Re: Linux: Poor Stepchild for xPL?

["John B" <home-automation@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Gerry,

> Anyway, while there are some Linux things, for the most part, this
seems to be
> a heavily Windows crowd. Most downloads don't even indicate if they
are for
> Linux or Windows (though the Linux ones do seem to be cleared
demarced). What
> I'm wondering is -- is linux considered a viable xPL platform?

Linux is certainly a viable xPL platform - even more so than Win32 for
certain applications (e.g. diskless workstations etc.)

> I see things like xplhal and nifty GUI tools, all geared toward
Windows, but
> just a few things for Linux/non-windows.  I'm still coming up to speed
on
> things (reading a years worth of posts), but wanted to check in with
the
> general feel/view.

As my day job is working for a mainly Microsoft-oriented organisation doing
.NET development, I tend to do most of my xPL development work in .NET.

I did start to write a version of xPLHal in Perl - the intention being that
it could run on any platform that supported Perl, but this is still very
much unfinished due to time limitations.

I think someone was going to write a version of xPLHal Manager in Java that
would be cross-platform, but I'm not sure how far that got.

As far as xPLHal is concerned, we have attempted to make the basic
architecture as easy as possible to port to other operating systems -
communication between the GUI app (xPLHal Manager) and the xPLHal server
process is via TCP/IP (using XHCP), and the recently introduced
Determinators are again designed to be platform-agnostic, as they don't
rely on any scripting engines such as VBScript, and are basically just XML
documents.

I guess the bottom line is that we are all developing mainly for our own
needs, and at present we seem to have more Win32 than Linux developers -
hopefully this will change over time as our development community continues
to grow.

Regards,

John