[Xastir-dev] APRS software engineering course update

[Curt, WE7U]

On Sat, 8 May 2010, Jason KG4WSV wrote:

> [update on the "APRS client software engineering project" I brought up
> a few months back]

> We had 7 student teams.  4 teams worked on what was called the "data
> broker"

> 3 teams built a "data viewer"

> Two of the "data brokers" seemed to be fairly solid work.

> The data viewers were interesting.  One uses a package called Marble (
> http://edu.kde.org/marble/ ).

> Another data viewer team chose to implement mapping from the ground
> up: they took a map and projected stations onto it.  The really
> significant thing here (IMO) is that it's quite similar to the way
> xastir builds a display - so much so, that xatir's main map window may
> be easily ported to it.  (yeah, that would still leave us dependent on
> imagemagick and 37 other support packages).

Hah.


> The course instructor is attempting to glue some of the data brokers
> to the data viewers to get a basic but complete app running.  We'll
> see what the sqlite performance looks like when two apps are hitting
> it.

Rgr.


> Threads seemed to be a problem for most of the teams, and advice on Qt
> forums seems to be to avoid threads.  I'm not sure if this is a
> problem with the Qt thread interface, with threads in general, or lack
> of knowledge of threads.

It could also be a lack of knowledge about GUI's with threads...  I
tried a few times to do GUI stuff in more than one thread with Motif
and soon figured out that wasn't going to fly.


> The prof (who was licensed as KJ4SJK during the term) plans to use
> this project again, assuming he's assigned to teach the software
> engineering course again.  We've both learned some things about how to
> spec it to the students this time around.

Very cool!  Always good to see new hams come about.

Now the nitty-gritty:  What license if any where these produced
under, and how would one get their hands on the code?  I have a QT4
book sitting right here and have written a bit of code just to try
out a few things.

Sorry about the slow response.  Doing too much software at work and
not wanting to do much more by the time I get home each night.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.                         <http://www.eskimo.com/~archer>
    APRS:  Where it's at!                    <http://www.xastir.org>
   Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"