GSoC 2014 -Porting the Toolkit to Linux and Mac OS

[Meet Pragnesh Shah]

Hello Team BuildmLearn,

 

  I am Meet Shah, Electrical Engineering undergraduate from IIT-Bombay.I am really happy that some of the Ideas that are pushed in for the GSOC 2014 , were the ones that I'd love to solve.It took me a while to have a Insight in the projects and I really liked the Idea of enabling every teacher to implement technology-based learning for his/her class.( I have already recommended it to my ex-teachers).

  My Inclinations for the Projects and respective skills are :

  

      1. Porting the Toolkit to Linux and Mac OS

•    Familiarity
  

• Familiar with Qt on Ubuntu and Windows.
• Presently Working on developing a Debug Interface for our AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) to be participating at ROBOSUB, San Diego(in a team of 6) which is being implemented in Qt (both for Ubuntu and Windows) and involves fetching and processing graphical data formats and displaying the processed results in a lucid manner with additional functionality.
• The Debug Interface was developed earlier on Ubuntu and a modified version is being ported to Windows. So I am familiar enough with porting between two OSes.(I am familiar to the resolution glitches that occur while porting).
• Other Skills : C,C++, ROS, Java, Bash Scripting ,Android, Javascript ,Git, HTML, CSS  etc
• Currently Learning : iOS and Windows Application Development,OpenCV.
• Analysis of the Work
• After enough inspection of the code and the software, I found that porting it to Linux can surely be done and the resolution glitches can also be met with as Qt is quite a flexible framework and the Linux version of the software can also be streamlined to look like the Windows one.
• Porting it to Mac OS can be also done (although I am at a beginner level on Mac OS) as you pointed out that Qt, being a cross-platform UI Framework works on Mac as well. I have been using Mac OS for sometime and it would be great for me to learn the intricacies of Mac as well, keeping in mind the large amount of time that these summers provide me.It would really be great learning experience for me to port it to a relatively new OS.
• Suggestion : When it comes to Operating Systems, a large bunch of them exist and developing or extending our software to each and everyone of them may not be possible ( I agree with you Sir that doing it for Ubuntu(in general Linux) and Mac OS is worth it as they are two widely used OSes). But indeed a Browser Integration of the toolkit using QtWeb should be a great Idea. The major benefit that we can reap from this thing is that running the toolkit on Chrome itself will ensure that the toolkit runs on every system , and other benefits follow(Little to worry about screen resolutions etc).I would love if this Idea of browser integration is accepted and would implement it with great enthusiasm.

Meet P Shah
Department of Electrical Engineering
IIT -Bombay,

India.

[Pankaj Nathani]

Hi Meet,

Thanks for your interest. I would suggest you to have a look at our source code on github, see if you are able to compile it. Make a list of points you would have to fix to do the porting. 

 

• Suggestion : When it comes to Operating Systems, a large bunch of them exist and developing or extending our software to each and everyone of them may not be possible ( I agree with you Sir that doing it for Ubuntu(in general Linux) and Mac OS is worth it as they are two widely used OSes). But indeed a Browser Integration of the toolkit using QtWeb should be a great Idea. The major benefit that we can reap from this thing is that running the toolkit on Chrome itself will ensure that the toolkit runs on every system , and other benefits follow(Little to worry about screen resolutions etc).I would love if this Idea of browser integration is accepted and would implement it with great enthusiasm.

Well, I don't think we would be going the HTML5 way, specially when we are using Qt.. it's already cross-platform - most of the UI would work without fixing anything. Just need to work on the business logic for platform specific stuff, which we would need to do anyway taking the HTML5 approach.