Coder's Log

I finally managed to port all the existing C code to Vala. What did i achieve from this exercise? For one thing, the code got much simpler, with LOCs being reduced from 2101 to 1117 (46.8 %). Also this proves that (at least the server-side) GUPnP's Vala bindings are already in a stable/usable state. Special thanks to Jürg Billeter , Ali Sabil and Jussi Kukkonen for their continuous support during this exercise and for quickly fixing bugs that I reported.

So yet once again Mr python decide to tease me when i do `apt-get dist-upgrade`: Setting up python-lxml (2.0.5-1) ... /var/lib/dpkg/info/python-lxml.postinst: /usr/bin/pycentral: /usr/bin/python: bad interpreter: No such file or directory dpkg: error processing python-lxml (--configure): subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 126 ... Errors were encountered while processing: epiphany-extensions bzr gnome-media-common libgnome-media0 gnome-media pidgin python-lxml E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Meet my new personal hero, Jussi Kukkonen . The only o-hand employee in Finland who almost single-handedly created the Vala bindings of the whole GUPnP stack and ported all our test apps to Vala in a very short amount of time despite the fact that he was completely unfamiliar to Vala and GUPnP (and UPnP itself) when he started working on this task and the fact that the Vala documentation is hardly any complete (especially binding-generation).

When I told some people that I will write (which involves re-writing existing code first) the gupnp-media-server in Vala, their question was "Why Vala? Why not Python, Java or C#?". So here are the strong points of Vala, not all of which are found in these languages: Statically-typed Back in the days, when I was hacking on Gazpacho I found the lack of types on variables and function/method parameters really annoying in Python. This can become quite a pain when you are reading other's code and that is exactly what I was doing most of the time. The fact that Johan and Kalle wrote very nice and readable code, helped a lot though. No runtime dependency/overhead This might seem like a small point to many developers but as an embedded-systems developer, this is a big plus for me and I am sure to many (if not most) of the embedded-systems developers out there. Easy integration with C/GObject A big plus for all the GObject/C developers out there. Besides, there are situations

- Use libsoup 2.4. [Jorn Baayen, Zeeshan Ali Khattak] - Incremental browsing of containers. [Zeeshan Ali Khattak]

- Use libsoup 2.4. [Jorn Baayen] - Add DLNA support to DIDL writer. [Jorn Baayen] - Some small fixes. [Jorn Baayen]