Cutelyst 2.6.0 released! Now on VCPKG and Buildroot
Cutelyst, a Qt Web Framework has upped to 2.6.0. This release is full of important bug fixes and is the best version when targeting Windows OS so far. It reached 5 years old, 440 stars on GitHub and since the last release has had many users asking questions, reporting issues and making pull requests.
Until now Windows support was a thing I mostly trusted Appveyor compiling and running tests fine, but this changed a bit in this release, I got a freelance job where some terminals would be editing images to be printed on T-Shirts, then they sent their art to a central server which receives and print, so, after I finished the QtQuick application and managed to convince them of running the terminals on KDE/Plasma as it was basically a kiosk full screen application I went on writing the server part.
Using Cutelyst on the server was a perfect match, the process was a Qt Widgets application, that, when linked to Cutelyst::WSGI could start listening all on the same process without issues, every terminal were connected via websockets protocol, which was just awesome, whenever I changed a terminal config I could see it changing instantly on the terminal, QWebSocketServer class could indeed do the same, but, to create the T-Shirt Art Fonts and Pictures needed to be "installed" on the terminal. Now with HTTP capabilities I simply exported all those folders and the whenever I sent a new JSON with config to the terminals, it contained the URLs of all these files which where updated in a blink.
On deploy time it was clear that using Windows on the server was a better option, first I'd need to give support for them on how to configure printers and use the system, also, printer drivers could also cause me troubles, so whatever let's just compile it and get the money.
In order to make things easier I managed to get VCPKG to build a Qt5 for me, in a command line fashion, after that I saw how easy it was to create a package for Cutelyst, it's upstream now, you just need to type:
vcpkg install cutelyst2
This will pull qt5-base package, and get you a working Cutelyst that easy, sadly Qt5 packages didn't work on Linux nor on MacOS (both with issues filled).
Thanks to this project, several Windows related issues have been fixed, still work to do but I have an app on production on Windows now :)
I'm still no Windows fan, so I ended up configuring MXE and cross compiling Cutelyst and my application for Windows on Linux with it.
If you are doing embedded stuff, Cutelyst is also available on buildroot.
Besides that Cutelyst 2.6.0 has some other very important bug fixes.
Get it here!