Thread: Front-end as a website (PHP, Jscript, CSS)

Bugbyte,

Thanks for the interest. Getting this system ready for demo to a critical audience on a strange car all the way on the other side of the country in just a few weeks sounds like a job for a young man who does not need to sleep. I am an old guy with a bad attitude and a day job. I checked out your website and you have got a sweet project. I appreciate your interest in mine. I will continue to polish it up as I get time to work on it. Maybe by the end of the summer I will put the code and my notes out there. There are much sexier front-ends, but it might fit the bill for some DIYer. Thanks again and good luck at Afkfest. You have got your hands full.

I understand completely. However, I'd like to keep this project moving along. I'm more interested in the experimentation end, so it doesn't matter whether it looks like a group of buttons on a screen and nothing else. What is of interest is the web basis and php underpinnings.

If you read about our OSDash project, you'll see that the services in OSDash, such as the location service, are perfect for a web front end. Obviously, they are useful in the polished and popular ones as well, but the work for a web FE.

One of the most popular things people do here is skin their FE's. Consider a service that would customize the layout of the web front end. People could build their own look and feel and you could simply point to it and download to your car and use it.

One thing I've been discussing with Chunkyks is a pre-configured plug computer with a built in OBDII chip and perhaps bluetooth. This plug would access and be configured using a web front end on a server that came on the plug. Your front end is exactly the type of thing we're talking about.

Keep us updated on your progress. There is definitely interest on my end.

Has anyone ever thought about doing this with adobe flash or MS silverlight? Seems like either of these technologies can bridge the OS/FE gap we currently have.

Originally Posted by Nextabyte_Matt

Has anyone ever thought about doing this with adobe flash or MS silverlight? Seems like either of these technologies can bridge the OS/FE gap we currently have.

html5?

that would also require a decent HTML5 browser... ;-)

I would like to see HTML5 used as well..

Just finished road testing the latest version: Serving the Front-end as a website.

- Console now includes:
Audio (playlist folders, autoload/rename/archive/delete mp3's, etc).
Email (send and receive, GPS stamp ) [when broadband active]
Phone (Skype account, call receive, DTMF tones, call list)[when broadband active]
Configuration module for button ,text, background colors
GUI totally vanilla HTML & CSS
Update / Download code and database from remote server [when broadband active]
User-configurable One-touch buttons for web searching, browsing
- In the works:
Wrapper for output from local apps on desktop (standalone apps)
FM tuner console
ODB console (good use for wrapper? )
Packaging code and installation notes

Basics:

- Using Xampp as a standalone server (could be any standalone mysql/php server) on XP.
- Optimized for Firefox 3x as browser.
- No special libraries or proprietary code needed, just vanilla javascript, html, css, php.
- Efficient use of touchscreen real estate. Can be minimized to use any other app on desktop without interruption of any app on the Console (email, phone audio, etc.)

The system pretty well meets my requirements for a flexible, easy-to-configure interface that preserves a full OS desktop but provides me a console for driver-readable one-touch applications. The next phase is to integrate some remote data acquisition modules (for environmental instruments)

With some tweaking of the configuration and CSS, I don't see why this system would not work for any OS/Browser combination.

I still have a bit of laundry and folding to do, documentation. Hate that part. This kind of UI is not for everyone, but if you have to hack your own front-end...

Very nice! Re-reading your first post I can't tell whether you intend to open source this or not. If you do, why not consider putting it on the auto app-mart for download by the community.

I'm certainly interested in using/extending something like this to provide interaction with the Sheeva plug and OBD projects like nobdy and obdgpslogger, among other things.

treehouse, you may want to look at velocity, it's a front end that I started doing.

It's exactly what you're trying to do, and I did it for Flash. Ultimately, it's JSON going back and forth to a Java backend.

It's open source and a lot of work has been done. Hopefully it'll help