RE: HALManager idea ?

[Ian Lowe]

Robert,

Have you seen the determinators? In simple terms, determinators are a
higher level type of script that are built out of triggers and actions
in plain English.. this is possible due to information about the
capabilities of the various applications stored in each vendor's xml
file..

Determinators are low-level language independent - they could be
implemented in Perl, Python, Java... and multi-platform use was one of
the reasons for choosing this path.

The idea would be that for the general user, everything they need should
be able to be done via determinators, whilst for advanced users, they
would need to use (and therefore know how to program) the scripting
engine that is native to their platform - thinking that a hardcore
wintel, penguin or mac head will know a bit more about their own
platform of choice.

So, if you connect to the .Net xplhal server on Windows, the scripts are
all in vbscript, if you connect to a Java based xplhal server on Linux,
the scripts could all be in Python, if you connect to a Perl based
xplhal server on MacOS, the low level scripts might be in Perl... but on
all platforms, the determinators work the same way.

Remember that the Manager doesn't run scripts, it just edits them and
posts them back to xplhal - it doesn't need to understand what it's
doing, only the human does!

From a developer's viewpoint, all that's needed for a manager is to have
a text editor that can display and edit scripts in a general way (so,
being line-feed sensitive I guess) and a determinator -building
interface (basically, an xml builder/validator)
Does this make sense?

Ian.

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Welsh [mailto:<a
href="/group/ukha_xpl/post?postID=Pcevoxy703dwbJiBPf042PIjyCQxBcqbol5Xp22uQWikKH5yFYo8yF67V9TOL_-llYTK9vMs9j35J5JLDlGNyw">bob-ukha@s...</a>]
Sent: 13 February 2004 15:17
To: <a
href="/group/ukha_xpl/post?postID=dso1C-6xTS-1d1aiF-dfL_emMOypChTDTf2umr2-6T7IxTYd4yPEjPQB7W42NrbCh-qal5TnzsVlz6mplOqGjcLr">ukha_xpl@xxxxxxx</a>
Subject: RE: [ukha_xpl] HALManager idea ?

Just to continue the thought process on this....

I've been looking through the functionality of xPLHALManager for the
past hour or so and have just come up on something worthy of discussion.

I noticed that all the scripts that are written are VBScript based. I'm
assuming this was chosen for a number of reasons; one was probably
familiarity for the authors and another, I'm thinking, is that you've
got a parser "for free" given the app is written in VB.

Is this indeed the case ? If so, do you have any thoughts on what this
means for platforms w/o VB support ?
It probably means we'd (I'd) need to write VBScript parser for the
alternate HALManager..... (eek, big eek, very big EEK!)

Thoughts/Ideas/Comments anyone ?

Rob