CMS 2.0 released

Some typical UI features:

Data & input validation using XPath

Custom-drawn combobox (with check-box item)

Custom-drawn grid with tens of thousand cells

Simple vector object editing

Custom-draw tree with loading effect

he CMS project, in which I’m the team leader, has come to it’s second phase, with major features completed. Although I felt tired with the on-going work, it’s my most beloved product. CMS (short for Central Management System) serves as a gateway through which clients manage the DVR Servers (Digital Video Recorder). The product demonstrates many technologies & programming techniques, just to name a few:

  • IOCP (IO completion port): the multi-threaded IOCP server has proved to be very efficient, hundreds of concurrent connections won’t rise CPU usage to higher than 5%. However, the connections are stateless, it’s best that we would add a state-machine to better control the traffic.

  • TCP + XML communication: we devise a draft protocol like XML-RPC or SOAP, which bases on TCP rather than HTTP.

  • XML data storage: all network command & data is presented in XML. With version-numbered XML, we hope to solve the backward compatibility problem ever existed with so many releases of our main DVR products.

  • XML processing is made easy thank to the wonderful TinyXML and TinyXPath libraries. I must emphasize that XPath makes XML processing much more feasible, it greatly reduces the number of LOC (line of code) and procedural complexity.

  • A sophisticated client MFC GUI demonstrates various GUI programming techniques, almost every tricks with MFC GUI has been gathered in this product: heavy custom-draw controls, flicker-freed rendering, advanced input validation…

  • Some borrowed concepts from other flatforms: the elegant “signal & slot” are added to handle complicated interaction between GUI’s elements (in addition to MFC’s message queue mechanism).

I have some lessons learned after the project:

  • It’s a MUST that you have a team with members of the same professional level. This would make sure the members would easily understand each others and share a common culture.

  • C/C++ is still a MUST for real time programming tasks (it’s “half-civilized nature” makes it a strong language). And the use of some matured flat-form: boost, wxWidget… would greatly help the developing process.

  • It’s only by the desire for creation & creativity that programmer would offer an excellent product. The culture of a developing team is somewhat like honey-bees, who collect pollen little by little to make honey and wax.

I’ve been involved in many projects, some is more interesting, some is more difficult than this one. But this is the first one that I’d made, everything from A to Z. It’s now time to leave I3 but I must say this is the project that I loved and two years at I3 was a special time in my career! Looking at the screenshots below, you would see that CMS is very rich in it’s designs about information presentation.

my old Hue’s pictures

hese are the pictures I took some 10 years ago, when I was still an university freshman, wandering around and keep documents for everything, everyplace I go. Yesterday, looking back on the old films, they had degraded greatly in quality due to time and bad preservation. I scanned the films to digital form to save them and managed to scan from the printed photographs. You can have a look here and compare their quality. Feel like part of my souvernirs has been ruined with time 😢.