When most people think of Qt, I imagine that they think about the Graphical User Interface components. But Qt has a variety of other components beyond just being a GUI framework. In this post, I highlight some of what I find to be the more interesting features.
Authentication and authorization is one of foundational aspects of any security system. However writing an authentication and authorization system can be anything but: There are complex, ever-changing requirements, not to mention differences for differing interfaces it can quickly become daunting. However, there already exists a system on Linux and Unix that allows for dynamic and complex authentication: PAM.
Recently, I was working on a project for 2D Game Development where I had to use SDL 2.0. SDL 2.0 is a family of media libraries designed for writing cross platform games in C. However it can be difficult to remember where various resources are allocated and deallocated. Resource Acquisition is Initialization (RAII) is a common pattern in C++ programming that solves this problem. So I wrote a series of wrappers for SDL 2.0 that use RAII and various other improvements.
Object Pools are a commonly used pattern used in operating systems, game, and high performance computing development. However just as it can be easy to forget to return a pointer to memory, it can be easy to forget to return the memory to the pool. In this article, I layout a class that I recently used to automatically manage memory from a pool.
Functional programming is a surprisingly useful programming paradigm. The best aspects of functional programming have this odd habit of showing in places you would never expect.
Ansible is probably my favorite provisioning and configuration management tool. Its syntax is concise, expressive, and elegant. Unlike other tools in its category, it has excellent documentation with working examples and intuitive naming. Learning it use it effectively can help you be a more productive developer.
C++ is a both a fantastic language and a mess. It supports at least 4 programming paradigms (procedural, functional, object-oriented, template meta-programming). In some senses, many languages give you one great way to do things: C++ gives you every way and trusts you to use them well. With this flexibility comes problems that C++ seems to have beyond what other languages experience. Therefore, having effective tooling to develop and use C++ is essential.
The Interpreter pattern from the “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software” can potentially be a very powerful pattern. It allows you to use a domain specific language to represent a complex computational situation. However, writing interpreters in practice can be tricky and time consuming. It really helps to know something about some fundamental parsing algorithms and techniques.