Pictures and Code

I got tired again of developing in Windows XP. Since my Vista destroyed itself within a micro second XP was my last hope. I thought it must be possible to code stuffs in Mac OS X Leopard too. I tried installing the old Eclipse 3.2.1 because of the one and only QtClipse Plug-in I knew from old times. I couldn’t find some Eclipse 3.2.1 binary with CDT included for Mac so I downloaded the platform release and installed CDT 3 via software-updates. So far so good. I tried installing QtClipse but without success. So I thought about using KDevelop but I didn’t want to go through all the hassle installing KDE and so on. Using XCode was not a good alternative after various reports about malfunctioning code completion (code sense).

Suddenly I stumbled upon this article about Cmake, Qt4 and XCode on OSX. He pointed to the Qt SDK for Mac (430 Mb). Installed like charm and worked very smoothly without any further configuring or installing. Code completion in QtCreator is at its best. Since I like a few packages from libqxt I downloaded, extracted and installed it.

./configure -no-db
make
make install

Additionally I had to copy

libqxt-0.4/src/gui/qxtwindowsystem.h

from the downloaded source package to

/usr/local/Qxt/include/Qxt/QxtGui

but that’s almost it. The qxt.prf was not deployed into the correct folder, so I had to move it manually to /usr/local/Qt4.5/mkspecs/features/mac. After that I added these 2 lines to my .pro file:

CONFIG += qxt
QXT += core gui

And that’s it. Qt Development in Mac OS is pretty easy and comfortable now. Worked for me.

Coming back to coding Actionscript after a while I noticed that you got to fix more and more bugs over the years of Flash development. Yes there were many limitations with AS1.0 and AS2.0 using Macromedia Flash, MX and CS, but the recent movements in Adobe’s labs make me wonder where they want to go. For example using their mx.rpc packages with flex and AS3.0 gives me a lot of headache. Gladly I stumbled upon the “YAAB – Yet Another Actionscript Blog” and found this article about Remoting with BlazeDS from plain vanilla Actionscript 3 class. He summed up all the workarounds and problems you get when trying to work with Remoting from AS3.0.

At first I tried using Axis2 for remoting. But the recent versions of Axis2 Service Archive Wizard – Eclipse Plug-in and Axis2 Code Generator Wizard – Eclipse Plug-in are buggy at times when you want to achieve very simple tasks. To generate a services.xml and .wsdl file seems to work but stuffing em into some .aar package with the Archive Plug-in results a faulty Service Archive. So there was almost no possibility to change the session scope of the werbservice or access and register remote classes. Switching to BlazeDS gave some advantages. Now I didn’t have to build some .aar package because it just interprets my .class and .jar files. All I had to do now was looking for the right AMFChannel and now I was able to transfer complex Objects in both ways. I just wish I had found the YAAB blog entry a few days earlier.