Lately I’ve been investigating many things for next releases of Dorgem and come to the conclusion that the only proper way to add new features is the stop developing for a 2.x release and move on to Dorgem 3.0 even though it requires a almost complete rebuild of Dorgem.

A rebuild? Yes, I’m afraid that is the only real way to be able implement new things, like for instance DirectShow. Currently the communication with the camera is based upon Video for Windows (VfW) and is build into the main dialog. New cameras don’t always support VfW anymore and VfW has problems with more then one camera on one machine.

Another thing is the streaming web server. The current implementation simply can not give a constant stream of images. A new web server is needed.

And the list goes on. To add proper support for other graphical file formats, I have tried to add DevIL and FreeImage. A quick and dirty method to be able to use .jpg as an overlay would be possible. I like the quick part, but definitely not the dirty part.

So when I would rebuild Dorgem, are there other things that can be changed as well? Should I stick with MFC? Are people interested in a version for other operating systems? What would be the new architecture of Dorgem 3 and beyond?

A lot of questions and not too much answer yet.

I recently programmed a little using wxWidgets and I must say I like it. It has advantages over MFC, like that it is multi platform. A wx-application build for Windows can be rebuild on Linux and MacOS, when not too much platform specific things are used. And other pro is that it drops the requirement of the Microsoft compiler. Furthermore wxWidgets has built-in support for common graphical file formats and support gettext so the application can be translated into other languages.

But the programming I have done in wxWidgets yet is not that much and I need to learn a lot.

When an application is build with multiple platforms in minds, platform specific thing (like communication with the camera) need to be separated from the GUI. On Linux people probably also want run it as a daemon. On Windows running as a service would be nice.

As said, much questions and few answers. But still I thought it would be wise to share them with you.

The main conclusion it that there will no 2.x release anymore. I will stop the nightly build system but will leave the latest nightly build in place. And I will start to make more plans for Dorgem 3.x