This weekend is all about housekeeping. The reason: PureBasic v6.4 was released two weeks ago.1 So I spent the morning updating my open source projects built on it. No new features, just recompiling and testing. I also took the opportunity to bring the documentation up to date. The way you would expect from a well-maintained Git repository, including my offer of professional business support for real added value. Updated projects at a glance: QR Code Detection A QR/barcode scanner for standard webcams or RTSP streams. It provides a virtual keyboard and essentially replaces dedicated hardware, while offering significantly more flexibility.2 Read more

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, you still had to dive deep into the hardware to get decent software. This meant checking hardware-related register values to get mouse coordinates via interrupt 33h, for example. 1 Or write inline assembler within Turbo Pascal procedures or PowerBASIC functions. Those were the programming languages I grew up with. Later, others came along, but I never really got used to them. I am a “BASIC guy” as I write in my README on Codeberg.2 Read more

PureBasic v6.3 came out yesterday.1 A real good occasion to recompile my projects based on it and make them more visible. Especially in times of heavyweight frameworks, these tools show that functional software can be done differently: single binaries with native performance, extremely small, transparent and easy to maintain. A self-hosted aviation weather planner with DWD ICON-D2 data, which processes raw data on the server side and delivers it as a lean web application. 2 The front end and web server do not require external services or frameworks, including OSM caching, reverse proxy and kiosk mode for permanently operated POI/POS information systems that can be used offline aswell. Read more

Yes, I have a passion for exotic languages. This time I experimented with Purebasic1 and wanted to see how quickly a robust, multi-threaded HTTP REST API could be created. Cross-platform for Linux, Windows and OS X, free of additional dependencies as a single-file binary behind a reverse proxy that takes care of everything with TLS and load balancing. The result is a complete skeleton framework that can be quickly customized for your own purposes. With only 100 KB, it is ridiculously small and extremely fast, with its own config file and logging. I even found time to integrate Swagger. The project is available on Codeberg, have fun!2 Read more