Gregory Haynes' Weblog - Libinfinitymm

Kollaborative Editing in (K)Ubuntu

nospam@example.com (Gregory Haynes) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:53:28 -0500

In the (somewhat) recent release of Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10), Kobby Beta 3 is available to all users via apt (Horray!). For those who do not know about Kobby, it is a collaborative editor built using libinfinity, allowing it to be protocol compatible with the GTK based Gobby editor.

For those who do know about Kobby you may have noticed the lack of development progress in the past couple months. This is a result of my college workload being above normal for the past semester. With the end of year approaching and a new semester I would really like to try and give collaborative editing the push into the public spotlight I think it needs. A 1.0 release of the editor would help this greatly, but before this can happen the project is in need of some brave crash-testers. Beta releases of Koby have been available for several months, but little more than a handful of bugs have been found since then. This means there must be a whole lot of bugs still waiting to be found so please - break Kobby and tell us how you did it! Hopefully KDE land can fill the bug queue enough to keep me busy over the new year holidays coming up.

If you're looking to get up and running quickly, I have created a public server you can use at infinote.greghaynes.net.

Libqinfinity: A portable/lightweight Qt interface to Libinfinity

nospam@example.com (Gregory Haynes) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:18:08 -0500

For those who do not know, Libinfinity is an extensible collaborative editing library and is the core of the collaborative editor Gobby as well as my recent project to create a KDE counterpart: Kobby. In order to use this library in a C++/Qt environment I created Libinfinitymm and Libqinfinitymm this past summer which wrap Libinfinity's GObjects, and add some code for use with the Qt event system. While these libraries do what they need to, they are far heavier of a dependancy than they probably should be. It would be a nightmare to port them to non *nix platforms in the future due to the use of code generation in Libinfinitymm. As a result, when I began work on updating Libinfinitymm to work with the latest Libinfinity I decided to give writing a pure C++/Qt interface for the Libinfinity a try. So far, things have turned out much better than expected, and I can say with almost absolute certainty that I will be switching Kobby to make use of this new Library in the next couple of days.

I have noticed interest recently from several projects pertaining to implementing Libinfinity in a Qt environment, and I highly suggest anyone considering doing this give Libqinfinity a look. Unlike its predecessor, it has a very simplistic design and does not try to hide access to the Libinfinity interface underneath. It also depends only on Libinfinity and Qt, and uses CMake for building so you should not lose out on portability by chosing to use it. Although it is still being developed, all of the core features which are needed for interacting with an infinote server are complete.

Edit: It's been pointed out to me that the code generation used in Libinfinitymm (and Glibmm) is not a portability issue as I mentioned.

Wrapping libinfinity

nospam@example.com (Gregory Haynes) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:00:45 -0400

This week I have been working on creating a C++ wrapper for libinfinity. The library uses a gobject API and is very extensible, so ditching it in favor of a non-glib library would be a real waste. Luckily, there are tools like gmmproc (an internal glibmm tool) which auto-generates the C++ classes to wrap gobject based libraries, given that you don't mind using the gtkmm source code as your documentation. Aside from having a fun time dissecting various libraries to figure out how to use gmmproc, the application is absolutely awesome. The tool reads from definition files (which can also be auto-generated from other glibmm/pygtk tools) which store data on the library's object names, their member functions, parameters, etc. and parses .hg and .ccg files which contain C++ code with macros (such as _WRAP_METHOD) into source files which are fed to the compiler. Some documentation can be found in the gtkmm book: http://www.gtkmm.org/docs/gtkmm-2.4/docs/tutorial/html/chapter-wrapping-c-libraries.html. After getting the hang of the tool usage, wrapping the library is a breeze, so a usable version will be on its way very soon.