Premise Silverlight UI for SYS

I just started playing with this idea and I was curious as to other's opinions. Has anybody else thought about this? Silverlight 1.0 is out now for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it is coming in the next quarter for Windows Mobile 6.

I am planning to avoid requiring the sysconnector in order to achieve better reach, although possibly supporting it as well would be useful as it provides a non-polling way to get events when something changes in sys. I'm also not sure if I want 100% generated UI or if requiring custom authoring for a particular house is better. There are tradeoffs either way.

(I tried to upload a picture of the very initial work I just started this morning, but I can't seem to attach anything. Oh well.)

Thoughts?
--jim

So many questions! Where to begin?

I support any effort to leverage new web technologies. Things have changed dramatically since Premise Browser's inception.

Dropping the need for sysconnector should open the door to non-Windows platforms. However, as you pointed out, you lose event-notification and you're back to polling for status. If I'm not mistaken, MiniBroker provides the means to subscribe to events ... but then Minibroker only runs on Windows so we're back to square one!

I like Premise's 100% generated UI because it means I don't have to code the UI. In effect, there's a library of web-widgets" that Premise pre-places in the UI according to a master template. However, it would be nice to have the option of placing these "web widgets" in a manner I prefer ... to create my own template(s) using a "UI Builder" that lets me drag and drop the web-widgets to create custom interfaces.

This all sounds like Expression Blend, no? An artsy tool to build beautiful UI's, coded in a declarative language like XAML, and then shipped off to Visual Studio to get a layer of coded logic. Is this what you had in mind?

The Premise Browser UI is generated by AutomationBrowser ... I have not "grokked" this thing at all. I figure any new UI will need to invent its own library of web-widgets and that's no small feat! Is this what you're planning?

This is something that I've considered as well. Would have to be asynch though and not use polling for me to get really interested. I haven't investigated much at this point, but I think what we really need to do is put together a proxy service that can consume and serve xml. Could be written as classic SYS ATL driver. Then sysconnector and having to deal with polling both go away. Thoughts? You tackle the back end and I'll help out with the front end.....

... a proxy service that can consume and serve xml. Could be written as classic SYS ATL driver. ...

Click to expand...

If I understand you correctly, you're proposing a web-service that talks XML and exposes Premise's innards to external applications. It sounds similar to MiniBroker except it doesn't oblige the external app to be equipped with a COM object ... just the ability to speak the service's XML-based protocol. Is that about right? If so, that would be a valuable addition to Premise and would open it up to new applications ... even on non-Windows platforms (i.e. iPhone).

I'd love to help with this but I just don't have the programming chops to tackle something of this magnitude. However, I'd certainly find a use for this web-service!

This is actually a very good idea. I think the way to do it is to expose all Premise objects via UPnP. UPnP uses SOAP to pass information via XML. My control point does this with the media server. It exposes Media items via UPnP so that a UPnP Media Renderer (like the DSM-320/520) can browse and play them.

The UPnP Forum has defined a few useful devices (Light, HVAC, etc.) as a set of standards that could be leveraged. For example, a "Light" at the Premise Home level could be mapped into a UPnP "Light" type. A UPnP aware UI would then know how to control it.

I don't think it would be too difficult to expose "lights" via my control point using the standard to get us started. Someone better at UI design than me could do the front-end.

John in VA said:

This is actually a very good idea. I think the way to do it is to expose all Premise objects via UPnP. UPnP uses SOAP to pass information via XML. My control point does this with the media server. It exposes Media items via UPnP so that a UPnP Media Renderer (like the DSM-320/520) can browse and play them.

The UPnP Forum has defined a few useful devices (Light, HVAC, etc.) as a set of standards that could be leveraged. For example, a "Light" at the Premise Home level could be mapped into a UPnP "Light" type. A UPnP aware UI would then know how to control it.

I don't think it would be too difficult to expose "lights" via my control point using the standard to get us started. Someone better at UI design than me could do the front-end.

Click to expand...

I could obtain the UI sources to make this happen if Johnwants to do some of the back-end work. I think if you could expose lights as a first step, then maybe the rest of us could start exposing others, although Im not sure what the upnp does w/ av devices...