Releases Galore!

It would be negligent of me if I did not point out that today several important software releases were made:

The first is the project formerly known as project greenhouse - now known as Qt Creator. I've blogged about this before. You can now download a technical preview. I'm very excited about this - having played with it in it's beta state I can't wait to use it with some of my active projects. Unfortunately I won't be doing any coding this weekend, as I'm off to Switzerland for a long weekend. I'll have to try it out when I get back.

The second big release event today is the Ubuntu family of distributions. That's right, version 8.10 is out now. I'm a kubuntu man myself, so I'll be trying this out after my long weekend as well.

That's all from me - I have several projects in the wings to blog about in the coming weeks, but for now I need to catch some sleep - my taxi arrives at 5:00 AM tomorrow.

Cheers,

VMWare Server 2: Worse Than Failure

OK, so this is hardly breaking news, but I thought I'd share this mini-rant with you now any way.

At work We deal with multiple operating systems (WinXP, Vista, Linux), and multiple programming environments. A few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and do all my development work inside virtual machines. The advantage of this approach is that it's very fast to switch from one environment to another (much faster than a whole machine reboot).

There are two problems with this approach:

1. Performance. Programming is a pretty CPU-intensive task. Well, compiling the code is anyway. Compiling our code base takes around an hour on a physical machine with top-of-the-line specs (this makes compiling the Linux kernel seem fast). On a virtual machine, that time doubles. This is an inescapable truth about software virtualization: there will always be some overhead.
2. Hardware. The applications I program need access to physical hardware, over a variety of interfaces, including RS232, RS422, USB, Parallel, TCP/IP, UDP/IP and a few others besides. Any software virtualization package must be able to forward all these hardware interfaces through to the virtual machine.

In my experience, the only software virtualization package that meets requirement 2 is VMWare. I know I've raved about Virtualbox before, and I was very tempted to use it again now, but it lacks the hardware support I need.

So, VMWare Server it is then. The next question then becomes: which version? I've used version 1.x before, and it fulfilled all my needs at the time. However, I noticed that version 2 is now available. I thought "In software, bigger numbers are better, right?"

After downloading the sevrer, and registerring for a free license key, I spent a busy 30 minutes clicking through the ubiquitous license agreements and installation options (does anyone ever read these things?). Everything was installed. I went to fire the application up, only to have it launch Mozilla Firefox. What's going on here? Then it hit me: a wave of fear and horror. What were they thinking?

The managment interface for VMWare Server 2 is web based.

That's right... you want to use your virtual machine? You need to run a web browser. The interface is slow, the browser plugin that supports the interface is buggy... I could go on, but some other people have detailed the problems with the software far better than I ever could (Yes, I realise that link is talking about the beta release. Trust me, nothing much has changed).

Maybe I'm missing something, some gold nugget of understanding that would make Server 2 more usable for me, but right now I just don't get it. Why would you decide that the primary interface to a virtual machine should reside inside a browser? Browsers are notorious for implementing different standards, being generally slow, memory-hogging apps that occaisonally crash. Who in their right mind would want to use a browser for their virtual machines?


Until then, I'll stick with VMWare server 1, thank you very much.

It's true: Qt Developer Days Rock!

Well, I'm back. I arrived home at 1:30 AM this morning. Qt Software's "Developer Days" conference was simply brilliant. On top of the many technical talks (I'll digest them and use them as inspiration for new posts here over the next few weeks), it was a great chance to meet other Qt developers, and the trolls themselves.

There's a lot of stuff to talk about - more than I can do justice in one post. I will quickly mention Project Greenhouse, the new IDE that should be released as alpha software in the next few weeks. Details are sketchy, but the following points are probably all correct:

• "Project Greenhouse" is the development title - it may chance before release.
• The IDE is aimed at creating a truly cross-platform development environment.
• Uses GCC / GDB to compile / debug code.
• Includes nice editor features like code folding, syntax highlighting, auto-completion etc.
• It's been touted as a "replacement for Vi/Emacs" - although this is misleading - as I understand it no one is going to create a Vi clone editor in the IDE. It's a replacement in the sense that you will no longer need to use Vi in order to edit your code under Linux.
  

One point the trolls were very insistent upon was that they're not trying to replace Visual Studio, Eclipse, KDevelop, or XCode. Those IDEs have a great many features, whereas PG intends to deliver a core set of features - just enough to make Qt development a breeze across multiple platforms.

At least, that's my interpretation of the project. There's been lots of speculation across the internet and on the Qt-interest mailing list about the project, so we may have to wait and see.

TT Dev Days: Here I come!

Just thought I'd let you all know that I'll be attending the Trolltech Developer Days in Munich, Germany. I'm not taking my laptop, so I probably won't update this site while I'm there (not that you'd notice a change in activity levels, right?), but I hope to provide a few details once I get back.


Until then, keep coding!