Poco++
I mentioned a ${NEWJOB} in my last post. I've moved back to the embedded world, and back into the networking world, and this job is going to be a lot more flexible than what I've been doing for the past 6 years. It is dragging up some old, fond memories, which makes me smile. One of those old, fond memories is the Poco C++ components library.
For those who are not familiar with it, Poco is a library of object classes that makes writing things like network servers in C++ much easier. For those who know the C++ world, you can think of Poco as being like Boost without the incredible overhead of Boost. It's even distributed under the Boost license. Yay for license reuse.
Since I'm going to be using Poco professionally for the first time in 6 years, the first thing I did was check to see if the FreeBSD port was up to date. Of course it wasn't, because I hadn't touched it in quite some time. I also found the port did some rather silly things, like not using the FreeBSD configuration profile provided by Poco (or more properly it let the configuration discover it's being built on FreeBSD, rather than telling it up-front), and building the test suite and the sample programs by default. So I fixed all those and updated the port. I also fixed the poco-ssl port to build with either unixODBC or iODBC, and made the build of each of the database components optional. If you are a Poco user, these upgrades should help. If you're a C++ programmer who isn't a Poco user, you should definitely run (not walk) to the Poco website and have a look around.
The target environment for work is Debian Linux, but as always so much of what we do is very portable, so I'll continue to do a lot of my exploratory work on my little FreeBSD eeeBox. And perhaps to keep a couple of the ports I'll be relying on up to date. Expect to hear more about some of these adventures, along with some code, in the near future.
Oh, do I actually need to mention where Poco is found? I thought not; I'm sure that you, my gentle readers, are perfectly capable of using a search engine without my holding your hand.
For those who are not familiar with it, Poco is a library of object classes that makes writing things like network servers in C++ much easier. For those who know the C++ world, you can think of Poco as being like Boost without the incredible overhead of Boost. It's even distributed under the Boost license. Yay for license reuse.
Since I'm going to be using Poco professionally for the first time in 6 years, the first thing I did was check to see if the FreeBSD port was up to date. Of course it wasn't, because I hadn't touched it in quite some time. I also found the port did some rather silly things, like not using the FreeBSD configuration profile provided by Poco (or more properly it let the configuration discover it's being built on FreeBSD, rather than telling it up-front), and building the test suite and the sample programs by default. So I fixed all those and updated the port. I also fixed the poco-ssl port to build with either unixODBC or iODBC, and made the build of each of the database components optional. If you are a Poco user, these upgrades should help. If you're a C++ programmer who isn't a Poco user, you should definitely run (not walk) to the Poco website and have a look around.
The target environment for work is Debian Linux, but as always so much of what we do is very portable, so I'll continue to do a lot of my exploratory work on my little FreeBSD eeeBox. And perhaps to keep a couple of the ports I'll be relying on up to date. Expect to hear more about some of these adventures, along with some code, in the near future.
Oh, do I actually need to mention where Poco is found? I thought not; I'm sure that you, my gentle readers, are perfectly capable of using a search engine without my holding your hand.
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