Thread: Requirements for a Web Front End

Well if you guys need some jQuery Javascript HTML5 CSS help, let me know, thats my field of expertise more so than whatever the CDK is offering, Im still not clear on that layer. Opera isn't the only browser that supports html5.

Now another option is a firefox plugin. I've built them before, and they are VERY powerful. As in you use javascript, css, html5, but the underlayer can be a combination of c++ and javascript. They actually make a component that allows your c++ components to run in the browser. Its very cool. We built a c++ ftp component that was accessed via a javascript call.

And firefox plugins are cross platform of course.

optikalefx,
You're right. Actually, that was something I was still thinking about...
Songbird, firefox and sunbird or even webkit ...
if and how these fit into this or not ...

In my post above, I was just trying to pull together the various thoughts here. Hopefully more ideas will come along

Originally Posted by optikalefx

Well if you guys need some jQuery Javascript HTML5 CSS help, let me know, thats my field of expertise more so than whatever the CDK is offering, Im still not clear on that layer. Opera isn't the only browser that supports html5.

Now another option is a firefox plugin. I've built them before, and they are VERY powerful. As in you use javascript, css, html5, but the underlayer can be a combination of c++ and javascript. They actually make a component that allows your c++ components to run in the browser. Its very cool. We built a c++ ftp component that was accessed via a javascript call.

And firefox plugins are cross platform of course.

Thanks for the offer dude, I'm sure your front end skills will be much needed.

As for firefox plugin - interesting approach and could prove useful. However, it won't do many favours for things like ipad or android based tablets as they probably won't have that option.

Originally Posted by SapporoGuy

optikalefx,
You're right. Actually, that was something I was still thinking about...
Songbird, firefox and sunbird or even webkit ...
if and how these fit into this or not ...

In my post above, I was just trying to pull together the various thoughts here. Hopefully more ideas will come along

defo. it's good to do a load of research and prototypes and see how it all goes.

I've just come back from a dinner that was bigger than my head - my grandfather always said never eat anything bigger than your head! I'm going to see if I can knock something up quickly now...

hmmm, looks like that maybe we should also be considering: meego and ubuntu
I really would like to start with a base distro that already is almost car friendly than try to recreate what ICE has gone through.

could be a good idea.

what car friendly bits in particular are you thinking and what did ICE go through?

Car bits friendly?
If I understand correctly:
obd, gps, drive recorder, possibly tire pressure, distance sensor, fusion brain for hvac, etc

if this software friendly regarding ice:
they converted the top end GUI like meego did making the visual is part actually the front end. However looks ice makes you go to the terminal for deeper interaction, it's too (maybe haven't figured out yet) bad that there isn't a way into a normal windowing system like gnome.

I'm using vulirtual box to run the system so I really can't comment on speed at the moment it's ok for speed.

In way what they did was what I am imaging what a in-car enviornment should be like.

Im still trying to visualize how both a net and regualr app approach can work.

Did I misunderstand you?

LinuxICE is extremely easy to use as a base distro. Especially since we've already done all the hard work of making a lot of the subsystems work by default (ie, gps).

At the very least, the LinuxICE build tools could be useful to build your own custom Ubuntu-based core.

MeeGo is a bit more work right now as I'm discovering. Public OBS needs to get up and going before it's generally useful I'm afraid (OBS is how you build custom packages and repos).

Are you trying to make a distro with your web frontend on top al-la-LinuxICE style?

Not sure yet, but that is something that needs to be discussed.
I have my own personal vision but I'm just trying to keep ideas and this thread going.

I really like what you guys did with ICE.

The plan of this thread, as I see it, is to have a web-based front end. For this to work, it'll require some services that will need access to OS level stuff.

I'm currently building Velocity2 (from scratch) even though I don't have the time, I just can't resist What I'm building is a Grails app that uses DWR. What this will do is expose ANY Groovy/Java class to javascript.

In doing this, it means a HTTP based front-end will have access to Groovy/Java. Whilst this can also be done for any other language, DWR's offerings are superior to having to build things from scratch. Here's the blurb from the DWR site:

DWR will generate the JavaScript to allow web browsers to securely call into Java code almost as if it was running locally. It can marshal virtually any data including collections, POJOs, XML and binary data like images and PDF files. All that is required is a security policy that defines what is allowed.

With Reverse Ajax, DWR allows Java code running on a server to use client side APIs to publish updates to arbitrary groups of browsers. This allows interaction 2 ways - browser calling server and server calling browser. DWR supports Comet, Polling and Piggyback (sending data in with normal requests) as ways to publish to browsers.

DWR provides integration with Dojo, TIBCO GI, Scriptaculous in the browser, and with Spring, Struts, Guice, Hibernate and others on the server.

Groovy is a dynamic language built on Java. Here's a link for Python people showing the differences between Groovy and Python. Should be easy to pick up.

Also, Grails uses GORM which is an outstanding way to abstract the database away from the app. You just use a domain model and it takes care of persistence for you. It uses pure Java DB by default so no additional installation needed on any OS.

Using a Groovy (Java) based web services layer has it's advantages and disadvantages:

+: You get DWR from above, which is an amazing AJAX framework. I've not seen anything that can touch it yet.
+: You get to choose your base distro since Java is write once run anywhere. (Ubuntu/Windows/Android/OSX/...)
+: GORM for persistance

-: You need to learn Java/Groovy if you don't know it already
-: Performance wise, although Java is very fast with JIT compilers, it still won't be as swift as something like Perl

I'd like to finish this thing and in doing so, I'll build the groundwork which means people can just write Groovy and hopefully it'll just work.

Regarding video, we'll need to get a transcoder working that can read any file and stream it over the network using h.264. Does LinuxIce do anything like this already? If not, should be easy to integrate mplayer or similar to do that.

Sounds like LinuxIce is an ideal candidate for a base distro to start with. If it falls short either we can commit some changes to make it better or change distro if it's fundamentally not possible. Having tripzero here is also a big plus