Almost a year ago I took my Qt/DirectFB Jenkins down. With that CI for MIPS/uclibc and DirectFB stopped being done (as far as I know). It was a difficult decision but it reflected my situation. I didn’t do a Qt project for a long time and didn’t have any Qt related work on the horizon.

My main work involves using Smalltalk (GNU Smalltalk and Pharo) and writing a lot of a C code for the various Osmocom/GSM related projects and the joy of integrating software to build  HW products. I didn’t think I would use/write/develop using Qt anytime soon. For sentimental reasons I stayed on the qt-devel mailinglist (I still read it day to day) and followed the work done by Lars, Simon and all the others with great joy.

For an internal project of sysmocom I needed to parse, generate and stream (through HTTP) JSON content. I built a first prototype using GNU Smalltalk and the Iliad Framework. The system was quickly built and we were able to gain some experience with it. Given the amount of data we intended to pipe through the system we wanted to move to a fully compiled version (instead of spending the time tuning the VM). I decided to use the Json support of QtCore, QtNetwork for the HTTP client and planned to use libsoup as the HTTP Server. After some research I stumbled across Tufao and used that one instead and don’t regret it. Thanks to QThread and queued signal and slots I was able to make use of more than one CPU core and the application was fun to develop.

I am a Unix Dinosaur so for the buildsystem I shortly considered using qmake but then ended up using autotools. Thanks to the autotroll m4 macros building Qt applications is not that bad. I decided against using cmake as it still feels backward (e.g. no config.log, most scripts don’t use pkg-config but some hand rolled magic like the FindBoost thing).

We are building Debian packages using an internal OBS appliance and this way can easily update/deploy our software thanks to that. After deploying every couple of hours the application/thread would crash. The backtrace pointed to QNAM, deleteLater and QObject.. David Faure had documented and fixed various race conditions and after we upgraded our application to use Qt5.2 the crashes stopped occurring. The application was last re-started on the 5th of February and works quite reliable.

This month we started a simple REST server using Qt and Tufao. Maybe I should search for a nice Qt consumer related project too? Qt is definitely here to stay.