Re: [Linuxsampler-devel] API documentation & guidelines for GUI dev

[Christian S. <chr...@ep...>]

Es geschah am Freitag, 16. April 2004 10:02 als Peter Roos schrieb:
> Can you maybe give any indication when there will be some stable API
> documentation for controlling LS from (say) a Windows box? I can imagine
> that besided a "dry" API reference list, there should also be some doc with
> guidelines for setting up a proper client framework that explains how to
> deal with establishing sessions, working with time-outs, graceful
> degradation, and so forth.
>
> Is that still far in the future? ;-) Or it is already possible to start
> experimenting with some barebones LS box and basic documentation?

Stable API? Probably never, but for the first official release of LS the API 
(and documentation) might become stable in one or two months. Currently I'm 
working on multi channel support, so there might be a couple of things that 
change in the LSCP API and beside the network protocol (and the liblscp 
library) there will also be a native C++ LS library (for local host only of 
course) very soon.

Meanwhile you can play a bit with the LS network protocol using a normal 
telnet connection and manually typing the control commands. You will see it's 
a quite simple and human readable protocol. If you have questions regarding 
the LSCP post it!

After the first release of LS we will then start (beside implementation of 
further sampler engines / formats) with all modularity features, on the fly 
recompilation of custom engines and profiling. As you might imagine this will 
mean a huge extension of the API, but it will be backward compatible I guess.

> Although I have background of many years in technical software engineering
> (I am also perception research psychologist), I am a bit hesistant by
> getting a Linux LS box up and running :-/

No one will force you. ;)

> I can't promise I can devote any serious UID attention on short term - my
> own business is not doing fine at the moment. But things can improve soon,
> and I can even think that a serious LS GUI for Windows might be commercial
> project for my Company.
>
> Or, is that actually something that you will be trying to avoid? Do you
> also want have the client GUI apps in the public domain?

Of course we would also like to see LS frontends to be free software, but as 
LinuxSampler and it's libraries are released under the GNU General Public 
License, commercial usage equals to any other software released under the 
GPL; means it is possible with the common restrictions given by the GPL. But 
that's more Marek's field, he is our lawyer, right Marek? ;)

CU
Christian