RE: Re: Is xPL the ideal work-around? Need to access the LPT port from Mister House...

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

Hi Gerry,

> Anyone have any thoughts on this?  I feel I could knock this
> out in a fairly short period of time, but I don't want to
> produce something incompatible with an existing app.  And yet
> there isn't anyway via Java I can use a device identifier
> like 888 to mean anything.

888 = 0x3F8 = hardware address of parallel port - totally abstracted
from the OS IMO.
(LPT1 or /dev/whatever is totally OS-dependent)

You will never be able to standardise on an addressing scheme across
multiple platforms, as they all use differing naming conventions for
their ports.

Anyway, I only knocked that little IO app together in a hurry - the API
wants a hardware address to send to, so that's what the device=
parameter asks for.  Specifying LPT1 would have required additional work
to map LPT1 to the base address 0x3F8.

If you can put something together that is cross-platform, then that's
great, and don't worry about being compatible with my app, as if your
app can perform the same tasks on multiple operating systems, there's no
point in me continuing to make my app available.

Regards,

John