Zac Bowling’s Blog

It has been a long time since I posted a real blog entry in a while on what I’ve been doing so here goes…

• GtkEmbedMoz + Gecko# for WIN32 -

  The patch is making its way into the Mozilla tree that makes this work and it might make it into the official upcoming Mozilla Suite 1.8 release (cross your fingers). Right now you can find the beta versions of the dlls required to make it work, a custom GRE (even though I have tested it with the official Mozilla 1.7.3 and 1.7.5 build, the official versions have a few bugs like disappearing scroll bars and control focus issues on web forms) and my patches to build yourself. The Gecko# dll is up there as well and I’m committing my fixes into the SVN later on to Gecko# so we should have this in the next WIN32 installer

• Monodoc using Gecko# and working on WIN32 -

  Miguel and Paco talked about it a little before. It’s nothing really to write home about except it brings it to Windows. I have the patch for using Gecko# instead of GtkHTML (which doesn’t work on WIN32) here if you want to play and a screenshot can be seen here.

• Tomboy on WIN32 -

  I got bored and decided to have some fun, so I ported Tomboy to WIN32. It was pretty easy. It only took me about 30 minutes. I think it really shows that rapid application cross platform development is really something that Mono can offer.
  

• SNMP.NET -

  I have a fully working lightweight SNMP library for .NET that I wrote using references from a few networking books I have. I included two little sample apps as well that can query a devices id and uptime and the other one can query for that machines MAC address. Provided of course you query an SNMP device that you have its community name for. Most routers and any *nix flavor box running an SNMP server. I don’t have any M.I.B. support so you have to use the UID directly to make this work. M.I.B. translation is a bit more work then I pulled off in the 250 lines of code in this. It uses pure sockets provided by System.Net so it works on Win32, Linux and Mac OSX I know for sure. Get it here: http://polystimulus.com/snmp.zip. (Side-note: I do have a fully library that does have full M.I.B. support written by this guy in England but its very complex and very resource intensive but it provides the ability to host SNMP, but it doesn’t currently work in Mono yet.)

• PHP&GTK - PHP & Mono & GTK#/SWF -

  I’ve been toying with this idea a bit and had some great success with it. It’s the one idea that when I mention it, people seem to always say, “I don’t know whether to be sick or socked and amazed.” I know a lot of people have tried and used PHP-GTK. You basically run PHP as a runtime on the client side and use it make GUI apps with GTK as the interface. Applications like Nova (a gnutella client for WIN32) do this and pull it off really quite well. The biggest issues though is that PHP+GTK is very slow on development and stuck in gtk 1.x right now and it doesn’t have a lot of interest as it started as more of a proof of concept. Part of the issue is that if you use it to wrap your existing code, you couldn’t render HTML in anyway so everything has to be rewritten with GTK.

  Well I have a much cooler solution. Thanks to the classes in PHP that allow you to load and access .NET/Mono assemblies in PHP, it is possible to take PHP, run it as a runtime, and call SWF/MWF or GTK# for your interface. Then thanks to Gecko# and GtkHTML you can render basic things like your tables and css styles inside your app without rewriting. Nothing working well enough to post about it.

Well that just about sums it all up. I’m also looking for a job if anyone is hiring in the Dallas area.

Tags: Linux, Mono & .NET, Personal

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 26th, 2005 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.