Dean Roddey
Senior Member
[This was split off from another thread, so if it seems to kind of start in the middle of a conversation, that's because it did. See the Egg that Homeseer Laid thread for the context. http://www.cocoontech.com/index.php?showtopic=2967]
Guys, if you are looking for an alternative, I think that CQC can provide that. With the 1.5 release (of which the first beta should be out this week or the weekend at the latest), we'll have the two big things that HS folks have so far complained about as being essential, i.e. the event system and a web interface.
CQC is rock solid, just ask any of our customers. And it's fully networked, which I think that most people just don't appreciate fully until they've really tried it. HS lets you one run small app remotely, but CQC is completely network distributed, so every machine can control devices or be an end user and/or administrative client. And with the media management stuff that's now in the product, and the big step forward that's going to happen on that front in 1.6, and our powerful graphical interface system that's already in place and growing steadily, I just don't see how HS is really ever going to catch up with that.
It may not support every device you need right now, but all the tools are there for anyone to create device drivers and we'll give you any help we can to get the missing device support in place. The thing is, adding new device support is trivial relative to creating a powerful and robust architecture. We've done the work to create that architecture and it's already out there and well proven in the real world. Our underlying code matured for over 10 years before the actual product was ever built on it. There's just no way anyone can catch up with that the way that HS had to do it (i.e. having to pull along an existing code base and maintain backwards compat and do it 'quickly'.) So we just have a code base at a level of maturity and power that they'll just never be able to compete with, and it does really make a difference.
So we just need to get more folks involved with device driver creation in order to get some of these devices in place that you guys want, and it's not a large number of devices really that are missing. As I said, we'll provide any help we can give you to get them done, including getting the basic driver in place which you can then just finish off and test. For instance, I have a basic Ocelot driver done now, but I don't really have a real system to actually test it against (I just have the Ocelot, but not any modules), so if someone could pick that up and just finish it off it wouldn't be nearly as hard as doing one from scratch. We also have the remote port server which will allow me to connect to your serial device (IP based devices are a given) to either get a basic driver done for you to start working with or to help you spelunk issues if you run into them.
Anyway, that's my pitch. There is an alternative, and one that's uber-robust, and which has features and capacilities that HS probably won't ever have. The only thing it's missing is the device support in order to get some of these devices that you guys are using but we don't currently support integrated into the system. I think that often people confuse basic architectural capabilities and device support, but they aren't the same. You can have broad device support and weak architecture (HS) or you can very strong architecture but not broad enough device support (CQC). Of the two, the latter is the better position to be in, because the missing part is fractionally as difficult as the part that's there, and because it doesn't matter how much device support you have if it's not based on a robust and scalable architecture.
Guys, if you are looking for an alternative, I think that CQC can provide that. With the 1.5 release (of which the first beta should be out this week or the weekend at the latest), we'll have the two big things that HS folks have so far complained about as being essential, i.e. the event system and a web interface.
CQC is rock solid, just ask any of our customers. And it's fully networked, which I think that most people just don't appreciate fully until they've really tried it. HS lets you one run small app remotely, but CQC is completely network distributed, so every machine can control devices or be an end user and/or administrative client. And with the media management stuff that's now in the product, and the big step forward that's going to happen on that front in 1.6, and our powerful graphical interface system that's already in place and growing steadily, I just don't see how HS is really ever going to catch up with that.
It may not support every device you need right now, but all the tools are there for anyone to create device drivers and we'll give you any help we can to get the missing device support in place. The thing is, adding new device support is trivial relative to creating a powerful and robust architecture. We've done the work to create that architecture and it's already out there and well proven in the real world. Our underlying code matured for over 10 years before the actual product was ever built on it. There's just no way anyone can catch up with that the way that HS had to do it (i.e. having to pull along an existing code base and maintain backwards compat and do it 'quickly'.) So we just have a code base at a level of maturity and power that they'll just never be able to compete with, and it does really make a difference.
So we just need to get more folks involved with device driver creation in order to get some of these devices in place that you guys want, and it's not a large number of devices really that are missing. As I said, we'll provide any help we can give you to get them done, including getting the basic driver in place which you can then just finish off and test. For instance, I have a basic Ocelot driver done now, but I don't really have a real system to actually test it against (I just have the Ocelot, but not any modules), so if someone could pick that up and just finish it off it wouldn't be nearly as hard as doing one from scratch. We also have the remote port server which will allow me to connect to your serial device (IP based devices are a given) to either get a basic driver done for you to start working with or to help you spelunk issues if you run into them.
Anyway, that's my pitch. There is an alternative, and one that's uber-robust, and which has features and capacilities that HS probably won't ever have. The only thing it's missing is the device support in order to get some of these devices that you guys are using but we don't currently support integrated into the system. I think that often people confuse basic architectural capabilities and device support, but they aren't the same. You can have broad device support and weak architecture (HS) or you can very strong architecture but not broad enough device support (CQC). Of the two, the latter is the better position to be in, because the missing part is fractionally as difficult as the part that's there, and because it doesn't matter how much device support you have if it's not based on a robust and scalable architecture.
