Compilation Servers

dejai · Post by **dejai** » Wed May 14, 2008 8:59 am

I have heard around the town that one can set up a compilation server. Now I have always thought of such servers as something that was used to build nightly builds of projects yet a strange thought recently crossed my mind... I was wondering if it was possible to send source code to a server from an embedded device and have it send you back a file to the binary or a link to a compilation log.

Imagination how useful this could be. I am sure their are many of these about but I don't have any prior experience with them. I was just curious if anyone here has any experience which such a. "cool toy". Anyway any help, comments or experiences would be great.

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Wed May 14, 2008 3:27 pm

The more I thought about it, the more I realised how much of a good idea this is. With the stage of mobile devices these days, its feasible to develop on them, but one runs into the problem of having enough processing power to compile the applications, especially on native platforms such as BREW. So you are saying someone can be sitting on the bus, writing an application on their cellphone, and get it compiled for them on a remote server. This kind of thing has serious business potential.

JP · Post by JP » Wed May 14, 2008 3:47 pm

but surely you wouldnt write the application on a cellphone would you...? I would have thought you'd write it on a PC, compile it for the cellphone and then copy it over... That's how homebrew DS coding goes anyway.. I imagine coding on a cellphone would be rather tricky!

dejai · Post by **dejai** » Wed May 14, 2008 9:39 pm

JP, though what if you were on your way to work, on the bus or train and you had a bit of code left over from last night? You throw it on your portable phone or micro pc and debug it add some code on your way to work. Then when you get home you have the fixed version on both your micro pc and on your server

I think the idea is very possible, given you have access to the linux server. Think about it even now you could FTP the files to a folder on your linux server get it to compile it and send the errors to a file. Then Download back the file.

Anyway its just a thought, has anyone done this?

JP · Post by JP » Thu May 15, 2008 7:31 am

I still would never dream of coding on anything smaller than a laptop i don't think. the screen would be waaay too small to be able to easily read the code or have enough on screen or even have a decent enough input device... coding on a phone's numpad or a pocket pc's tiny keyboard? no thank you!!

Though, that being said, i myself have imagined how cool it would be to be able to code homebrew directly on a PSP whilst you were on a long train journey or something, but of course that would require a USB keyboard add-on for the PSP which i've talked about with my coworkers, thinking about how that would result... as a decent sized USB keyboard you simply plug in? or attached similarly to the xbox360 controller keyboard?