Requirements for a Web Front End

**SapporoGuy** · 09-16-2010, 11:16 AM

OMG!
Bug you basically put one of my sketches into words!!!
I'm gonna have to put my drawing to a scanner. However, it is more of a hardware concept.

I left my sketch on my desk, however, it is a piece of hardware like a dock with an OS that would adapt to the hardware interacting with it. Essentially an old powerbook duo dock and fusion brain like device that could extend the abilities of limited device connected to it (like an iphone/ipad).

@ my story
I came to mp3car looking for a way to connect my iphone to my speakers aka parot or such. However, before owning an iphone I had a come up with the idea of being to port my data between house - car - computer. Of course, I had no idea of what a carpc was or even the idea of being on wifi to transfer the data. haha, I was thinking that data would move by memory stick. However, the data would include (now I know) OBD data, your electronic seat position, itunes, and phone data.

Data being all powerful.

@ current FE options
Being a newbie to community I soon realized that many front ends are going to be outdated by the power of the smart phone. I tried several and chose the one that I felt fit my needs with the least amount of entry effort.

What I mean by "outdated" is that the various apps are too limited in scope. CF with their recent campaign is an interesting try but I wonder if the base core code can really broaden it's scope to adapt to the smart phone invasion.

But to be honest, many of the current FEs could possibly go connected but that would probably mean a re-write.

@ integration
We're gonna need a source code that has scalable, expandable and connectible to various devices from nike shoes to main frames

well, you know what I mean

@ context
Could you go into more detail about what kinds of information you want to move between location and devices?

**SapporoGuy** · 09-16-2010, 11:33 AM

Trip and sama,

Could it be that both of your solutions actually solve each of the problems that we are looking at?

web interface : grails/groovy - tomcat/apache
app interface : QT/QML

Couldn't this possibly solve the issue of when users buy-in? They will have a choice on how their device interacts with the system.

I'm still trying to figure out the core code and it's interaction with the OS.
But maybe, I'm making this more difficult than it seems since what really is going on is the transfer of information and data.

lolo, I want an OS that is the system that is the FE

**tripzero** · 09-16-2010, 01:43 PM

Originally Posted by Bugbyte

So, is QML used inside a browser whereas Qt WRT would be an application that runs outside a browser but allows the use of js/css/html code?

Where has Qt WRT been used commonly and where has QML been used?

Both run as a normal application would --outside a browser. the difference is that QML is javascript syntactically, but different from what web developers would expect and Qt WRT is html/js/css.

i admit though, i've kinda lost the goal of this thread. I'm assuming all that is wanted is to separate the logic and system services from the UI and have the UI be something simple that web developers could write.

**sama** · 09-16-2010, 01:44 PM

hehe, lots of excitement all round

So trip, QT is open source and not propriety (my bad!), and web wise if you want to you can use the WRT (web run time?) and therefore QT becomes effectively SOA that can sit next to any other SOA (if any). Is that true?

Whilst we're all talking of visions, here's mine. I see no reason why you should have a PC in the back of your car in the future. One day we will have internet ubiquity; 100% connected or some satisfactory solution. The demand for it is there and where there's demand, there's supply. Already we're seeing cloud based services provide fantastic stuff, like social services from facebook (facebook connect etc), photo services from flickr, music services like spotify, mapping services from google.. yadda yadda. If you think about it, as a home consumer what do you use computing mostly for? web browsing, multimedia, gaming. In the office, it's productivity, collaboration etc. Those are typical uses and then there's specialisations too.

We're all singing a very similar song here. I think bugbyte's "context" is all around where you are and what services you require when you're there, so that you have access to your services given your context. And SapporoGuy's saying "data being all powerful" that is either your data (media/documents) or data that's interesting to you (social data/) is always available to you.

Having a service oriented architecture for a car, in the same way that we currently have it for lots of things in the home and office then starts to make sense. Which ever the framework is to provide it really doesn't matter.

My leaning towards HTML/JS/CSS means that it's available to pretty much any device to consume the services, and thereby allowing your data to be available to you in whatever context you're in. You don't need to install any additional client side S/W, it just works out of the box.

I'm not at all fussed about the service layer. As btilford and others have said, that can be a mixture, so long as we get the interface part right.

**sama** · 09-16-2010, 01:50 PM

Originally Posted by tripzero

i admit though, i've kinda lost the goal of this thread. I'm assuming all that is wanted is to separate the logic and system services from the UI and have the UI be something simple that web developers could write.

Yes. Nice to just restate things in simple terms sometimes

**Bugbyte** · 09-16-2010, 02:01 PM

Originally Posted by tripzero

I'm assuming all that is wanted is to separate the logic and system services from the UI and have the UI be something simple that web developers could write.

Agreed. The vision-thing becomes more obvious and/or possible if we can simply achieve that.

Originally Posted by SapporoGuy

I see no reason why you should have a PC in the back of your car in the future.

Me neither, but you will get quite an argument (and rightly so) about reliability and so forth. However, if a hobbyist community isn't the place to experiment with this idea, I don't know what is.

**SapporoGuy** · 09-16-2010, 07:58 PM

@ bug
That quote should come from sama

Looking like:

cloud service : (need to come up with some cool services) will also allow connections to user "data" libraries
web server : installable by user or service contract through cloud service
web GUI : what you would expect jquery and friends would allow you
application GUI : what we have been using all along
base application code

@ QT
I thought it was xcode ROW. Meaning xcode for the rest of the world. For me it seemed like it was springsource tool suite but more for application that web development thus the association with xcode.

note: even programmers can give this a spin. Download the SDK and install it. There is a demo applicaiton (on OSX for sure) that let's you browse through several demos showing off what it can do. Pretty impressive! However, I wonder if you would use it over xcode for OSX development. What does windows offer?

**Heather** · 09-28-2010, 12:03 PM

Guys, what about a name and a subforum in the front end section for all of this discussion?

**Penzance** · 03-02-2011, 06:32 PM

Has there been any developments in this area lately?

I was looking at the Microsoft website for their HTML5 app development (part of IE9) and noticed they have a contest going on for browser based apps that would be perfect for someone developing a front end.

The website itself is located at beautyoftheweb.com, and the contest ($9,000 first prize!) is located here.