EcereSDK 0.44.09.0 Portable with OpenSSL (shared and static)

Finally have time to play with EcereSDK. In my own opinion, it is more convenience than Qt.

• Size is small
• Easier to build than Qt
• The SDK is more portable 

There already have portable versions around, the EcereSDKPortable by Ryoanji. However, it is based on 0.44 SDK two years ago without any new updates. So, I decided to build my own portable version for the latest 0.44.09.9 as of my writing. Instead of using Mingw-w64, I have chosen TDM-GCC.

Thanks to Ecere Teams' efforts, building the SDK on Windows platform is very easy and fast, no quirks needed. Just download the sdk source, the toolchains and upx. Open a command prompt with administrator right and set up the corresponding path. Finally run "mingw32-make" will do the job. As I am building a portable sdk, I did not run "mingw32-make install".

This only takes me around half an hour to build the sdk with a fully functional ide. And it only that me another half hour to build the static libraries as well. That's a big contrast with Qt.You may argue that Qt may be much more powerful, e.g. they have include QML, WebKit, JavaScript engine, ... and others. But the size and time to take for building Qt just not my cup of tea as I just want a simple tools to create cross-platform applications.

After building the SDK, it is time for me to really play with the eC language.

If you are interested to my build, you can find the final products and the corresponding tools at EcereSDK Portable.

• EcereSDKPortable-0.44.09.9_tdmgcc-4.7.1-3_openssl-1.0.0e.7z: Just extract the file (preserve folder structure) to any folder you want. After unzip, run "<FolderForExtraction>\EcereSDKPortable\ide.bat" to start using the tools.
• EcereSDKPortable-0.44.09.9_tdmgcc-4.7.1-3_openssl-1.0.0e_build_script.7z: This contains the Windows batch script, tools (7z.exe and wget.exe) and some supporting files. The batch file is handcrafted by myself and may contains errors not trapped. What the script doing is using wget to grab the files required to build the SDK from their original site (you can find the location inside the batch file with variable urlXXX. If you cannot find the files in the original web site, a copy of them can be found in the same folder as well. The script just build the x32 and x64 shared version of the SDK. Static libs and SQLCipher drivers (shared and static) required to use the IDE to build as I cannot find ways to just using command line to build all the stuff. If anyone has any idea on how to do all the stuff with Windows command line, please share with me so that I can perform some fully automated build testing stuff.

The batch file has only been tested on Windows 7 64 bit and Windows Server 2008 R2 64 bit platform as these are the only Windows boxes that is available to me. Building on 32 bit platform may not worked as the batch file assume default architecture is 64 bit. Tweaking with the batch file may help but not guaranteed. Running the batch inside VirtualBox will certainly failed, which may be due to the DirectX support is missing or incompatible.

2014/04/01
NOTE:  Due to unknown reason, in order to debug your project, you need to copy the gdb.exe as x86_64-w64-mingw32-gdb.exe under EcereSDKPortable\tdm\bin. It seems the ide cannot recognize the existence of gdb.exe (in version 0.44.08, I did not need to do this steps).

2014/04/02
NOTE: You will also need to download the gdb for x32 to debug the x32 version of your project. Save the gdb.exe as i686-w64-mingw32-gdb.exe under EcereSDKPortable\tdm\bin. This gdb.exe require libexpat-1.dll in the same folder, and jit-reader.h under EcereSDKPortable\tdm\include\gdb.