.ruby-lang.org
    11. cvs:swac.cz:lintouch/scratchpad/template_farm/tests/test-project/

Note that references [9] and [11] point to the CVS managed area where
special developer access (which developers have and know how to use) is
needed.

Since we have the Christmas and holiday time, enjoy your families and
friends and snow and love and don't expect the new issue before the next
year comes. Again any comments, corrections and ideas to be published point
directly to me[0].

    0. mailto:mman at swac.cz.


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