In the main thread there has been a fair amount of talk about IR blasters, relays etc. This go me thinking about the subject of software expansion, along the lines of plugins, applets, bolt-ons etc. Now seems like a good time to discuss how this wants to be dealt with in a community project.
At least in the beginning we will probably still be using LMS, so the existing plugin interface will most likely be used for the server side. But on the player side it does not look like we will be using SqueezePlay which had the "applet" infrstructure. Some simple aspects of player to server communication for things like IR blaster was embedded in slimproto, but I don't think we need to stick with that if we don't want to. A lot of work was done with JSON outside of slimproto. Another issue is how such expansion code will be implemented on the player. In SqueezePlay it was one big monolithic program with a Lua interpreter that handled all the applets, personally I think that is the wrong way to go for this. We have a fairly powerful hardware platform with a fair amount of memory, I think we can get away with multiple cooperating programs, I don't think it has to be one monolithic thing. Having expansion code written in an interpretive language (such as lua) has some big advantages, which still probably exist for this project, but I don't think it has to be one interpreter instance. I don't see why we couldn't have several lua interpreters running at the same time, each one running a particular add-on. The "linux way" tends to be multiple programs cooperating together to make a system rather than one large monolithic thing, and I think with our hardware platform this is certainly doable. But then of course that brings up issues about how these things are distributed and installed, updated etc. All this may be completely unnecessary, but I just have a gut feeling that if some form of framework isn't worked out that everybody that wants to add some little functionality to the system is going to reinvent the wheel and do it their own way and after a while we will have a mess. Any thoughts? BTW I certainly do NOT want to be the keeper of this, I'm doing the hardware, that's enough for me, but I think this needs discussing. John S. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=98179 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
