RE: Re: xPL announcement/description protocol -- was xPLDiag

["Ian Lowe" <ian.lowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Wow - we have all been busy this morning, huh?

I thought I would sleep on this, and post my thoughts in the morning..
Of course, there's a stack of new stuff to think about!

Firstly, I can see where Tony's frustration is coming from - there's
always a tendency to overengineer things like this, and one of the key
design goals of xPL was to produce a *very* simple implentation, which
could be ported onto anything (down as far as microcontrollers) and
remain fully compatible.

In that regards, I don't really like the idea of extending the
heartbeats - the hbeat schema is a pretty fundamental thing, and at
present, it's increidbly easy for the smallest of devices - adding a
response element makes it "chunkier".

As for a separate "about.basic" schema - there's no good reason
not to
have this, and I think it should be added to as many apps as possible...
*but* xpldiag should treat this as an added bonus, not a required item.

As we move towards ever greater xPL management (and smart frontends,
which is where this is all ultimately heading), the vendor's xml files
will become more and more important.

In Windows 2K/XP, these live in the "All Users" Application Data
folder
- we need a standard location for these files on each OS. There's quite
a documentation effort involved here - which is the sort of thing that
the Wiki is good for, as the load can be easily split across all of the
developers involved.

I'm seeing three levels of info - the very simple app that doesn't
support about.basic, which is described in the vendor's XML file (which
we may wish to do is add more elements to the xML file to include a
bunch of author information, support website details etc)

The second level, where *in addition to the above* the app supports
about.basic, which can return a cross-platform well defined set of
information about this instance of the app - I would say that about.app
messages should all be identical across platforms, so no OS specific
stuff in the message.

The third level, about.extended (or possibly about.win32 about.linux
etc?) will (as with all schema designs) include the above cross platform
info, but can also contain the more specific information that's not
consistent across platforms.

That's my thoughts - I'll add that I think the amount of discussion in
recent weeks has been great - it seems that we are seeing a lot of new
development, and that can only be good for the project in the long term!

Ian.