Traditionally third party "applications" were implemented as a plugin for the server and ran on the machine the server was running on. These are written in perl (the language the server is written in)
The new generation devices (controller, radio and touch) add a new form called an applet that is written in a language called LUA which runs on the device itself. There is a fair amount of stuff you can do in LUA. At this point we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg as far applets go. We need to wait for more people to get Touchs in their hands and start playing with applets. There IS a third possibility, a native linux app running on the Touch. Both plugins and applets are written in interpreted languages.(I know, some plugins run native programs) A native program is compiled down to the native machine code of the processor, this can produce much faster programs. This is probably the best bet for any serious number crunching on the Touch. As long as SBS is not running on the Touch there should be resources for some fairly serious native programs to run. At the moment there is no official loader for such programs, you have to SSH in and SCP the program over and provide a way to start it etc. Besides stuff traditionally done by plugins, a native program can use standard Linux methods for accessing hardware on the Touch such as the USB port which opens up a whole new world of possible uses for the Touch. Some of this stuff is bound to happen over time, but its going to take a while before there is much ground breaking new functionality. John S. -- JohnSwenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=77045 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
