libpion 0.1.0 released!

Filed under: Digital Information, Computer Software — mike @ 10:45 pm

Today I released my first 3,000 lines of open source (LGPL) code.

libpion is a library that makes it easy for C++ software developers to implement lightweight HTTP interfaces. I’ve been working on this new project on and off for the past few weeks and using it as a way to learn Boost, asio and GNU autotools.

So far, I love Boost and asio and can hardly imagine ever having to write code without these great libraries. I highly recommend that every C++ programmer learn these, if you haven’t already done so. Autotools, however, is not so great. The learning curve is huge and the documentation available is conflicting and scattered. I’ve used hand-written and Perl-generated Makefiles in the past, and I’m not sure autotools is really worth all the trouble.

While googling for answers to the many problems that I encountered with autotools, I came across another project called CMake. I read a lot of nice words about CMake and also learned that KDE has switched to using it. It definitely looks like something worth checking out..