Caffeine, C Application Framework

Caffeine is a C language based framework which uses C99, POSIX and SUSv3 standards, and system specific system calls -- Linux and FreeBSD for now -- to support the development of daemons and services. The idea is to have predefined algorithms to help you in some tasks for building your own daemons, command line applications and complex tasks such as integrating plugin interfaces to your applications. The concrete goal of this project is to implement most common algorithms to develop service oriented applications.

Features

• Process pool support
• Thread pool support
• Static state machine support
• Dynamic state machine support
• Loadable state machine support
• Dynamic shared object support
• Deque support
• Linked list support
• Circular list support
• Hash table support
• Asynchronous I/O support
• File descriptor events support
• Buffer management support
• SysV IPC support

STEPS FOR BUILDING CAFFEINE

Build Tools:

• CMake
• PCRE

CMake is a Makefile generator tool writen in C++. To build Caffeine manually you must run:

cmake .
make

In the bin directory resides a script called cmk.sh, it's script that helps in the compilation of caffeine, setting verbose output and debug binaries generation, written to help in debugging tasks.

To build Caffeine with cmk.sh you must run:

cmk.sh -mcb

To clean the proyect output, usually to get a patch:

cmk.sh -mc

To import the proyect into kdevelop:

cmk.sh -kcb

To clean the project output made by kdevelop:

cmk.sh -kc

Caffeine Coding Style

Indenting and Formatting

The style in Caffeine is a mixture between ISO C 99 calling conventions, K&R blocks breakings and KNF -- Kernel Normal Form -- indenting.

• Functions in ISO C 99 (ISO/IEC 9899:1999) calling convention.
• Block must be broken using K&R indenting style.
• The code must be indented with concrete tabs of width 4.
• The fill column must set to the column 78.

Concrete tabs are used to speed up the compile time of caffeine, concrete tabs means less tokens to parse.

Naming Conventions

• Lowercase functions.
• Lowercase identifiers.
• Lowercase constants in files and static variables.
• Uppercase enums.
• Uppercase macros.
• Uppercase define constants (in headers).

For core functions, you must use: <module_abbreviation>_<function_name> I.E.: cbuf_create

For caffeine functions, you must use: <module_abbreviation><function_name>

For parameters, and local variables, abbreviations are permitted.

For typedefs, you must use: <module_abbreviation>__t

For structures, you must use: <module_abbreviation>__s

For single variables and parameters, hungarian notation -- type prefix or suffix -- isn't permitted.

Emacs Style

To use emacs during caffeine hacking you must use the next sentence in your .emacs file:

(c-add-style "caffeine"
         '((c-basic-offset . 4)
           (c-comment-only-line-offset . 0)
           (c-offsets-alist . ((statement-block-intro . +)
                   (knr-argdecl-intro . +)
                   (substatement-open . 0)
                   (label . 0)
                   (statement-cont . +)
                   (inline-open . 0)
                   (inexpr-class . 0)
                   ))))

This will ensure that the code is indented under the caffeine rules.

Vim Style

For VIM is needed the cino variable. I'm working on that, but isn't ready yet.

Kate Style

On Kate you must turn off the mixed indenting style and set the tab key to insert concrete tabs. As part of KNF indenting style.

Caffeine Hacking Guide

Before you start

You must read the STYLE guide.

2. What can I do?

• Write unitary tests for every algorithm in Caffeine. If you don't have enough time, you can submit the test and we will debug the tests for you.

• Contribute with modules. Write a module to extend caffeine, something that can be usefull.

• Wait for the caffeine design specs.

3. Centralized Development

• Contributions are received through the development mailing list.
• Module contributions retain the original copyleft notice (copyright under LGPL), if you write a module, you own the copyleft notice.
• Patch and patchset contributions that affects up to 50.000001% of a module, means the inclusion of the proper copyleft notice in the module file.
• Patch and patchset contributions that affects less to 49.00001% of a module, means the inclusion of the author name in the AUTHORS file.

4. Avoid Compile Warnings

Caffeine is build under strict compilation flags. Common flags to build caffeine are:

-Wall -Wextra -Wshadow -pedantic -std=c99

This means that the code must be 100% C99 (ISO/IEC 9899:1990) compilant. Every compile warning related to this standard, must be removed. To build Caffeine under debugging configuration, see the BUILDING text file.

Related Webpages

The caffeine main web page is located here coder.cl

Authors

• Copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Molina Wegener coder.cl