xPLDiag

[Mal Lansell <mal@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Aside from all the hub confusion, I've been thinking about the xPL
Diagnostics app (and I'll start writing it soon if no-one has any
objections).

It would be easy enough to detect the presence or lack of a hub, spot
potential firewall issues and issue appropriate advice.
However, it would also be useful to be able to display information about
the applications on the xPL network.  To this end, I propose the
following schema - "about.basic" - comments would be very
welcome...

The diagnostic tool would send the following message:

xpl-cmnd
{
hop=1
source=mal-xpldiag.default
target=*
}
about.basic
{
remote-ip="192.168.0.4"      // ip and port are the same as in
the
tool's heartbeats.  The reason for including them is outlined below.
port="50002"
}

Applications would respond to this with (using my W800 service as an
example):

xpl-stat
{
hop=1
source=vendor-device.instance
target=*
}
about.basic
{
application="xPLW800 Service"                         // Long
version of
application name
version="4.0.1"                                                  
//
Version number - just a string for the diag tool to display, not parse.
url="http:\\www.xplmonkey.com"                         // URL
linking to
web page related to the application.
description="The xPLW800 service blah blah"      //can have
multiple
description fields, each no longer than 128 chars.
description="blah blah blah"
}

In addition, I think the hubs should also respond to about.basic
commands.  Being able to include the active hubs in the report would be
extremely useful - especially when trying to work out what version is
being run.  Unfortunately, it wouldn't be sufficient for the hub to
respond by sending about.basic stat messages only to its clients - if
they did that, the diagnostic tool would not hear back from hubs on
other machines.  This the reason for including the ip and port of the
diagnostic tool in the original command - the hub can then send it's
about status directly to the tool.

Although most apps won't support the schema at first, if we adopt this
then eventually the frameworks will have built-in support and the apps
will too.  This should go a long way to solving a lot of issues with
versions etc, and provide a handy way for the user to obtain up to date
information about just what is running in their system.

Thoughts?

Mal