W I S C H N E R

I've been searching for this for three years and now my collection is complete.

I expected most of my readership to come from Africa, India and Asia. But they are from Silicon Valley, California.

If you would like to publish SQL or C++ code on your blog hosted by Blogger I recommend SyntaxHighlighter.

You can install the SyntaxHighlighter Blogger widget somewhere on your blog. I installed it at the bottom of this blog.

Use tag pre to publish your code. For example:

<pre name="code" class="SQL">
-- Sample
SELECT * FROM city;
</pre>

will produce this result

-- Sample
SELECT * FROM city;

Supported languages include c++, sql, c#, etc. All supported language tags can be found here.

When in Unix you should really do as Unixans do. They store application configuration to the /etc folder and user preferences to user's home folder using dot (.) for first name of file.

So if your application is called maestro then it should store its' configuration to /etc/maestro.conf (or /etc/maestro/config.xml or /etc/maestro/app.ini - it doesn't matter as long as it is in the /etc). And it should store its' user preferences to ~/.maestro file (or to ~/.maestro/.profile.txt - as long as it is in users' folder, starts with a dot and the filename hints about its origin).

Even Gnomes' GConf (you may run it from cmd line using gconf-editor) follows this convention by creating a ~/.gconf file in your home folder.

Your application should also be configurable via environment variables and command line parameters. But what if a collision of settings occur? Then you should use following priorities - low) read config file, mid) check the environment variables, high) check command line parameters.

Configuration source with highest priority should prevail. For example - if an option is defined in config file and is also passed as a command line parameter the one passed at the command line should be used.

Easiest way to implement all this is to try to read each settings from config file, then from environment vars and then from cmd line overwriting it each time a new value is available. This way the last read setting will prevail. There are multiple libraries available to assist you with reading config files and parsing command line parameters. Though options are many for C++ I recommend using Boost.Program_options. It will provide the user of your command line tool with experience he is familiar with including command line script files. I explained my preference for the Boost library here.

.NET spoiled us all. The Framework's Standard Library contains answers to numerous programming challenges. From implementing http client to reading from a database – a plethora of classes speeds up the development and unifies programming experience.

Nothing quite as complete exists for C++. The open source world offers many libraries but without consistency of .NET. Except for two - the C++ Standard Library and the Boost. The latter will soon become part of the former.

Thus start your C++/Unix programming voyage by reading about Boost. Install it on your system. You do not need to compile it on Ubuntu. Just use Synaptic Package Manager to download and install. Then...whenever you identify a programming problem first consult the C++ Standard Library and the Boost. Only if solution can't be found there continue your search elsewhere.

Because the C programming language played such a pivotal role in history of Unix and open source many libraries are written in it. It is quite common to find a pair - a high quality C library to fulfill some task and a C++ wrapper to provide more modern interface.

For example - you might want to implementing http protocol in C++/Unix environment by using the Neon library as underlying technology and the Neon++ wrapper as an actual interface.

Sometimes instead of adding two pluses to wrapper library names an extension mm or xx is used. For example for C library libgtk the C++ wrappers is called libgtkmm. libpango - libpangomm. libcairo - libcairomm. libpg - libpgxx. This convention makes it easier to search for a wrapper when finding a C library to perform a task.

If not too much of a compromise try to keep your code consistent with C++ Coding Convention by selecting libraries that only use combination of lowercase letters and underscores for all program identifiers (except for template parameters, which start with capital letter).

It is a matter of taste and as old Roman wisdom teaches de gustibus non est dispudandum. I use this.

It includes source control tags which are standard and supported by most source control systems.

If you plan to use this you should really include it into your Visual Studio new file template so that you don't have to copy'n'paste it every time you create a new class.