Author Topic: uTasker usable with Keil Compiler (not GNU)  (Read 8936 times)

Offline stephan

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 2
    • View Profile
uTasker usable with Keil Compiler (not GNU)
« on: May 04, 2011, 01:30:24 PM »
Hi Mark,

I'm quite impressed by your project and with some luck it may be suitable for my projects.

Situation:
I'm using NXP LPC23xx/24xx with Keil MDK-ARM  + RL-ARM until now and was quite happy with it. What I was originally only looking for, is a replacement for the Keil TcpNet Webserver (included in RL-ARM), which does not fit my needs. Replacing the whole IP stack or even the complete RL-ARM library could be acceptable, but I actually want to stick with the Keil toolchain, because lots of existing code would potentially have to be touched when switching to a different toolchain.

Questions:

1) Is it possible to use uTasker with the Keil MDK-ARM compiler? Somewhere on your site it sounded like one would have to use the GNU compiler. I have never tried, but I'd expect quite some code to break when switching. So will I have to?

2) Is it possible to use only parts (i.e. the web server + layers below) from uTasker? Or does it rely on being run on a complete uTasker RTOS?

3) Where can I find a documentation/feature list of the web server?

4) All your NXP service packs are marked "beta". What does it mean?

5) Any specific hints from your side, when coming from the Keil evironment originally?

Thanks!

Stephan

Offline mark

  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 3234
    • View Profile
    • uTasker
Re: uTasker usable with Keil Compiler (not GNU)
« Reply #1 on: May 04, 2011, 02:23:18 PM »
Stephan

1) The LPC2XXX package includes GCC, IAR, Keil uVision and Rowleys Crossworks projects. Therefore it should be OK with the MDK-ARM compiler.

2) There are a few OS resources used by the web server and stack so it may not be that easy to separete them. Generally it is intended to be used together as one package.

3) The web server can do quite a lot but isn't standardised (eg. it doesn't support PHP, but can do similar things using its own interface). There are a few posts with examples of typical requirements (mainly displaying and manipulating variables - eg. http://www.utasker.com/forum/index.php?topic=94.0 ) - dynamic content generation is described here: http://www.utasker.com/docs/uTasker/uTaskerV1.3_Content_Generation.PDF

It interacts with the uFileSystem and user files systems (http://www.utasker.com/docs/uTasker/uTaskerFileSystem_3.PDF and http://www.utasker.com/docs/uTasker/uTaskerUserFiles.PDF) and can be used to serve data from an SD card (utFAT - http://www.utasker.com/docs/uTasker/uTaskerUserFiles.PDF )
It supports basic authentication and post methods - together with the standard user call backs it can then be controlled to do most other forms of protection (eg. individual user access rights on a page basis).

4) Only the V1.4-4B is a Beta (it includes new SDIO controller support) - otherwise V1.4-3 was the last release (including SD card via SPI and utFAT). The Beta versions (or developers version, or pre-release versions) are generally versions made available a.s.a.p. so that the new features can be tested and used, even when the project hasn't otherwise been broadly tested (older versions are always available in case something gets broken in the process).

5) Keil offers a compiler/debugging environment, which should work normally with the project; there are a few Keil specific defines (mainly in LPC23xx.c and sometimes some assembler code) but the rest is not compiler specific.

Keil however is also way a supplier of middle-ware; presumably this is very professional (I believe the price tags are quite high) and could be much better than the uTasker offering - however I don't know any details and it may turn out that it is in fact more restictive than the uTasker solutions. I think that the best thing to do is have a try and see how things go - the uTasker simulator is certainly a hugh plus when working with Web server based projects since it allows fast and efficient development, testing and debugging. The web server is also designed to use low resource levels so should enable much more user sessions that other solutions with constrained memory resources.

You can get an idea of things that can be simply done with the uTasker web server at the on-line demo (http://demo.utasker.com). There are various projects that have however done much more powerful things with it ;-)

Regards

Mark

Offline stephan

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 2
    • View Profile
Re: uTasker usable with Keil Compiler (not GNU)
« Reply #2 on: May 05, 2011, 10:27:57 AM »
Hi Mark,

thank you for the summary.

I have not had a detailed look into uTasker yet, but worked a lot with Keil compiler and middleware (and liked it). And from what I've seen so far - while Keil documentation currently is more consistent than yours - in terms of functionality uTasker doesn't seem to be quite far away from the Keil middleware.

The original trigger for looking for alternatives is that the Keil web server is limited (e.g. does not support authentication on a per page basis) and additionally does not allow solving the limits due to unavailable source code.

I'll check out uIP first, because it might create less effort for me than getting into a completely new middleware for that project. But it won't take long until a test-drive with uTasker, it looks very interesting and well-priced to me.

Stephan

Offline mhoneywill

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 173
    • View Profile
Re: uTasker usable with Keil Compiler (not GNU)
« Reply #3 on: May 05, 2011, 12:57:15 PM »
If you are going to look at UIP then it might be worth looking at LWIP http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/lwip/ . UIP is very simple and may well be too simple for your requirements.

FreeRtos has demo's for the NXP chips you are looking at and I think they have LWIP and UIP demos http://www.freertos.org/

One think I really value about uTasker is the quality and speed of Mark's support (I my opinion the best of any software product I've purchased), this has helped me out even when the documentation doesn't cover everything.

Good Luck with your investigations.

Cheers

Martin