Web service for device (WS4D) and using make, cmake with Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) on Linux

Thanh Phu on December 16, 2011

WS4D-gSOAP is a framework to deploy web services on multiple environments (computers, embedded devices, phones…) without having to rewrite code. More introduction information can be found in this post. The downside for WS4D is that the build system is based on cmake, and it’s a bit complicated to use. I have since managed to successfully build the stack from source (there’s no binary distribution). But I ran into numerous problems during my time getting familiar with the stack. Namely following the tutorial.

Even for such a simple task of copying and pasting code from the tutorial (The Air Conditioner tutorial), I did not succeed. The client and device doesn’t seem to be able to communicate with each other. Even though the tutorial have been kind enough to include logging code (send, received and memory allocations), I’m still unable to figure out where the problem lies. And that’s when I think I’m forced to perform debugging on the project. That leads to a big problem: what am I supposed to use to debug this?

So I tried to install Code Blocks, but it doesn’t support cmake projects, it couldn’t import the CMakeList.txt. Then reading through several articles revealed Eclipse to be a pretty good gdb front-end, I installed it, and have successfully imported the project, but I was hit with several problems:

  • I couldn’t build the project, Eclipse’s project structure was make-based, not cmake-based, trying to ‘make all’ or ‘make clean’ with Eclipse obviously would generate errors
  • Editing  the code is an eyesore because Eclipse doesn’t seem to be able to recognize include and libraries directories even after I added them manually in project properties.
After several more hours of analyzing WS4D-gSOAP documentation (not really helpful, they are only related to build and run with command line), cmake (wiki pages after wiki pages with no structure between pages and in articles), Eclipse and Code Blocks’ documentation on make projects; I finally realized the right way to do this: cmake supports generating make-based projects for both Code Blocks and Eclipse, and it’s as simple as this:
  1. Go to the directory where you would normally run cmake to build your project from the command line

  2. Perform

    cmake -G"Eclipse CDT4 - Unix Makefiles" -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ../certi_src
    cmake . -G "CodeBlocks - Unix Makefiles"

  3. Import

    The project directory
    ProjectName.cbp file
You can now work with the project normally within your preferred IDE

Setting the encoding in Eclipse or Netbeans

Thanh Phu on August 30, 2010

It’s the era of Unicode, and you though the problem of encoding is a story of the past. Well, not if you’ve got to view old code. This is what you may get:

Can you read it?

Eclipse allows you to set the encoding in Edit / Set encoding, but unfortunately it only offers UTF variants and standard encoding (cp1252 and ASCII). But what it didn’t tell you is: you can type in the box and access other code pages, like in this example, I want to view a file encoded with code page 949 (Korean)

Code page dialog

And the result…

Properly encoded

Here’s a small list of encodings for your reference:

List of encodings

In Netbeans

You can only set encoding for the whole project, by right-clicking the project and set the encoding:

Netbeans project properties

This is why I prefer Netbeans: it have a list of ALL encodings listed, you can just pick one and doesn’t have to remember the above list.