A technical blog from Daniel Rákos (aka aqnuep)
General
Common pitfalls of iPhone development
May 10th
I haven’t written any posts lately. This is because I dug into iPhone application development and this really consumed most of my spare time. As you may remember, I’ve already mentioned that I would like to start dealing with mobile platforms as a target for my OpenGL related experiments and projects. After Android, this time I got my hands on a Mac mini and took a look at the currently most popular mobile gaming platform. Actually, these initial experiments wouldn’t take that long time if I would have to deal with just a new API and not with a brand new world with its own benefits and drawbacks.
Flexible static analysis for C++ code bases
Mar 2nd
The importance of static code analysis is already a well known thing in the domain of software development. There are plenty of useful and less useful tools for the purpose, especially in the case of C++. However, even if in general the quality of these softwares is adequate they usually suffer from the inability for extending or customizing behavior. Also, a usual problem arises from the fact that the C++ language syntax is overwhelmingly complex and it makes the code parser of any static analysis tool a nightmare. In this article I would like to present a tool called CppDepend that gracefully solves the aforementioned problems primarily focusing on providing an interface that enables 100% adaptability and extensibility for creating customized metrics that are relevant or applicable in a particular domain.
Unit testing OpenGL applications
Feb 22nd
Nowadays comprehensive testing is a must for any software product. However, it isn’t such a general rule when it comes to graphics applications. Many developers face difficulties when they have to test their rendering codes. Manual tests and visual feedback is sometimes satisfactory but if one would like to have automated regression tests usual approaches seem to fail. Even if at first sight unit testing of rendering code doesn’t look really straightforward, in fact it is. OpenGL is not an exception from this rule as well. In this article I would like to briefly present a few methods how to unit test OpenGL rendering code and also present my choice and the reasons behind the decision.
Synchronizable objects for C++
Feb 2nd
Previously I talked about how one can easily take advantage of multiprocessing using OpenMP. Even if the C pragmas introduced by the parallel programming API standard is very straightforward for simple programs, it simply doesn’t fit nicely in a complex C++ application that is built from the ground with the OOP in mind. To smoothly introduce OpenMP into such projects one need higher level constructs that hide the actual implementation details. This is the first article of a series that will try to provide reference implementations of such an abstraction. First, we will start with synchronizable primitives that try to reflect the functionality provided by the “synchronized” statement of Java.
Flawless alternative to SDL
Jan 27th
There was always big need for libraries that provide an abstract interface towards the basic platform specific facilities that are necessary for setting up an execution environment for a particular application. In the OpenGL world one of the first such libraries was GLUT. After a while more and more functionalities were put into these libraries that reflect more or less the requirements of application developers. One such framework is SDL. It seems that SDL is still the most respected one of these and it is preferred by the developer community. However, in this topic I will present an alternative that proved its superiority to me in the last few months…
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Unit testing in C++
Jan 11th
Many people are looking for information about which particular C++ unit testing framework they should use for their project and there are also many articles discuss the topic but few articles talk about mock frameworks which are even more important factor when applying unit testing in practice and they have much greater effect on the productivity when doing test-driven development.
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Manage code yourself
Jan 11th
Those who know me know it well that I am not a big fan of languages which produce managed code. In this article I would like to cover the reasons behind my skepticism. Also I would like to dispel the myths around such languages and try to prove them with facts (we will see how well I manage to achieve this). If you disagree with me, you’ll most probably hate me because of making this post but please, respect my personal point of view.