48 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
48 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
Title: November 2016 recap
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Date: 2016-12-15 00:00
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Category: News
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Slug: 2016-november-recap
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Lang: en
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![Construction of a building][screenshot]
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This article describes the start of MJIN library separation into modules.
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Once we built OpenSceneGraph for Android, it became obvious that some MJIN functionality is not suitable for Android. For example, UIQt provides a basis for OGS Editor UI. Since OGS Editor is a desktop application, we don't need UIQt for Android.
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We decided to have a look at two approaches to separate MJIN into modules: build-time separation and run-time one.
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**Build-time** separation means MJIN becomes highly configurable and each platform gets specifically tailored MJIN build.
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**Run-time** separation means MJIN is divided into smaller libraries that are connected at run-time, which makes it easy to change functionality without rebuilding.
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**Run-time separation research.**
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Since run-time separation has more benefits, we started researching it first. The easiest way to achieve it was to use C API, because C ABI rules are much simpler than C++ one's.
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We created a sample project consisting of the application, library, and plugin:
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* **The application** has been linked to the library and used it to load the plugin.
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* **The library** provided functions to register plugins and call their functions.
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* **The plugin** provided functions for the library and called library functions.
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The research was successful: the sample project worked correctly under Linux and Windows. However, since MJIN is currently a single large entity, we postponed C API application until we finish build-time separation.
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**Build-time separation start.**
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We extracted the following modules from MJIN:
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* Android: provides Java Native Interface (JNI) to MJIN
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* Sound: provides access to OpenAL
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* UIQt: provides access to Qt UI
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Sound and UIQt modules are currently statically linked into MJIN library, while Android module is already a separate library due to JNI requirements.
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In the coming year, we're going to significantly restructure MJIN so that it suits as many platforms as possible.
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That's it for describing the start of MJIN library separation into modules.
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[screenshot]: ../../images/2016-12-15_2016-november-recap.png
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