Joe's Nose

Joe’s Nose is back in business … for now …

jrunyans — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:56:35 +0000

Its been a while since I’ve posted, had to take stuff offline because this poor ole laptop (Dell M90) just couldn’t handle the stress and strain of the work tasks it was being asked to perform. With everything that was needed to do the work was installed and running, the hard drive was very full and the memory footprint was over 2.5 GB…..which is bad when you only have 2.0 GB of RAM to begin with. Poor machine was paging like crazy and performance tanked soooo hard, that I would swear my old 486-80 linux machine at home was at least 2x faster.

But HEY!, I’m off the web service oriented project now (YEAH!!…oh.did I type that out loud??) and now over to a different world now. Not sure how much better off that is….but at least its normal development, and its C++, and its on a UNIX platform…well mostly.

Last thing for this post, I learned a few days ago that a friend is moving on to newer (greener??) pastures, so the Nose may seem a bit more runny than usual. I wish him all the best. To you I say

jajmey bIyIntaH ‘ej batlh bIHeghjaj

–JR

in the Spirit

jrunyans — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:50:54 +0000

Ok, I need to gather my limited knowledge of all things Spirit, and thus this post is born.

Spirit is a Recursive Decent Parser and is included in the Boost library
As of Boost 1.36, Boost includes both Spirit 2 and Spirit “classic”
Documentation for Boost, including Spirit, can be found here but appears to only cover the “classic” so far as I can tell
Spirit also has it’s own web resources found here
There is a Spirit 2x available from the Spirit SVN. Information about acquiring the Spirit source via SVN can be found here. Spirit 2 and Spirit 2x documentation are supposedly available from the SVN but are incomplete
Spirit help is available via email list instead of a newsgroup, however you must register here before posting questions to the group. There is also an archive available here

Links of Interest:

Learning Boost::Spirit

jrunyans — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:21:49 +0000

This stuff isn’t easy.

I am not a BNF grammar guy, so far as I can remember I’ve never done grammar parsing of any kind ever. Maybe as part of a class in college, but that was long ago, and I’ve slept since then.

I say that because, in my opinion, I am failing miserably at my Task 2 project. I am woefully out of my element and am having a hard time (for whatever the reason) picking up what I need to know. Among other things, I am having a hard time following along with the Boost::Spirit documentation (for Boost version 1.36 found here). Maybe because all of the cohesive examples seem to center around a ridiculously simple calculator example and more complex topics divert to disjoint code snippets that diverge from anything even remotely familiar, so I stay lost. There isn’t a sense of layered learning, of applying the next level of complexity and power to the previously established example, and from their simple examples I just can’t see how some of the concepts extend to a more complex scenario like, say, parsing the C/C++ language and capturing meaningful data out of it, and all of my guesses have usually been wrong.

All is not lost however. Found some articles at 4thmouse.com which could help my understanding of all this stuff. Plan to review these articles

Boost Spirit Part I (Validating Against a Grammar)
Boost Spirit Part II (Attaching Actions to Your Grammar)
Boost Spirit III (Adding Error Handling)

He’s apparently figuring stuff out, perhaps I’m just stupid.

Imma Bonehead

jrunyans — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:25:15 +0000

Yes, yes, it’s true.

Bjarne Stroustrup’s book “The C++ Programming Language” contains a description of the language grammar in Appendix A. It also seems to be reproduced here.

duh!

Grammar parsing…

jrunyans — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:59:59 +0000

Been a while.

I’ve been able to successfully use the Boost::Spirit library to create some grammar for parsing the function signatures out of a header file. Problem now is handling complex data types.

I found this link to (I think) a bnf style grammar for the C language. Ok, it’s not C++ but its more than I had.

I’ll keep poking around. If I had a BFN, then creating a better Spirit parser will be much easier.

Task2 Metadata decission…

jrunyans — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:28:14 +0000

OK, I need to transfer some earlier thoughts regarding Task2 from that are recorded elsewhere, but that’s another story.

I have the need for the Task2 tool to be able to glean meta data about the library being wrapped by the user. This meta data could be almost anything and I do have the ability to constrain it to what I want. Thinking about it long and hard, I believe I will go with a scheme that is essentially a simplified JavaDoc style. Doing so should allow the possibility of using JavaDoc or Doxygen tools to generate a rich set of documentation pages for the library if it doesn’t already exist. Additionally, the resulting web service could potentially use an HTTP-GET command to fetch the documentation if it were available. How cool would that be?

and more walls…

jrunyans — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:48:46 +0000

Now I find out that the gcc version I have with MinGW/MSYS is over 2 years old. My version is 3.4.5 and current version is 4.3.2 (released 5 weeks ago). I’m beginning to think that my decision to use MinGW/MSYS .vs. Cygwin is the bad choice. However, I am still hung up with the dependency to cygwin.dll that anything build using Cygwin has, not a huge deal, but I want to try and avoid it if possible.

crap.

worms….why did it have to be worms?

jrunyans — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:29:30 +0000

And so it begins…it doesn’t look like the Boost binaries will build under MinGW/MSYS which happens to be the platform base I’m using. I hate to say “I told me so”, but I told me so.

Maybe I can build the libs with Cygwin and use ‘em that way, or maybe just use the Windows version. I’m not entirely sure how the Cygwin shell and the MinGW/MSYS shell differ. I suspect the Windows version of the Boost library won’t work under Cygwin or MinGW/MSYS.

Painting into a corner??

jrunyans — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:49:50 +0000

One of the requirements for this tool I’m suppose to build is that it not rely on 3rd party stuff, well at least in the sense of requiring the user to have a non-standard item pre-installed. The tool can supply its dependencies however.

Why does any of this matter? Because of the “take in a header file” part. The tool needs to parse the header file to pull out defined C methods that the library supports. I’ve got code that seems to be sufficient for simple stuff, however it will not likely stand up to anything complex, such as defined structs and classes within the header, which is perfectly legit content for a header file. Introduce Boost, specifically Boost.Spirit, and the proverbial can-o-worms. From what I’ve been able to read, Boost.Spirit can provide the rich capability I’m looking for, but can I use it?

My current thinking is that it should not be a problem. I’m depending on Boost at the building of the tool stage and not with the building of the results the tool generates, so to say that the tool itself needs the Boost library available on the platform on which the tool is being built should be acceptable.

Maybe.

I’ve not had an opportunity to work with the Boost library before, I’m fairly excited at the opportunity. That, given my luck, probably means that it is a bad decision.

Service is Services…

jrunyans — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:09:36 +0000

OK, I seem to be making good progress on my 4th quarter project tasks of essentially building a tool that, given a header file and library, can automatically roll a web service executable, ready for deployment, with minimal interaction from the user. I actually have a working prototype, atm, but it still needs some cleanup and error checking added, and maybe a few more features and options.

Anyway, got to thinking. If the user rolls a stand alone service then it would seem reasonable that the user will want to deploy the service on a host machine somewhere. Moreover, the user will want to ensure the service is running whenever the host is running and will not necessarily want to have to “restart” the service all the time, much like a Windows service if the host is a Windows box.

Turns out its quite easy to do on Windows and this Microsoft link tells you all about how to do it. Just guessing, but it will probably require admin rights to make the necessary registry adjustments and to actually launch it as a service.