Nmap Development mailing list archives
Re: GSoC Proposal: Nmap on Maemo/ Symbian
From: Sukhbir Singh <singheinstein () gmail com>
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 11:00:42 +0530
Hi David and everyone else, It's great to be thinking about these things and I'm glad you're
interested in the project! I have to say though, that I think it's completely unworkable to rewrite Zenmap using Qt. Even if it was successful, we would have to abandon the existing GTK+ version. The key thing, as Fyodor mentioned, is having to maintain two codebases. There's no good way to do that.
I was thinking of giving Nmap a Qt GUI. I won't be attempting to recode Zenmap GTK -> Zenmap Qt, but write a completely new Zenmap Qt - from scratch. When moving code between toolkits, the best approach I think is to stick to a native toolkit for that particular platform.
I'm pretty sure Zenmap does run on Maemo, at least there is code that is designed to handle it. Fyodor had it running on a version of Maemo, just not the most recent one.
Indeed, I also saw that. And of course Maemo supports both the GTK+ toolkit and Qt. If we do a Qt port, you would be running the most recent one :)
There was a newer Qt interface to Nmap announced in December 2009. I just looked and its most recent release was a few days ago. Maybe it would be better to port that to work on Symbian? http://www.nmapsi4.org/ http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2009/q4/654
Quite possibly yes. I have looked over the source code and I think a few changes need to be made. Specifically the UI part, since we will be working with small screen sizes on the S60. Same for Maemo, though we have more control over that because of the touch screen.
Can't these platforms run native compiled code? Why does the language matter? I'm pretty sure Nmap runs on Android, but I'm not sure about Zenmap. Thanks for the ideas. I'm looking at this from the point of view of a maintenance programmer, so naturally I'm going to resist big changes like this. But sometimes change is good. Anyway, it's good to see thought going into the future direction of the interface of Zenmap
Take a look at [1], the Native Development Kit for Android that allows the use of native code in Android applications. I quote, NDK will not benefit most applications. As a developer, you will need to
balance its benefits ... Typical good candidates for the NDK are self-contained, CPU-intensive operations that don't allocate much memory, such as signal processing, physics simulation, and so on."
So Nmap as a native code on Android might be possible (again, I don't have much experience with this), but it is not a good idea. Also I had a talk with the guys in #android-dev about this. They also shared the same sentiment that you can do it, but it is not recommended and may not be entirely possible. My point being: there has to be a shift in the code base if you are to take Nmap to new platforms. Likewise take the example of the iPhone. iPhone programs are written in Objective C rather than C++. Of course we could package up the logic in C++ and call it from Objective C but there are always bound to be problems. If you are worried about maintaining the code base, I think there should not be much problem. After all, Nmap remains the same. We would just be adding a GUI layer on top of it. And like I mentioned if Nmap has to go to newer platforms, you have to do this. Looking for your inputs after all I am a beginner and you are the real Gurus! -- Sukhbir CC: Nmap-dev, David References: [1] http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html _______________________________________________ Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/
Current thread:
- GSoC Proposal: Nmap on Maemo/ Symbian Sukhbir Singh (Mar 22)
- Re: GSoC Proposal: Nmap on Maemo/ Symbian Fyodor (Mar 22)
- Re: GSoC Proposal: Nmap on Maemo/ Symbian luke jeter (Mar 22)
- Re: GSoC Proposal: Nmap on Maemo/ Symbian Fyodor (Mar 22)
- Re: GSoC Proposal: Nmap on Maemo/ Symbian Sukhbir Singh (Mar 23)
- Re: GSoC Proposal: Nmap on Maemo/ Symbian David Fifield (Mar 23)
- Re: GSoC Proposal: Nmap on Maemo/ Symbian Sukhbir Singh (Mar 23)
- Re: GSoC Proposal: Nmap on Maemo/ Symbian luke jeter (Mar 22)
- Re: GSoC Proposal: Nmap on Maemo/ Symbian Fyodor (Mar 22)