Tuesday, March 27, 2012

unity, cmock and ceedling

This could be the first post about how I am using a unit testing framework that uses the mock concept.


Some background, I was researching some information on the best way to deploy a unit testing framework for embedded work. I started by posting a question on the programmers.stackexchange.com. The answers led me to investigate the solutions provided by Atomic Embedded, namely unity, cmock and ceedling.


Each of the tool by itself will provide some value of unit testing for you, but for embedded work and to help manage all the infrastructure, all the three tools need to be present.


unity is a bunch of macros that performs the tests that determines if the results are correct. 

cmock provides an intelligent parser and framework that mocks the underlying code. So for all the functions that you use, cmock would be your friend.


ceedling is like the glue that holds unity and cmock together. It is a bunch of ruby scripts the parses your code that is being tested and generates the calls to cmock, generates the test runners and builds the unit test executables.


The Atomic Embedded folks also have CException but I haven't investigate this option.

Tuesday, March 06, 2012

As I was researching Java scripting, I came across an interesting new language. It is called HAXE. For me, the interesting part is the cross platform nature. 


Having a quick look at it, it looks like that HAXE has quite an establish community of developers. There have been quite a few sites, applications and webapps using HAXE as their language of choice. 


Be cross platform, it means that I could be developing a Android application, but it can also be deployed for iOS or a Windows phone.


A framework is also available to create rich and engaging sites. The framework is NME.


I am not too sure what toolchain is required, but with NME as a framework, deployment of it to an Android device looks to be quite easy.



Saturday, March 03, 2012

Choosing a host

On my journey to be the webapp guru :-), I started to search on the net for online tutorials and came across www.html.net


On the html.net, it gives some information for all the basic foundations of the building a webapp. I mean, the stack could include Ruby or Python or other. html.net concentrated a php for the server side functionality and javascript for client side functionality. That seems quite reasonable.


I quickly read through the html tutorial and the tutorials about CSS. It is now time to tackle php. I went with their recommendation on using 000webhost.com


The signup process was pretty easy and allow me to quickly get up and going quickly.


From my learning perspective, it said that it gives me full php functionality with MySQL. Technically, it gives me php version 5.2.17 and I can get access to a MySQL installation.


Well, let continue and see how far this gets me.


disclaimer: the link to 000webhost.com is an affiliate link..