I am new to automation for Windows apps, apart from using basic Sikuli.
I checked some options like PyAutoGUI, PyWinAuto. Which is the best tool for automation of a 3rd party Windows application out of Sikuli, PyAutoGUI, PyWinAuto or any other tool?
Preferable - a cross platform tool (Mac and Windows)
If you need text properties based automation, pywinauto should help you. But there is no popular text-based cross-platform tool in Open Source field.
On macOs pyatom/ATOMac is good enough if you prefer Python (it requires some compilation during setup, but works well).
This is the big list of open source tools I'm maintaining.
PyAutoGUI has image recognition capabilities (like Sikuli or Lackey) but it's not text based (even no Win32 API support).
PyAutoIt bindings and AutoIt itself doesn't support MS UI Automation technology (only Win32 API).
The Getting Started Guide for pywinauto explains some differences between these 2 technologies and how to switch between them in pywinauto.
Anyway this field is complicated and you may face many challenges. Feel free to ask more detailed questions because this question is more suitable for
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I want to create a third-party plug-in for Serato (a software for DJs).
I searched in their site and I saw that Serato supports VST (VST2) plug-ins. So my question now is what should I read in order to create a VST plug-in?
Thank you in advance.
A good starting point would be the wikipedia site for VSTs, just to get the basics if you are not familiar with this technology, first you need to know the creators of the VSTs: Steinberg.
VST SDK is a set of C++ classes based around an underlying C API. The
SDK can be downloaded from their website.
Therefore I would recommend starting with something simple. Let’s review a few options:
JUCE
This technology is trending for a few reasons, like their homepage says:
With support for PC, Mac and Linux, JUCE is the perfect tool for
building powerful and complex applications. JUCE also supports the
development of plug-ins: VST, AU and AAX. Run your desktop
applications on mobile! One-click deployment to Android and iOS
(requires Android Studio and XCode) Adjust the user interface of your
application with the Projucer live coding engine Use the best audio
performance available on iOS and Android.
So the pros of this technology are the big community, multi-platform and that is free, at least for non-commercial developments (then if you want to sell it you have to pay). The cons would be that you need to have a little more than the basics of C++ to get started, fortunately there are a lot of tutorials on their page, youtube and the internet, the community is growing so if you have issues you can always ask.
SynthEdit and FL SynthMaker
If you don’t want to get into the code that fast you can start practicing with these, as they don’t require programming expertise, or only a few basics.
SynthEdit is a framework and a visual circuit design that allows you
to create your own synths with only drag & drop without programming.
Therefore giving you the flexibility of using your DSP algorithms
inside the modules.
This is cool if you want to start going quickly, this currently has a cost you can check on their official website.
FL SynthMaker, aka Flowstone, comes free with FL studio. It has a straightforward drag-and-drop graphical interface and a wide range of components. You can use it to code modules and DSP in Ruby and comes with loads of examples to get started quickly and its capacity to assist you in creating a prototype within a short time is a plus.
FLowstone is a programming application that is used to create virtual
instruments effects and computer control of external hardware without
the need to write basic code. The instruments and effects you create
in SynthMaker can be used in FL Studio as 'native' plugins and shared
with other FLowstone users.
MAX MSP
Max, also known as Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling '74. Over its more than thirty-year history, composers, performers, software designers, researchers, and artists have used it to create recordings, performances, and installations.
The Max program is modular, with most routines existing as shared
libraries. An application programming interface (API) allows
third-party development of new routines (named external objects).
Thus, Max has a large user base of programmers unaffiliated with
Cycling '74 who enhance the software with commercial and
non-commercial extensions to the program. Because of this extensible
design, which simultaneously represents both the program's structure
and its graphical user interface (GUI), Max has been described as the
lingua franca for developing interactive music performance software.
SOUL
The SOUL project is creating a new language and infrastructure for
writing and deploying audio code. It aims to unlock improvements in
latency, performance, portability and ease-of-development that aren't
possible with the current mainstream techniques that are being used.
SOUL unlocks native-level speed, even when hosted from slower, safer
languages. The SOUL language makes audio coding more accessible and
less error-prone, enhancing productivity for both beginners and expert
professionals.
Maximilian
Is a cross-platform and multi-target audio synthesis and signal processing library. It was written in C++ and provides bindings to Javascript. It's compatible with native implementations for MacOS, Windows, Linux and iOS systems, and client-side browser-based applications. The main features are:
sample playback, recording and looping
support for WAV and OGG files.
a selection of oscillators and filters enveloping
multichannel mixing for 1, 2, 4 and 8 channel setups controller
mapping functions
effects including delay, distortion, chorus, flanging granular
synthesis, including time and pitch stretching atom synthesis
real-time music information retrieval functions: spectrum analysis,
spectral features, octave analysis, Bark scale analysis, and MFCCs
example projects for Windows and MacOS, using command line and
OpenFrameworks environments
example projects for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers using the
Web Audio API ScriptProcessorNode (deprecated!)
example projects for Chromium-based browsers using the Web Audio API
AudioWorklet (e.g. Chrome, Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi)
Extras
A few months ago I found this community that is focused on audio programming. They also have a Youtube channel with hundreds of tutorials and a discord server where you can ask questions, and even show your projects or even get a job. If you are interested. It’s called the “The audio Programmer”
Hope this helps you get started. I know there are a lot of option out there and this might confuse you at the beginning but I hope this little guide helps you choose a good starting point depending on your needs and goals since every technology offers different things.
Background: I have created a CRUD web app using a java based RAD tool called Wavemaker. I am considering developing the app again in a framework that has greater support. Even though I have some experience in development I still get confused by all of the terms. My understanding is that there are languages (C#, PHP, Javascript, Java, etc), frameworks (Wavemaker, Ruby on Rails, Yii, Symfony, Code Igniter, Zend, etc) and editors (Dreamweaver?)?
I outsourced the development of a mobile version of my web app and this was created using jquery mobile, php and ajax. I started using Dreamweaver because I read it had integration for development with jquery mobile and hence I could perform modifications on my mobile app.
I was wondering whether Dreamweaver was a viable choice for the development of a CRUD web app? I used dreamweaver many years ago for the create of html pages and it would automatically create a lot of "unclean" code that made it hard to maintain. I fear that I would put myself in a similar situation here with server-side code.
If Dreamweaver is not appropriate could you kindly suggest a framework that may meet my requirements?
The main things I liked about Wavemaker:
Drag and drop widgets
A lot of the database functions were automatically handled
The main things I don't like about developing with Wavemaker (not Wavemaker itself):
Support: The support generally involves posting to the forums and hoping for a reply that may never come. I would rather paid support over this option which to be fair is offered by vmware but I found it too confusing.
Small number of freelance contractors: Much of the functionality within my app required coding or workarounds outside of the standard features of wavemaker and it is very hard to find a freelance wavemaker developer for help
Ongoing bugs that cause a headache during development
With that being said my priorities are:
Support: great documentation with rapid response to problems (even if this requires a paid subscription)
A large number of freelance contractors available (I guess this means a popular framework using a popular language).
Simple and easy to use (I understand there would be an initial learning curve)
Stable: I won't be running into bugs that hold up my development and need me to wait for the next release for a fix
The ability to incorporate reporting like BIRT reports or Jasper.
Possibly steer clear of Java as I have found Tomcat to be an extra level of complication that it would be great to do without.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Dreamweaver was a viable choice for the development of a CRUD web app?
Yes, but with caveats. It still does not produce code that advanced users would consider "clean" but the integration of JQuery Mobile in CS5.5 makes it a good choice for non-coders or beginning coders who need to spin up rapidly and will worry about elegance later.
That being said, if you are outsourcing the design it is likely that the code you get back will be editable in Dreamweaver but not written in such a way as to take advantage of Dreamweaver's built-in behaviors (automatic code writing). Dreamweaver expects to see code written to its specs in order to take over for the user. If not, it is still a great wysiwyg editor and above-average code editor.
But it's not a framework. In your sitution, JQuery Mobile is the framework and any JQuery Mobile developer should be able to step in and run with the project. But if you write big chunks of the CRUD using Dreamweaver, developers may tell you that they will want to rewrite those sections. Some won't care.
From what I can recall, ActiveX components are executable files that conform to some form of standard, that can be distributed on the web and run on IE.
Is ActiveX still an 'active' technology? and if not, why not?
EDIT:
I actually write mostly Silverlight and WPF applications at the moment. I am currently working on a presentation regarding plugin technologies, so am more interested in ActiveX from a historical perspective.
I suggest you to develop XBAP Application rather than Activex for the following reasons:
WPF provides more interesting features , and MS do more effort to improve WPF than ActiveX programming.
XBAP application run under a sandbox it's more secure than ActiveX.
Yes, ActiveX is still ‘active’, but is going down because of a number of reasons:
Potential security issues. ActiveX allows execution of native code on the client side and this is the biggest problem. Your personal security depends on control’s vendor.
You can use ActiveX only with Internet Explorer. Last few years IE loses its leadership, so ActiveX becomes less available on client side.
The progress of cross-browser frameworks: Java, Flash, WPF... Five years ago ActiveX was almost the only choice for implementing heavy client side plug-in. Now there is no such performance difference. At least it is not so significant to sacrifice security.
At the moment Iam evaluating java web frameworks. More precisely Iam talking about GWT, JSF2 and apache wicket. One very importent criteria in this evaluation is prototyping.
The prototyping process in my company can be described by the folloing:
The customer can produce GUIs with an easy to use WYSIWYG editor, by drag&drop-ing web components on the corporate predefined website structur. There is also a need for some litte dynamic being like navigation from one frame to another.
So Iam looking for tools. These tools should not only provide nice GUIs but also deliver
some basic code, which can be forwarded to the development. The aim is to avoid missunderstandings between designers and developers as much as possible. More or less the
developers just have to implements the code, but not to implement the optical requirements.
In addition it would be desirable to customize the components thats been used in the WYSIWYG editor. Does anyone know any good tools for the mentioned frameworks (GWT, JSF2, wicket)?
One of the challenges with WYSIWYG tools for UI is that you generally have to pick between rapid prototyping and maintainable code. Even then, as soon as you want to do something that's not supported by the prototyping tool, you can implement it as you would without the prototyping tool, but your round-trip functionality (namely turning your app back into something that can be edited) is broken or crippled unless extra work is done to generate the metadata that the editor needs.
Upgrading between major releases is another issue. Vendors and groups who have developed these tools have a historically spotty record of when they stop supporting older versions, reasonably because of limited resources and sometimes difficult problems with how to track solid innovation happening in the framework itself.
My suggestion instead is to prototype with an RIA prototyping tool like Balsamiq Mockups or use a grid system like 960 Grid to generate rapid prototypes, then use a web development framework that allows your developers to run the code with or without the backend server. Wicket has a tag called that is great for this kind of thing -- web devs can fill a div with stuff that a component should generate, and Wicket devs can wrap the contents of that tag with after they implement it. Both parties can coexist for a long time that way.
Try GWT Designer for GWT.
Introduction
Quick Start Guide
Download
There's nothing like this for Wicket that I know of. The closest you would get to any kind of resource reuse from your customer would be to give them a drag and drop HTML editor - the resulting HTML could then form the basis of Wicket page/panel layout.
if you are planing to use a javascript library, you may use extjs,
http://www.sencha.com/products/js/
they have developed a nice designer
www.sencha.com/products/designer/
there is also a port of ext in GWT
www.sencha.com/products/gwt/
You have to pay for a commercial license if your application isn't open source!
I've been around Visual Basic for years in high school, and I've grown up with the IDE supplied by Microsoft. It'd wonderful, but the educational and "working-model" editions of VB available to me through school don't allow me to redistribute software, as part of the EULA with Microsoft.
I instead find myself working in perl to design programs for friends and family, and it works fairly well, but I don't have a firm grasp on building user interfaces yet. I understand I could design user-interfaces with tcl/tk for perl, but the notion of coding all of that by hand is a bit daunting to me. That brings me to my question.
Do you have any suggestions for a tool I could use that would allow me to build GUIs for my perl programs?
Thanks in advance!
In addition to what tsee suggested, you can have a look at :
Perl/Qt (using Qtdesigner) and Perl::GladeXML (using Glade)
With Glade and Qtdesigner, you can generate a XML file that will describe your user interface and it will be a matter of hooking your perl code to widget's events.
I don't think you will find something as simple and well integrated for Perl as the Visual Basic GUI builder. A couple of pointers:
wxGlade can be used to design GUIs for the Wx GUI toolkit (for Perl, not only Python).
For Win32::GUI, you can use the GUI Loft to achieve something similar.
I think there's a bunch of other GUI builders including at least one for Tk, but I don't remember the name.
Either way, I believe you will have to accept that you have to do more coding vs. designing when compared to VB. The upside is that if you use Tk or Wx, your programs may well be portable to all major operating systems.
For a Perl-specific development environment, you might want to check out Padre, which is itself written in Perl using Wx. It's under active development, so eventually, somebody will probably integrate a GUI builder, too.
Frankly, having thought about GUIs for years and never getting round to them, I've found the best way to distribute GUI apps with perl is to use Catalyst, its built in server and for windows users, distributing it with Strawberry Perl (the professional edition comes with Catalyst included). For Linux or Mac users a local::lib installation to pull in the required cpan modules. Optionally bundle in a copy of portable firefox if you want not to have the usual web development pain caused by internet explorer.
tl;dr; Sidestep the whole issue by going for web development with a framework that comes with its own standalone server.