Song Of The Day: Pushin’ On (Instrumental) - Artist: Dent
A while back I published a couple of blog entries about my interest in web-based network performance, modeling of that performance, and an open source initiative, called dent, which I initiated for research purposes. Well, today, I’m releasing a simple yet interesting application under the dent open source project called dentp, notice the “p” :).
dentp is an OS X, Objective-C, Cocoa application (i.e., OS X 10.4 or higher; also a universal binary) that behaves similarly to the ping command-line utility. Although the ping capability within dentp is relatively simplistic, there are various parts of the design and implementation that may be of interest to OS X programmers. For example, the application uses Cocoa and Objective-C, the source includes the entire Xcode 2.4 project, and the application utilized various technologies and frameworks including Interface Builder, Cocoa Bindings, NSThread, BSD sockets, OS X deployment bundles, etc.
So for those interested in OS X programming, I’d imagine that the application’s source could be a good reference app. I have released it with a tag of 0.1a (alpha) because it needs more testing, and possibly a few other tweaks, so let me know if you find issues or bugs. Also, the IPv6 references are a work in progress: IPv6 is not supported at the moment.
Also, with the experience I plan to direct all future dent project work to Cocoa and Objective-C (i.e., combination of C/C++/Obj-C source) and then migrate or port components to Firefox plug-ins and complementary capabilities (i.e., merge what has been done with what I am currently doing). The short reason, for why, is that it is much faster for me to model what I want to do with Cocoa and Objective-C than to continue the way I was–at least until more people join the project. :)
The binary bundle and source code is released under the MPL 1.1, so please read it before downloading.
The code is located on sourceforge here.
The OS X package bundle can be downloaded from sourceforge here.
In future entries I may have to delve into OS X technology and framework minutia, but for now….
If you install and then want to uninstall dentp, just delete the dentp application (e.g., by dragging the icon/directory to the trash can).
Also, the dentp application writes some user defaults, so you may purge these if you want by first checking them in a terminal window with:
einstein:~ eolaughlen$ defaults read com.erico.dentp
{
prefsHostnameLastUsed = 1;
prefsHostnames = (localhost, “velocipeek.com”);
prefsSliderCheckbox = 1;
prefsVerbose = 1;
}
And then by purging them with the following:
The defaults domain will likely be titled net.sourceforge.dent(or p) in the future and hopefully be more automated and friendly.
einstein:~ eolaughlen$ defaults delete com.erico.dentp
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