Sep142008

Flex… WTF?

Started checking out Flex today. Been wanting to learn up something new recently, and Flex seems to bridge the gap between web development and a more traditional desktop application. So, what is Flex?

Flex is “Flash for programmers.” Previously, to create a Flash application, one had to utilize the timeline-based, GUI Flash authoring tool published by Adobe. While later versions of Flash allowed some pretty heavy programming through ActionScript, it was tedious and/or annoying to program through what was essentially a visual editor. Also, the program cost $900.

Flex is free from Adobe; they sell an IDE which supposedly makes things easier… it seems you can do drag ‘n drop application layouts with it, reminicent of Visual Basic. Anyway, I digress. A Flex application is made up of MXML (an XML-derivative used for layout) and ActionScript 3 (for logic). A very valid comparison would be to compare Flex to HTML (presentation) and PHP/ASP (logic).

I downloaded the SDK (read the release notes… no real “installation” per se, but you have to uninstall/reinstall your Flash player), and ran through the first two parts of this orientation. It starts you out with a basic application, then goes into tying Flex into other dynamic web languages such as PHP. Definitely web-centric for right now; I’m interested in looking into more graphical, ActionScript-centric tutorials.

No comments · Written by Nathan at 6:46 pm · Tags , ,

Aug102008

Tutorial: Use gcc/g++ with Cygwin

One of the problems that I always faced as a developer was what compiler to use on the Windows platform. While Linux-based operating systems come with their own compilers, Windows users are kinda screwed… I think the last tool that came with DOS/Windows and allowed you to make programs was QBasic. So the question is, what’re some free tools I can use to make Windows binaries?

Enter Cygwin, a Linux-like interface for Windows. It has the bash shell, as well as lots of popular tools, such as C/C++ compilers. This is pretty much just what we want, eh?

Let’s download and set up Cygwin. Hit up the website and click the “get Cygwin” link on the right. Run the installer, and make sure to have the ‘developer tools’ option checked during setup. When you’re done with that, this readme has all the information you need regarding installing the SDL library. OpenGL libraries will be installed with Cygwin by default.

That’s it! You’re ready to rock. Just compile your SDL/OpenGL program using a command similar to this:

gcc -o test.exe main.c `sdl-config --cflags --libs` -lglu32 -lopengl32

If you’re using SDL, make sure to have a copy of SDL.dll in the directory your program is in.

No comments · Written by Nathan at 6:18 pm · Tags ,

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