Dane from BeOS Radio is looking for a good BeOS developer for an important app. In a nutshell, Dane feels that BeOS needs a quality scheduling app that will allow a user to setup events that run apps periodically. Dane’s solution is a nice BeOS app that servers as a Cron configurator. Click here to read the whole article over at LeBuzz.

9 Responses to “BeOS Developer Needed!”

1. Guildencrantz Says:
   November 3rd, 2003 at 9:19 pm

   Ironically enough this is a project that I have been thinking of taking on for a little while now. I didn’t realize that Scheduler had gone AWOL, but now that I know that I think I’ll start work (tonght?) on a front end for cron.

   ~~Guildencrantz

2. Anon Says:
   November 4th, 2003 at 6:09 am

   You can also get the source for it from beunited.org:

   cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@code.beunited.org:/cvs/samplestudio login

   cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@code.beunited.org:/cvs/samplestudio co .

   Cheers

3. Ryan Says:
   November 4th, 2003 at 7:22 am

   Is Scheduler a component of samplestudio? Is that a Typo? What source are we talking about?

4. guildencrantz Says:
   November 4th, 2003 at 5:05 pm

   I checked over at BeUnited and Scheduler is not on the list. I have not been able to find either the source code or my purchased copy (it must have been on the backup drive which died. 120gigs of data, mostly unmirrored, gone.)

   I’ll download the trial and start playing with code after work today.

   ~~Guildencrantz

   Hm. Haven’t written in C++ for a while, only Perl. This could be interesting.

5. tb100 Says:
   November 5th, 2003 at 8:09 am

   It’s not on bu

   I think Anon thought we were discussing Dane’s other recent “call to action” - that of sample studio.

   Discussion cropped up on the OBOS list about a scheduler. It was suggested that writing a front end to cron would be much harder than, say, Grep as cron is an interactive CLI app - it’s not just a case of generating a command line and running it. A better method would be to have an “Event Daemon” running in the background that can then send messages and get actions done. This is a lot similar to how scheduler works I think. A front end to cron would not be a very clean solution, and might not be much easier to implement that a scheduler-type app from the ground up.

   Good luck with it anyway Guildencrantz

   Simon

6. Yez Says:
   November 5th, 2003 at 10:31 am

   I thought cron had a very cryptic configuration file. So, something like “2003101208002 -r appname” means to run an app called appname at 0800 on Oct 12th 2003… It is fairly complicated for the average user but if Guildencrantz can build a nice GUI interface that makes more since of all the possible options and can put that into the cron cryptic language and touch cron so it knows to look at is conf file again, that would be GREAT!

   Let us know how it goes or if you need help Guildencrantz! Also, if you are serious about starting and completing the project, let Dane know over at LeBuzz.com so he can get you in touch with anyone else that has said they are interested. A dev TEAM for this project would be cool.

7. Brent P. Newhall Says:
   November 6th, 2003 at 2:20 pm

   An alternative is to build this app “on top of” cron by building a GUI that writes out a cron configuration file.

8. Deej Says:
   November 7th, 2003 at 9:00 pm

   Brent still lurks!!! Howdy!

   Deej

9. edge Says:
   November 9th, 2003 at 2:32 am

   hrmm… cron is not so complicated. Mind you, I’ve never used it on BeOS (and my current state of affairs preclude me from investigating it), but the configuration is a lot simpler than people are presuming here.

   It should not be that difficult to write a front-end, there are already several GPL’d GUI front-ends a.k.a. ’schedulers’ for cron already written and open-sourced.

   The latest cron I’ve used on other unix-like platforms is not so hard to manage. To be blunt, just look at crontab in any standard UNIX install. There are usually hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly directories in the config (so you can just drop scripts in to be run automagically). There is usually also a directory that gets sourced by the cron daemon. The scripts in there have to be modified with a time config in-front of the command itself to be run. This is the only hard part really, but it is very flexible in that you can tell it to be run at intervals - not just static times.

   There are of course alternatives to crond, designed for systems not always on (this would apply to home-user desktops I suppose).

   FYI there is a newby guide right here:
   http://www.unixgeeks.org/security/newbie/unix/cron-1.html

   -edge