On Saturday, February 18, 2017 at 11:40:46 AM UTC, Schooner wrote: > > Hi > > Just a straw poll, to see if anyone is using webtalk and if they are, > from packages or a RIP? > > There is an opportunity to reduce the dependencies for Machinekit, by > making webtalk an optional extra in a build. > Only if selected would libwebsockets be required. > > This would speed up builds slightly, plus reduce the dependencies and > binary footprint for the vast majority of users. > > Affirmative responses only required > > Thanks >
I would say keep it in the build, it is a possibly useful piece of infrastructure, I have tried using it but it did not seem very userfriendly and so never went further than trying to compile it. I think there was a lot of good ideas about network connected things that went into machinekit early on but unfortunately there are just not enough people able and interested in developing them further. The idea of machinetalk and webtalk it seemed could give something like ethercat ( synopsis <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IId15I3oFQw> ) with mdns discovery and protobuf allowing futureproofing of protocols. Unfortunately it seems tieing it all together in an easy to get started package has not happened. With starting new api stuff I think most important is showing it working with lots of easy to compile and test examples so developers can see it works with less than a couple of hours setup work. I don't know if I misunderstood something but I spent a couple of hours trying to get it to compile and it did not seem to do much(probably my own fault, but maybe others had similar problems?). Anyways I think it should stay in the dist and someone should fix it, of course I have no idea how such a situation could occur as I am not going to do any work on fixing it, and I have found other ways to do web interfaces. One problem that I do see is that machinetalk does not have any sort of realtime sync timeing or deadline handling, I don't know how such a thing could be implemented though it must be possible to some extent as I believe sercos purports to be 'realtime' though ethernet can have quite a few ms of transmission delay but it should be possible to calculate delays and workout how to degrade performance and failsafe as gracefully as possible. Another problem I had was that all code seemed to be dependent on QT toolkits and python c++, I don't mind python, but most of the linuxcnc codebase is c which I prefer and the toolkit use glade and gtk. I ended up implementing an inflexible text protocol that could use ws/twisted/zmq for transport backend and started writing a glade2html shim with ws4py to get multiplatform browser guis from glade and pi3d to implement smartphone app interfaces with gles preview. Not got any of it to a polished working state yet but the axis browser view looks pretty good and works on most platforms. Anyways I would like to use machinetalk and webtalk if someone made it easier to use by getting it to compile properly out of the box and it had some easy to use and understand example code that used only python and glade. Keep it in the dist if at all possible. -- website: http://www.machinekit.io blog: http://blog.machinekit.io github: https://github.com/machinekit --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Machinekit" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/machinekit. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
