I'm creating several NSIS installers and as my expertise in this thing grows up I'm no longer happy with just making things work, I would like to see if there are some best practices or coding standards around this language, like how to write conditionals, variable names, unistallers, etc..
As far as I know, there is no specific coding standard for NSIS available -- but there are a lot of tutorials and examples to learn from. As with every other language you're trying to master, I think reading other's code helps a lot and inspires you to think in different directions.
From my own experience with NSIS, I can also suggest to tidy up your installer scripts regularly. As you learn new things, old workarounds become obsolete and can be replaced by proper solutions. Also watch out for new developments. Before we were able to use nsDialogs, InstallOptions was the way to go when it came to user-defined dialogs -- and now it's so much easier to do with less code.
Since you're aiming at creating several installers, I'd also try to reuse as much code as possible in the different installers. Modularising shared functionality is possible with .nsh files and fosters a good and clean code base.
Related
I need to create a custom GUI framework for a project. I actually created a very primitive GUI framework which has buttons, images, text etc. But it is pretty simple and I don't have any prior knowledge of designing a GUI framework. The project we are working on got a little serious and I need to do a better job. So, what books or any kind of documentation can you recommend for me?
Note: I want to create the framework probably in an object-oriented way and I will probably use C# but the documentation does not need to be in C#.
Ok, I'm far from an expert but I'll try to write some useful stuff. I don't know much about your experience, so sorry if it seems silly.
I have been working with several GUI frameworks in the past, in various languages (wxpython, gtk+, swing, . . .).
Never as an expert, but here is what I can say :
Keep it simple. If you want to design from scratch, I guess there is no need for crazy complex stuff. Try to keep it as straightforward as possible by reducing the number of inputs and options in your elements.
b. A major common point of all the successful frameworks I know is the abstraction. Each single element can be easily handled, but it still has the power of all its parents.
This allows your objects to be really versatile while simple.
Read lots of other frameworks documentation. I like spending time reading the doc of GUI framework because it helps you understand the abstraction levels. I find the pygtk doc easy to read.
Use other frameworks. Most frameworks do things more or less in the same way. This is especially true for GUI frameworks. Frame containing layouts; menubars and statusbars; I bet 95% of the concepts you want to use can be found in the other frameworks.
In this way, the best way to know how to develop it is to know what you need and how to do it.
Whenever I work on a GUI, I start reading the corresponding series of articles here .
The writer does a great job explaining everything in a simple way, so that you can get along fast with the concepts.
Keep it open. Something I see more and more often is the use of high level syntax for describing GUIS. GTk for example can take XML files in input and create a whole interface out of it. I find it very nice for abstraction, and reuse. And I also greatly reduce the amount of code needed.
I couldn't really find books on the precise subject you want. I think you already searched on the web also.
I hope those small ideas will help you.
I'm sitting here writing a function that I'm positive has been written before, somewhere on earth. It's just too common to have not been attempted, and I'm wondering why I can't just go to a website and search for a function that I can then copy and paste into my project in 2 seconds, instead of wasting my day reinventing the wheel.
Sure there are certain libraries you can use, but where do you find these libraries and when they are absent, is there a site like I'm describing?
Possibly a wiki of some type that contains free code that anybody can edit and improve?
Edit: I can code things fine, I just don't know HOW to do them. So for example, right now, I'm trying to localize a robot/car/point in space. I KNOW there is a way to do it, just based off of range and distance. Triangulation and Trilateration. How to code that is a different story. A site that could have psuedo code, step by step how to do that would be ridiculously helpful. It would also ensure the optimal solution since everybody can edit it. I'm also writing in Matlab, which I hate because it's quirky, adding to my desire for creating a website like I describe.
StackOverflow.com. No, I'm not joking.
At its best, people come here saying "hasn't some library done X already", and very often the Collective Wisdom answers "yes". But the biggest obstacle is lack of a description language: even here, a big problem for many posters is describing the problem clearly enough for others to recognize it as something they've seen before.
And if people can't understand what you're trying to do, no search engine will.
Firstly, two caveats:
Copy and pasting code you don't understand is a bad idea. Make sure you understand exactly what the code does before you use it.
Make sure you respect the license of the code you are copying. This is important!
Those caveats aside, it's often language dependent. Languages with an open development ethos (not just an open source implementation, think Python as compared to Java) tend to have official archives of open source libraries. For example:
Perl (which probably started this trend) has CPAN
Python has PyPI and Python Cookbook
PHP has PEAR
C++ has boost
Ruby has gems
R has CRAN.
Haskell has Hoogle and Hackage
Furthermore, don't forget to look in your languages standard library. Some modern languages have massive standard libraries, which have often contained the functionality I am looking for:
Java has its API documentation
C# and VB.NET have the massive MSDN
Non-openly developed languages often have non-official community archives. For example:
C# tends to have a lot of code at CodePlex and CodeProject
MATLAB has the Matlab Central File Exchange
A third category of sites are language agnostic. They are often best search through POG (plain old-fashioned Google). For example:
Stack Overflow
SourceForge
The confusingly language agnostic Java2s
Planet source code
Github
Finally, a fourth category of sites that I find increasingly useful are source-code search engines:
Google Codesearch
Koders
You may also be able to find useful source code, or at least get help writing something, through various pastebins.
Pastebin is language-agnostic
HPaste is mostly Haskell, but has a little in other languages.
Often, at the end of the day it is easiest just to google it, though.
There is a wiki that contains free code that anybody can edit and improve:
Rosetta Code.
As a means of an overview there is the "Solutions by Programming Task" page.
From the former page:
"Rosetta Code is a programming chrestomathy site. The
idea is to present solutions to the same task in as
many different languages as possible, to demonstrate
how languages are similar and different, and to aid a
person with a grounding in one approach to a problem
in learning another."
Cutting and pasting code you find on the Internet into production code would be like chewing gum found in the street. - Mike Johnson
With that in mind, try sites that host opensource projects like GitHub, CodePlex, code.google.com, etc.
I'm not sure this question is language agnostic, but I use GitHub this way ;) Other languages may have places where this is possible.
Safari Bookshelf from O'Reilly has many, many books that contain many implementations from which to choose.
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/
I was a subscriber for a few years before coming to my current job, where we have a corporate account! It's one of the best perks, and one of the best resources I have available. I haven't bought a computer book in years.
Aside from sites like this (Stack Overflow) I don't think there's many, maybe CodePlex, but I almost marked you -1 for assuming that code found on the Internet is yours to copy.
I'd suggest reading about software licencing, I hope you'd at least comment where you got it from.
What forces are at work keeping crufty old Make (with or without makefile generator tools) prominent as a build tool? Is it deficiencies in alternatives that keep them from being widely adopted, or insufficient publicity, or does something about Make keep it in place?
Despite Make's many weaknesses and difficulties dealing with large projects
(e.g. see http://freshmeat.net/articles/what-is-wrong-with-make) it appears to still be more widely used than newer, improved alternatives such as Scons, Jam, Rake, Cook, and others.
Are there measurable benefits to the alternatives, or are the "market shares" due mostly to opinion and experience of team leaders?
Ubiquity: I like Make because I can trust it will be available where I need it i.e. installed or easily installable on the target machine.
It's widely available, well documented, concise and powerful + best of all - no XML!.
I've been using it for close to 15 years and still haven't found something better. The coolest thing I've done with it is to have a master makefile generate makefiles for sub projects on-the-fly.
Regarding your question, which forces are keeping make alive ...its the force of habit.
simplicity - easy to do simple things
ubiquity - some version is on your system
speed - fast enough for most things
expressive - pretty good match to the job
nonobvious complexity - mainly large projects expose problems
It's availability on a large number of platforms probably helps. If writing a product for multiple platforms, knowing it will always be there is a plus point. It's a pain to have to port your build tool to a new platform before you can build your own project.
Hm, I never used make as a build system.
Other than that, it's a unique dataflow-programming language, where you can describe set of nodes, each serving specific purpose, describe their behavior, and let the manager handle and control the data flow between them.
We used scons on a relatively large project to replace make, and found that it was a reasonably flexible system, that allowed us to do some very necessary (but very unfortunate) hacking to get things to build the way we needed them to. Also, make is -strange-.
i think what would have to occur to see a big shift to another tool, is 1st the tool would have to be created.... that is significantly better. and to affect change, either one of the linux distros or one of the major packages would have to switch to it and probably keep the old one arround for compatibility. i would envision that the new build tool would be capable of generating the legacy makefiles. linux already demonstrated how well he can solve the source code control system with git. i have a pretty good hunch he could come up with something pretty cool and tie in with git.
What real-world projects would you suggest looking through the sources?
As I'm learning Java Swing, mucommander seems to be a decent example. The code is excessively commented though.
EDIT: No shameless plugs plz :).
I learned a lot from looking at the source code to GoGrinder. It's well thought out, uses MVC correctly, and the comments are helpful (and no, I didn't write it). It's also a fun program to use if you want to learn how to play Go.
For Gui design, Patterns and general good advice I highly reccomend Jeremey Miller's series of articles on building a better CAB. For C#, but equally applicable to Java. Also using
the MVC style which Stackoverflow follows, and Apple uses for Interface Builder.
Build your own CAB
Jeremy's articles/ideas are followed in his own project, which you can download and inspect at http://storyteller.tigris.org/
Take a look at the Windows version of truecrypt. It is one of the best organized open source projects I've ever seen. You can almost tell how the whole thing works just from the directory and file layout.
What I've done to learn some new technologies over the years is to look to open source projects that both match the criteria you're looking for and also interest you.
I'm not a Swing guy, but I'd suggest finding a project that uses Java Swing, does not appear too complicated, and then start digging through the source. The nice thing is you can then see the app before you start poking through it, and then you can see what happens as you change stuff.
The idea behind picking something that interests you is that it will keep you engaged. I am intrigued by content management systems, so I might download a CMS that I can then see how stuff works, and I'm engaged because the problem domain of the project fits in with an interest.
I've done this once or twice when I had to get up to speed on C# and I think it works will. YMMV....
Some of the most well thought out source code ( c++ ) I have seen in an open source project is the Ogre3D graphics engine, I've learned a lot about OOA&D just by looking at the structure and reading the comments. It is also well maintained and the community is very active.. http://ogre3d.org
I have a build process for a large enterprise system comprising several dozen separate EXEs and DLLs. These use multiple languages, C, C++, Fortran, Python, Awk and a couple more. The build scripts are 4DOS batch processes which evolved over 4 decades. They are large and unwieldy and need constant care and feeding.
I must keep the Visual Studio solution and project files as the basic compile/link entities. What's the best tool for wrapping these disparate languages all together. 4DOS is very old and cumbersome.
EDIT:
Thanks gang. I think I'll try SCONS first because it's Python. We have plenty of people well versed in Python to be able to update and maintain it. I'm 61 now and it's not going to be me supporting this in the long term. I don't like anything requiring JAVA or XML because those are not languages already in our product mix and we have enough in play.
Those blog posts were good. He concluded that SCONS was best but simply too slow for his purposes. I'm not looking for speed in nightly builds. It's got until 7 AM. I want readability and maintainability.
For example Apache Ant
Ant is a good choice. I would also be tempted to try Rake.
I think the best choice is NAnt and MSBulid
Scons perhaps?
These may be a little a outdated - the build systems might have evolved quite a bit, but this should at least give you a better idea on what to expect:
The Quest for the Perfect Build System
The Quest for the Perfect Build System (Part 2)
Personally, I never needed anything special, that couldn't be achieved with VS project/solution files, makefile's and BATCH'es, so I won't be recommending anything in particular.
Scons definitely. It plays with fortran and C naturally, and it is python based so it shouldn't have any problem with that one either (never used it for py though, so can't tell from experience). Also, much more readable than the majority of them out there.
I know Maven isn't known to focus on anything but Java, but perhaps it might at least be worth mentioning. There have been some work towards enabling at least C/C++. When comparing to Ant, it's pluggable in a similar fashion, but it's declarative rather than imperative, with standardized dependency management, and a build result repository which may even be distributed.
ANT + terp for the C++ portions. terp plays nicely with VisualStudio as well as with many other C++ compilers on many platforms. ANT requires Java though, if only as the hosting technology. I don't know whether that is a no-no with your requirements or whether you just don't want to start writing Java code.