2007 Sep 14 - Fri

Software Development, Coders, and C++ Libraries

I grew up with Assembler, Pascal, then C, then C++, then C#, and now I'm back to C++. I've found that C# makes things easier for graphical programming, but it feels sluggish when doing some computationally intensive things. I've since moved back to C++. Development time has increased on some stuff, but I think things are better, and I derive more pleasure from C++ development. And C++ has a rich heritage and a rich library universe. This entry goes through some interesting things I've found.

One of the first libraries I came across was the Boost Libraries. I believe I've written about these before. A few specifics of interest include Regular Expressions, a soon to be released Time Series, date/time operations, some geometry constructs, state machine tools, and, well, the list goes on.

A few days ago, in looking for sophisticated Web Application tool kit. Wt: a C++ Web Toolkit appears to fit that niche very well. It also handles Ajax like functionality.

To assist with web development and layout, Firebug: A Firefox Addon might be of value for page layout issues. Although it has nothing to do with C++, which is the main topic here, it does have to do with finding a viable solution for checking out web page design.

Earlier today, I came across dzone: fresh links for developers. It has a wealth of links to articles written by developers for developers, developers of all categories and skill sets. Doing a search on C++ comes up with quite a list of articles.

One of the links pointed to The Programmicon. This article is mostly game based, but gaming shares cross-functionality with many disciplines. This once had two links to resources regarding finance. I was first introduced to Multivariate Embedding Methods by Carol Alexander on page 405 of her book Market Models. Although she won a prize for best price predictor using a model with that concept, I havn't been completely sold on it's applicability. If I had time I'd try it out. However, a key part of embedding is nearest neighbor analysis. The Programmicon points to a site providing ANN: A Library for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Searching. It also points to TMV - Template Matrix/Vector Library for C++, something else upon which embedding algorithms are built. Embeddings are based upon chaos theory. The concept is to try to find self-similarity in continous time. When similarities are found, you've got a predictor. Easier to say than do.

dzone also re-introduced me to LUA: An Embedded Programming Language. Debian Administration discusses how to incorporate it in to C++. I'm thinking it might be useful for scripting signals in a network monitoring package or defining charts in a financial modelling solution, or performing information searches in text analysis tools, or performing event & signal handling in a Cricket grapher.cgi rewrite. IEEE Software has an 8 page article called Traveling Light, the Lua Way. Kind of related is Kepler: Lua based web development platform.

During a brief flirtation with Fuzzy Logic, where one needs to evalute line crossings and area calcuations, I realized Computational Geometry might be of use. The C++ library Wykobi might be of value for optimized algorithms. The Code Project discusses its use.

I'm currently 'enjoying' MFC based development. I'm wondering if, since I'm still at a relatively early stage, I should be using TrollTech's Qt: Cross-Platform Rich Client Development Framework.

From a Microsoft perspective, Somasegar's Weblog has an article on 'Visual C++ Futures'. There are more than 200 user comments summing up needs, wants, and desires in that universe.