Research, Research, Research!

Unfortunately, not much in the way of source code development in the last week. When I decided to switch to Glade to design the UI, that naturally required a lot of reading to bring me up to speed. Unfortunately, Glade is not well documented, and the documentation for using it with Perl is even worse. So, after some time of reading some sporadic, and often ancient, blog posts from geeks around the world, I decided to switch to something more uniform.

Joe Dougherty, a fellow RCOS member, spends a lot of time hyping Qt. As it turns out, with good reason. It's kind of a lot like Glade, with a drag and drop widget style interface, except all the documentation is one place, and it's actually good. So I'm going to play around with it and see what it produces.

Of course, Qt is an interface for C++ programs. So, the obvious question is, how does this affect (effect?) the work I've done in Perl already? Well, the answer to that question is, it doesn't, really. The Perl scripts interface directly with the Cisco routers to run their function and then terminate. So the Qt application will handle the user interaction events, and if the user wishes to execute one of Perl scripts, (for example, to save configurations) this can be called by going to File->Save, for example. The cool thing is that since Perl itself is basically one big C program, it is easy to call a Perl function from C. If Qt does prove to work out, I may invest some time in porting the Perl functions to C++. But that's a ways in the future at this point.

So I'm a little bit behind already (ugh!) but I'm looking forward to taking the long weekend to work on this and get back on to my schedule.

Also, I have improved the speed of the restore function (which loads configurations from a text file into the 11 devices) to the point where it is actually faster than a human manually performing the same task. Booyah!!