Progress Report

The progress report has been submitted (unfortunately a litte late) to my supervisor containing all the information about where I am currently up to. Once reviewed I will get the green sheet signed and submit the hard copy to the UPO, hopefully tomorrow.

Ok,

Yes it has been a while since I've last updated the journal so this post might be a little large. There has been a lot of work going on.

PHP

I have PHP working with Apache on my development environment now. This was more difficult than it appeared it would be as the first time I made some fundamental setup errors. Second time round it worked well.

gSOAP

C++ Web server is exposing SOAP functions as a stand along application, though it should also work through Apache if I require more security.

Requirements and High Level Design

These documents are all but finished in their content. I have started on the Low Level Design and also beginning to determine what is to be included in each build step of the application development.

From here

The next step is to get PHP working with SOAP and then get my PHP applicaiton to talk to my gSOAP application. At this stage my entire technology assessment is completed and I can focus on developing the solution and finishing the Detailed Design Document.

Requirements Definition

I have started the requirements specification phase of the project and intend on getting it finished by mid next week so I can start the design more effectively. At this stage the rough requirements have been drawn up from the research report and I am starting the informal analysis. Considering that I am myself the client of this project the requirement clarification should be quite easy as I do not have to wait for a client when preparing.

I need to start coding soon and to do that I need my design documents. I had a look at these but realise that there is no way I can start until I have finished the analysis phase of the project and my requirements are complete.

jsmtp

The source woudl not build as per instructions so I had to copy it into the application and use it directly. jsmpt is extremely simple however so it worked a treat and sending an email was a breeze.

gSOAP

The tough one. Turned out that it took me less than one hour to get a sample client application working. It might not be much use to me as I'm writing a server but it shows that the gSOAP source will work perfectly well under windows. The application goes to the web service provided as an example on xmethods and gets the latest stock quote for IBM and prints it to the screen.

Current IBM Stock Quote = 82.59

Wasn't expecting it to be so easy. I suppose getting it to work as a server is going to be much more difficult.

Doxygen

I've done some tests on doxygen and created some generic templates for commenting my code to produce the code documentation. Looks like the product is excellent, doxygen is fantastic.

PHP in Eclipse

Downloaded and setup the PHP plugin for eclipse. Looks good so far, though I'm not up to PHP just yet this tool should make it easier.

wxDB

Now fully working and the test application is complete. I will be using this in Test Bed.

log4cpp

This failed. I was unable to get it to build under the minGW compiler, or at least thus far. As it does not support this compiler or cygwin I will not be able to build it on the win32 platform without more effort than it's worth so Iv'e given it up.

wxDB

Finally. I had a lot of problems getting wxDB to work for me but finally I have it compiling. There were two problems really.

The first was that I was building the debug versions of the object files but looking for the release files. Sounds like a simple thing to find, but it was not so easy.

The second was that the wxDB sample was not setup to build a DEBUG version, so when I tried to build the debug release it fell over.

After I built the release version of wxWindows the wxDB sample built and my application linked. At the moemnt there is a function that is failing and I have to fi nd out why, but so far it is promising.

Spent about 5 hours over the weekend workking with wxDB. After finding the source of a compiler error my sample that is designed to purely open a database connection can now compile without error. I should note that it does not look like minGW can precompile headers so full compilation is going to take a little longer for my projects written in it. There are, however have so many more features in eclipse like a PHP editor and such as well as minGW being GCC compliant that it is still my compiler of choice for my windows system.

I am not yet able to link the sample with the correct libraries and thus it is throwing linker errors. I should be able to alleviate these errors by using the wxdb sample to determing whether I have correctly built wxWindows to include wxDB support and what libraries and compiler options are required.