Moving to TSC?

[Daniel Berenguer <dberenguer@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

After reading Kevin's post about the necessity to migrate to xAP TSC
for actual telemetry applications I've being considering doing the
jump for my recent projects. First of all, I wanted to do a first try
on opn-mbs, my Modbus opnode. I didn't like how data was being pushed
into the BSC text field where data and units had to coexist most of
the time. For my own projects, I never add the units at the end of the
text field because this complicates data parsing on other BSC
applications but some other applications need to know which kind of
data is being transported by any BSC message. This is what I call the
"plug and play" feature. A temperature controller can understand
the
data sent by temperature sensors with very little programming on the
controller.

Some protocols like J1939, Zigbee and KNX specify the type of data
transported each time so converting these data to xAP BSC would make
us consider the following scenarios:

1. Lose of information. BSC doesn't inform about the type of data
transmitted.
2. Add units at the end of the BSC text field
3. Add proprietary field ("units", "type" or whatever
else)

As you can see, moving to TSC is something technically useful IMO
although we should address some pending issues regarding the current
TSC draft too. However, what bothers me is that BSC is the most
implemented schema and abandoning it would reduce interoperability to
the TSC products. Obviously, we should combine both BSC and TSC
schemas, at least during the first years, in order to guarantee
interoperability with current BSC solutions but this is something not
desirable because of the increment of the xAP code footprint.

Based on the above reasoning, I'd always vote for enriching xAP BSC
instead of abandoning it regardless of TSC's advantages.
Interoperability and the current BSC implementations are the best
"heritage" of xAP IMO so we should take this kind of decisions
very
carefully. But instead of starting a new controversy, I want to do a
simple question to the active xAP developers:

How many among you are willing to move/implement TSC into your current
BSC applications in the short term?

I wouldn't want my controllers to become a TSC island into the BSC
sea. As any other I/O device, they need interoperability with major
software like HomeSeer, HouseBot, Mr.House or Xlobby but haven't heart
about any intention to do the jump for these applications.

Thanks guys for your feedback.

--
Daniel Berenguer
http://www.usapiens.com
http://www.opnode.org


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