Announcing the latest xPL Updates!

[Ian Lowe]

The xPL Team are happy to announce that we have been officially assigned a
TCP and UDP Port by IANA. After a frantic period of development and
testing,
the complete suite of xPL applications and development tools now supports
the new port, and is available for download.

The xPL Environment includes a robust configuration and discovery
mechanism,
allowing new applications to be detected and configured easily. Strongly
typed messages (status, trigger and command) allow complex behaviour to be
constructed from simple elements.

Highlights include:

1) xPLHal: quite simply, one of the most powerful HA systems in existence,
xPLHal is a powerful script engine, an intelligent "brain" that
can react to
triggers from other xPL enabled devices and applications, and perform
complex sequences of tasks. xPLHal is a fast low level application, with no
GUI, which runs as a Windows Service.

2) xPLHal Manager: a windows application that uses the powerful XHCP
management protocol to provide a GUI for the xPLHal scripting engine. xPL
manager allows for simple installation and configuration of newly installed
xPL Applications, and supports intelligent plug-ins to allow easy testing
and configuration.

3) xPLLib: a .NET assembly (DLL) suitable for inclusion into existing .NET
applications, the xpllib allows the various elements of the xPL environment
to be accessible to existing HA systems.

4) xPL.ocx: an ActiveX component suitable for use within Visual Basic and
any other language that supports ActiveX, that wraps all of the xPL
fuctionality into a simple, easy to use control. Use of the OCX allows an
existing application to be enabled in a few minutes.

5) Fully GPL'ed: All xPL code applications are released under the v2 GPL.
xPL is Open Source wherever possible, and as such is a community
development.

xPL Development environments and application frameworks are now available
for download for the Windows (98, Me, 2000, XP, 2003) Linux, Cygwin and
Tivo
platforms.


More details can be found at:

<a href="http://www.xplproject.org.uk";>http://www.xplproject.org.uk</a>
<a href="http://www.xplhal.com";>http://www.xplhal.com</a>
<a href="http://www.xpl.myby.co.uk";>http://www.xpl.myby.co.uk</a>

Howeevr, any member of the xPL Team will be happy to answer questions about
the currently available software, or provide help with those people wishing
to give the xPL tools a wee test-drive.

A simple step by step guide to controlling X10 devices using xPL (as an
introduction) is available at:
<a href="http://www.xplproject.org.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index";>http://www.xplproject.org.uk/modules.php?op=modload&amp;name=Sections&amp;file=index</a>
&amp;req=viewarticle&amp;artid=25&amp;page=1

Ian