Quick Start Guide

Introduction

This guide helps you to start develop your application with DCL immediately. Step by step, this guide shows you how to create the real application from scratch.

Before starting, be sure you have the following developer tools installed:

gcc
make
autotools, autoconf, automake
pkg-config
gettext
xsltproc

The following third-party libraries are highly recommended (or may be required) to be installed:

OpenSSL or GNU TLS
unixODBC or iODBC
GTK2
Qt4

Be sure that you have development versions of these libraries if you are planning to build DCL from the source code.

This guide assumes that you are developing on the UNIX/Linux platform. To develop on the Windows platform, you should install and configure MingW and MSYS building environment (does not covered by this guide).

Install the library

First, you should have the DCL installed. You can install the binary packages provided to your system or compile and install library by yourself.

Installing the binary packages

The binary packages of the DCL are available as DEB packages (Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux) and RPM packages (RedHat, CentOS, OpenSuSE GNU/Linux).

You can download and install the binaries from the SourceForge download area and Launchpad repository.

Building and installing from sources

Get the latest DCL sources from the SourceForge download area.
Unpack the sources
```
tar -jxf libdcl-0.1.0.tar.bz2
```

Configure, make and install

cd libdcl-0.1.0
./configure && make && make install

After building, the library will be installed into /usr/local directory.

Select the application template

The DCL provides the following types of applications:

Console applications. This kind of applications provides you the interaction with system console. Most of UNIX/Linux system utilities are console applications.
Daemon applications. These applications are running in the background and act as system services.
Web applications. This kind of applications is for web-based backends. Most of web servers support of extention mechanism by extention modules. DCL supports several types of extentions: generic type (CGI application; supported by any web server), IIS extention (ISAPI application; supported by Microsoft IIS), Apache module (Apache application; supported by Apache HTTPD web server).
Desktop applications. These applications provide the graphical user interface.

Get the appropritate application template from the 'examples/hello_world' directory and copy it into your workplace.

Customize the application template

First, you will need to customize template building environment. To do this, open the configure.ac file and edit it for your needs (refer to the comments in this file as the documentation).

Next, start the configuration script to generate building environment:

sh ./autogen.sh

After generating, you will have working build environment for your application. You will need to configure the application for building:

./configure

After configuring, you can build your application by simply executing 'make'.

Add the code

Go to the 'src' folder and open 'main.cpp' file. It contains the 'execute' method that should contain the actual code to make your application doing something useful (i.e. it's the entry point).

Future changes

Add your .cpp modules and register these into Makefile.am files; extend your application functionality with help of DCL classes as much as you need; translate text resources in the 'po' directory to a different languages; build and deploy!