FrogBlog

This year’s KDE conference was again worthwhile going to. Wish I had been able to stay longer. Talks were good and seeing familiar and new faces proved to be very nice again. I might be in the minority but in my opinion the initial lack of an Internet connection was a good thing. It made people talk to each other or closely listen to a presentation rather than staring at their screen and using IRC to chat with people elsewhere or inside the same room.

Everything would have been perfect if I would not have to add three more people to the list of those that commenced their stay by filing a Property Irregularity Report at Glasgow Airport.

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Yesterday we attended the Java Forum Stuttgart (JFS), a Java conference organized by the Java User Group Stuttgart e.V. We had a booth there where we presented Squish and I also gave a talk.

Lately we have been to quite a few conferences. The JFS really was one of the best organized conferences we have been to. The attendees were really technical and automated GUI testing was of big interest. We got a lot of interest at our booth so that at times people had to wait while Frerich and I answered questions of other visitors. From the questions we got we could judge that our visitors had seriously thought about automated GUI testing before and real concrete interest.

I also gave a talk which was well attended as well and ended with many interesting and good questions.

I really also need to say a few words about the excellent organization. At my talk I was heartly welcomed, got help with the setup and a moderator introduced me to my audience. At other conferences I have been to, nobody from the origanizers was present at the talks and I as the presenter had to do everything myself which always feels a bit odd.

Also one thing I really appreciated was that there was a separate lunch for exhibitors before the official lunch for the visitors. Why is this so great? During the breaks (coffee, lunch, etc.) people walk the floor and visit the booths. So those are really the times where you HAVE to be at the booth. This means you usually get no chance to eat lunch during the lunch break because you are busy talking to visitors and the catering service removes anything eatable immediately after the break. So it was great to have a good and relaxed lunch for the first time and a conference

In summary, it was a well-done conference and we’ll surely be there next year again.

Oh, and as it turns out, the taxi drivers in Stuttgart really like to talk a LOT. It was really entertaining but I also enjoyed the silence in the taxi we took back from the airport in Hamburg at the end of the day

Apple has a nice overview of thread communication means in their multithreading documentation (for both, Carbon and Carbon). However, I think the documentation is missing another technique that is very simple.

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Squish for Qt is available as a binary package and a source package. The binary package is available for common platforms and compilers, but sometimes the Qt version you need is missing. Or maybe it is there, but it was built with a Qt configuration that does not match the Qt version you use in your project. In all these cases, you have to use the source package and build Squish yourself.

This might be hassle since you need to install the wanted scripting languages, e.g. This becomes even more of a problem if you want to build Squish on one machine and use the one build on many other machines (because the scripting languages have to be installed on that machine as well).

The advantage of the Squish binary package in this respect is that all is already packaged.

It becomes even worse if you are in the unlucky situation that you have to do a split build of Squish because your applications Qt version is that old that some parts of Squish does not support it (e.g. testing Qt 3.0 applications) or if your application is using a single-threaded Qt library.

So wouldn’t it be nice if you could just use the ease of installation of the binary package together with the flexibility of the source package? Well, you almost can.

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