[Qt-interest] Qt Mobility Project needs to be expanded

[Brad Howes]

On Mar 5, 2010, at 11:37 AM, Josiah Bryan wrote:

> Just curious - could you expand a bit more on your underlying pub/sub 
> setup? Googling 'ACE' doesn't come up with much - Zeroconf, I recognize. 
> Is there anything you can share about it (Qt+Zeroconf+ACE)? Sounds like 
> a fascinating project!


See http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html. It is an active cross-platform library that has some good networking concepts. I relied on it for all of my low-level networking stuff. It also has a good 'task' class that we used to great effect to model signal processing streams. Supports threaded and event-driven processing, as well as a mix of the two.

On the Qt side, I primarily relied on a proxy objects to provide the signaling while using the ACE components for actual networking. I created Qt classes to interface with Zeroconf / Avahi in order to provide the dynamic publisher availability. I still think Zeroconf is one of the coolest bits of technology available today. I cringe now when I have to muck with port numbers and host names to get a distributed system up and running. Here are some (old) screen shots of various displays I worked on, showing synthetic data since the real stuff is classified:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/95088105@N00/

The radar system itself is a vintage analog track-while-scan radar. We tapped into it at various places in order to test out some advanced DSP algorithms. We can also record all of the streams, in real-time, for latter high-fidelity playback or MATLAB analysis. We also have an ACE/MATLAB bridge that allows one to process data directly in MATLAB, though at much reduced data rates.

Brad

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Brad Howes
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