In the thread titled: Re: Stereophile's visit to Sonos
there is a lot of discussion about alternative UI for
the SlimServer, Flash, Ajax, and other technologies
that are a lot more modern and sexy than boring old
HTML.
I believe this is a good thing to discuss a little,
altho selection of one tool or another really
belongs on the developers list.
This is the users list, so descriptions of what
cool features are desired is fair game.
kdf wrote:
has anyone looked into the Google toolkit?
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
I have, and as complex APIs go, it isn't too bad. But
it is a ton more complex than writing HTML with CSS.
More worrysome to me is that it would bind a great
open source product into a vendor's toolkit. I can
see pluses in using any big vendor's toolkit, but
one has to acknowledge that any vendor's needs are
not always in line with the open source community.
Not to pick on Google, you can say the same thing
about Microsoft, Adobe, Yahoo, Oracle, etc.
I found it not too hard to add some ajax to the Fishbone skin, using
prototype.js as the base. However, there is a limit to what that can
do without adding much more complicated framework. I don't think
that drag & drop will work using that. And, of course, drag and drop
from outside the browser is even more of a mystery.
I think this is key. What people want is drag and drop everywhere.
They want to drag an album just ripped with something like CDex or EAC
and drop it into the Slimserver, and have the files move
to the right place, the database updated, etc.
This might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I haven't see a well worded
request that is less grandiose. And I sure don't have any idea
how one would really implement such a thing. Or how many folks
really would want it, and would want it over any of the
other "top 50" requests.
I'm a strong believer is using the web for the ui. It allows a
ready-made platform instead of using up resources just to maintain an
application framework for MANY different OS's. Don't ever
underestimate the difficulties in maintaining a common interface
across even multiple windows versions, let alone OSX and the many
flavours of linux. Slimserver provides options for API's so that
third parties can create their own preferred UI on their preferred
OS. The popularity of JRiver is a good example. Why not campaign
those developers to create hooks for the CLI, and the importers.
But the web is so last century. It is understood and works. No reason
to keep using it.
The Flash discussion seems to have split into two views of it, neither
of which I think are important to this discussion. There is Flash the
video/blinking object eyecandy, and there is Flash the universal runtime
tool that does the same kinds of things that Ajax (or the Windows API)
do. With Flash, you can develop some very cool user interfaces that
work on lots of platforms, at least all modern Windows, Mac OS-X and
recent Linux/*BSD systems. I am going to give credit to the folks
that suggest usign Flash that they do not mean the heavy, bandwidth
eating eye candy that deserves to be cursed, but rather the
"Flash as platform" model that Macromedia has been pushing for at least
a year. As a platform, Flash can do good things.
The downside IMHO to Flash the platform, is the per-seat price
for developers. It is far too high to work for contributors in
something like SlimServer.
But the price is just an implementation barrier.
What is missing is a realistic discussion of the features
and functions that people think the SlimServer needs.
--
Pat
http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html
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