RE: Protocol questions

["Ian Lowe" <ianlowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I've some protocol questions of my own:

I sure hope the wiki gets updated with all of these questions and
answers...
;)

> 1) When driving MediaPortal with media.basic messages, I've been
sending
URLs in the message,
> including '/' or '\' characters - are those actually permitted?

There's an important distinction here - in the *structure* of an xpl
message, these characters are not valid. In the payload (ie, in the
"value"
part of each pair) there's more freedom - I would say that using the
"{",
"}" or chr(10) are not valid  (see the reply to Mark Hindess on
that one, I
guess)

> 2) What is the reason for the 128 char limit on the length of the
value in
a name=value pair?  It
> means I have to split my URLs onto multiple lines (not such a biggy, I
was
just curious really)

It's a microcontroller thing - one of the key points of xPL was to strictly
limit the size of elements to maintain something of the "control and
telemetry" aspect, rather than having people chucking big bits of data
around.

There had to be a line drawn somewhere, 128 characters seemed very
reasonable in light of the amount of space in most of the target
microcontrollers we have been looking at.

> 3) Should we have a method for giving "official" status to
schemas?

Yes, we should - something which will be decidedly simple to do if/when we
pursue Gerry's idea of an XML description of the schemas. At that point,
it's nice and easy - the master xml file held by the project website will
be
updated to add in new schemas as they get accepted.

I don't see the need for much more formality than discussing a suggested
schema right here for now - let's see how that pans out.

> Tony introduced it, but with him not contributing to
> xPL any longer (in fact, his MyHap protocol has the look of another
xAP/xPL style split)

Indeed. Tony's new effort is frankly bizzare, given that the key things he
objected to us adding to xPL have all, without exception, been added into
his new idea.

That being said, there's no point in crying over spilt milk - that's now in
the past, xPL moves on.

The xPLHal server is in the very safe hands of John and Ian J (the authors
of the xPLHal Manager), the source code for all of Tony's apps was GPLed,
and therefore remains available - it's business as usual.

> it doesn't seem right for him to have ownership of that schema
anymore.

Given this is an open project, there's no real heirarchy here, but I have
to
say that I agree with this Point of View. There's no concept of the ghostly
hand controlling things from beyond the veil - if you can do good things
with a revitalised media.basic schema, so be it.

There are a few schema that could do with a brush up and review - if you
want to do the good work on the media.* family - feel free.

Ian.