Blogs

Hello readers !
Last week we were at the RMLL (Libre Software Meeting) in France, with François (mmu_man) and Olivier (oco). Haiku has beed holding a booth and giving some talks in this conference for some years now, and it's nice to go and meet people again.

It's been a month and half since the very beginning of the GSoC coding period, and this is my first blog post about Services Kit. In fact, it's quite difficult to write interesting things for both developers and non-developers, I waited to have some materials before writing a report of my work and ... it's time !

If you manage to build complex applications over the original BeOS Network Kit, you will quickly face a major problem. Indeed, if it's a good C++ wrapper of the BSD sockets API, it's only a wrapper, providing useful classes to handle a network link, but no more. Services Kit is here to provide a more complete set of useful classes which will let developers to get rid of internet protocols and to only think of the good part of a web service client application.

The first milestone in this GSoC journey to building a generic file system driver based on Linux kernel code is booting LKL (Linux Kernel Library) inside Haiku.

For the short attention span: it works :)

...
KERN: KDiskDeviceManager::_AddDiskSystem() done: No error
KERN: file system: file_systems/iso9660/v1
KERN: KDiskDeviceManager::_AddDiskSystem(file_systems/iso9660/v1)
KERN: KDiskDeviceManager::_AddDiskSystem() done: No error
KERN: lklhaikufs: unhandled pheader type 0x4
KERN: file system: file_systems/lklhaikufs/v1
KERN: KDiskDeviceManager::_AddDiskSystem(file_systems/lklhaikufs/v1)
KERN: khaiku_env_timer:: LKL_TIMER_INIT
KERN: [lkl-console] Linux version 2.6.29 (gringo@lethe) (gcc version 4.4.4 (GCC) ) #10 Fri Jun 18 14:45:38 EEST 2010
KERN: [lkl-console] Built 1 zonelists in Zone order, mobility grouping on.  Total pages: 16256
KERN: [lkl-console] Kernel command line: 
KERN: [lkl-console] lkl: IRQs initialized
KERN: [lkl-console] PID hash table entries: 256 (order: 8, 1024 bytes)
KERN: [lkl-console] lkl: timer initialized
KERN: [lkl-console] Dentry cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 3, 32768 bytes)
KERN: [lkl-console] Inode-cache hash table entries: 4096 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)
KERN: [lkl-console] Memory available: 64900k/65536k RAM, (862k kernel code, 270k data)
KERN: [lkl-console] Mount-cache hash table entries: 512
KERN: [lkl-console] bio: create slab <bio-0> at 0
KERN: [lkl-console] io scheduler noop registered (default)
KERN: [lkl-console] lkl: syscall interface initialized
KERN: [lkl-console] console [lkl_console0] enabled
KERN: [lkl-console] Warning: unable to open an initial console.
KERN: [lkl-console] Switched to NOHz mode on CPU #0
KERN: [lkl-console] System halted.
KERN: khaiku_env_timer:: LKL_TIMER_SHUTDOWN
KERN: [lkl-console] lkl: IRQs freed
KERN: lkl: halt user callback called
KERN: KDiskDeviceManager::_AddDiskSystem() done: No error
KERN: file system: file_systems/nfs/v1
KERN: KDiskDeviceManager::_AddDiskSystem(file_systems/nfs/v1)
...

This lesson finishes up the project that the last two have been about: HaikuFortune, a program which randomly chooses and displays a fortune in a window. It's not a very complicated one, but it exemplifies a reasonably well-coded real-world project. Although it was code complete as of the end of Lesson 22, it was not finished, missing icons and other resources. This concludes the project with adding resources, a basic discussion on source code licensing, and packaging a program for Haiku.

Learning to Program With Haiku, Lesson 23

This also concludes the Learning to Program With Haiku lesson series. It's been a good run. Rest assured, though, that this is not the last lesson on Haiku programming that I will write. This series has been intended to turn a motivated power user into a developer using Haiku. It's been a lot of fun and many people have encouraged me with their kind words regarding it.

Later this summer I will start another yet-to-be-named series which will continue where Learning to Program With Haiku is leaving off and introduce novice and intermediate developers to real coding specifically for Haiku and its nuances, such as multithreaded programming, add-on coding, queries and attributes, Tracker and more.

In the mean time, I am working on revising the lessons into a complete book available for a reasonable price in dead tree and possibly e-book format. These PDF lessons will continue to be freely available and redistributable. More details to come soon.