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The mkiv Supra Owners Club

Any JAVA or C network programmers about?


Wez

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I work for NATS (National Air Traffic Services, although we're not supposed to call it that any more, "branding" and all that ;)). We do air traffic control simulations. They are used to train new air traffic controllers and try new stuff out before it gets implemented for real. For example new tools that predict the trajectory of aircraft in the medium term to sort out potential conflicts and enable the controller to handle more traffic - they were all simulated by us.

 

Some of our sims have 30 odd controller positions, each of which has 2 radar displays and a couple of information displays. Then there are >30 pilot positions where guys basically pretend to be the aircraft. Behind it all there is a pretty complex model that simulates the aircraft performance etc, and how they would appear on radar etc. All that lot is basically one big distributed system.

 

No flight sims though, sorry! :)

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Interesting, I do a lot of work which is based around airports.

 

The reason I asked the question is that I was wondering how difficult it is to write a small program that accepts a TCP stream through a designated port using our own protocol that would then output that data through another tcp port or write to a text file or mysql database.

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Interesting, I do a lot of work which is based around airports.

 

The reason I asked the question is that I was wondering how difficult it is to write a small program that accepts a TCP stream through a designated port using our own protocol that would then output that data through another tcp port or write to a text file or mysql database.

To a text file would be very easy, to a mysql database would add the complication of a MySQL API (never written anything that talks directly to MySQL before)

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To quanitfy in lines of code is very difficult, you could write a program that is very difficult to understand that uses a mimimum amount of code, or a program that is well thought out (easy to expand and well designed) that uses 2 or 3 times the amount of lines.

In my experience it's better to talk in terms of how long it will take to write. An experienced coder could prolly knock something up in under a day (esp if he's used to writing TCP applications & has a library of well used functions available).

 

PS the number of lines would depend on how complex you wanted the program, for example you could hardcode the ip & port within the code, or you code read the ip & port from config, obviously the latter would add the extra complexity of reading config. As a minimum of a hack program I'd say realistically 500 to 1000 to write to a text file, for a program which is being written as part of a business which needs to be modified by multiple people, could be over 3000 (and would need fully designing).

 

Oh and it also depends on how complex "your protocol" is, this is why it's so hard to give a definite answer, but I hope the above gives you an idea.

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Don't know which language would be quickest, if you asked me I'd go c++ all the way, experienced Java programmers would probably agrue otherwise. I would have thought it was easier to get c++ to access files as Java locks the environment down much more, c++ can tend to do what it likes with local files (and there's prolly an ODBC driver for MySQL)

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One of the problems I've encountered with Java is yes you only have to write the code once for many platforms, but when you add up the different combinations of browser/JVM version/OS type & version some code will work on one & not another (sort of defeats the prupose of Java) well that's my experience of Java Applets anyway, dunno if Java Applications fair any better.

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I have done some PHP MySQL work and years ago did opcode in college and have done some very basic C programing, where would be a good place to start.

 

This app needs to work on linux, I am thinking C is prob the best way to go, which development environment would be good to work in?

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Ahhh,

 

Interesting, out of curiosity are these networked using DIS, HLA or something proprietary?

 

 

 

you know me well then ;)

 

Mike

 

We use a proprietary toolkit we wrote quite a while back. The interfaces are basically defined in IDL and a code generator generates wrappers. The underlying toolkit uses good old TCP sockets and XDR to encode the data. It's multi-platform too, we used to use VMS machines (some of the code is still in ADA) and we now use SUN Solaris and Intel Solaris boxes, Windows and also the odd Linux box. These days we are running Solaris on VMware.

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Not really the easiet project to ease you back into c++ :D

 

PHP & C++ syntax is VERY similar so that should make things easier for you, just need to learn how to make best use of availble libraries (windows gets the windows API, STL & MFC, you won't get those with Linux but will get similar I assume).

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