Re: [LHA-misc] Web interface ...

[Tom H. <th...@ks...>]

Neil Cherry wrote:
> 
> Anyone want to comment on what they think is a good web interface. Normally
> I don't like web interface because they're just links and a form box.

Which tends to look bad because you have to serve up a whole new page for
each transaction. (It's also slow, but on a LAN it might be fast enough.
Also, the widget set is lame, but you can partly cover that up with images,
greatly increasing the amount of work to implement.)

One thing you might experiment with is frames. They're generally (and rightly)
deprecated, but the one big advantage that they offer is that you only have to
update one frame at a time, which usually kills off the flicker you get from
reloading the entire page. Also cuts down on the data going both ways. But the
big problem with using frames is knowing the window size. You might try getting
around this by forking a new window with a known size, then dicing that up with
borderless frames. You may want several canned window sizes to work with, e.g.,
one for a normal landscape monitor computer, one for a wireless PDA, maybe yet
another for flat panels.

> This
> one isn't much better except that I use PHP to update the table dynamically
> so we think we know the state of the device (it's X10 'ya know').

I like PHP for this type of thing. One real advantage that modPerl has is
the DBI abstraction. PHP uses specific coding for each database, so supporting
multiple databases would complicate the PHP code more than it would complicate
Perl.

> I'll
> further expand the PHP/JavaScript/HTML code further to include the weather
> station, Ocelot, and the HCS II. All of this is going into the contest
> for Aug. Though I don't think I can win I will attempt to put on a good
> show. I think the work can become an article for one of the magazines.
> 
> --
> Linux Home Automation           Neil Cherry             nc...@ho...

-- 
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 *  Tom Hull * thull at kscable.com * http://www.ocston.org/~thull/
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