blackcoot - Slashdot User

+ - Advice / suggestions on Windows Build Environments 0

Submitted by blackcoot on Wednesday April 14, 2010 @07:42PM

blackcoot writes "I find myself faced with the unenviable position of needing to port a lot of heritage C / C++ code developed using a mishmash of external and internal dependencies to Windows. The objectives of the port are:

1) Allow our Windows devs to work comfortably in Visual Studio (support for other IDEs is desirable but not a requirement)
2) Minimally painful support for the Platform SDK / Windows SDK
3) Minimally painful support for other SDKs (specifically, Boost and VXL)
4) Support cross platform development with the native tool kits. This can either be done in a qmake / automake style, where platform specific build files are automatically generated or fully integrated a la SCons
5) Allow building independent modules in an independent fashion so that we can cherry-pick dependencies

So here I am, I turning to the /. community: what has worked for you as a build system under Windows? What hasn't worked? What important lessons did you learn along the way?"

+ - Web services in C++? 0

Submitted by blackcoot on Monday November 03, 2008 @12:32PM

blackcoot writes "I find myself between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, I have fairly hard requirements on my new project to expose some capabilities through web services as an attempt to make it easier for us to integrate into a larger system. On the other hand, there is extreme resistance from management to use any language other than C++ because, well, a) that's what they grok, b) everyone in this project group is already fluent, c) switching to any other language would involve a spin-up time that they view as a major risk. We've been committed to Linux as a deployment platform, so unfortunately managed C++ with .Net is not an option.

I would like to quantify exactly how painful doing web services in C++ is going to be and what the pain differential versus using Java for infrastructure would be (feel free to substitute your language of choice if it runs under Linux, has good and cheap WS/SOA support, and the C/C++ bindings are easy to work with). Specifically, I would like to know:

1) Have any Slashdotters actually built web-services in C++ and, if so, what were your experiences? (I'm particularly interested in stateful services)
2) What toolkits did you use? Apache Axis2 C++ seems to be pretty much the only C++ WS package that I've been able to find other than an Intel package which seems to focus more on being a SOA bus from what I can tell.
3) For those who have built web services in both C++ and Java, could you compare / contrast the experience? I'm particularly interested in tool support, ease of administering development environments, and pitfalls.
4) Has anyone built Java web services using JNI under the hood? Any major gotchas I should know about?

Thanks!"

+ - Advice on recruiting

Submitted by blackcoot on Friday October 06, 2006 @01:11AM

blackcoot writes "I work at a small research and development firm that specializes in doing the sorts of things that lots of people only get to dream about — building autonomous robots. Because primary focus is autonomous robotic systems, we are almost always in need of people with backgrounds in control, machine perception, signal processing, and the other disciplines which are generally required to build and test these kinds of machines. We're not finding enough people with suitable backgrounds and as a result we're pretty understaffed. I was wondering if any folks out there had suggestions on strategies for dealing with recruiting people with fairly niche backgrounds."