Hello everybody! I had an idea and I wanted to share it with you. I've
being thinking about it sometime and today I didn't went to work so I
wrote a general description of it. It's very rough on the edges and
has lots of holes, sorry :-)
Let me know what you think!
/*---*/
The user using his browser chooses from a group of rooms.
He enters one room and he sees a series of running scripts and start
listening to them.
He can edit the scripts
Every version is saved and using the web interface the user can
rollback on them and the music is also rolled back to the point of the
edit.
A room could be versioned as well
Every room and script and edit is a universally accessible resource.
They have urls:
/rooms
-> a list of rooms
/rooms/33
-> a room
/rooms/33/scripts
-> a list of scripts
/rooms/33/scripts/44
-> a script
/rooms/33/scripts/44/versions
-> a list of versions of a script
/rooms/33/scripts/44/versions/38293
-> a version of a script
And in a very RESTful [1] and http loving [2] mood all resources
accept requests of different types.
So if the user do a GET (http method) on
/rooms/33
ACCEPTing [3] responses of the type html
he will be presented with an html/flash based user interface for
editing and listening the scripts.
But if the user accept MP3 he will be presented with a mp3 stream.
For videos there could be a video stream also...
The user can be another program. Say a facebook client application
(for you to livecode with your friends :-) ).
This application is written in python and displays a text area and a
button on a fecebook canvas. When the user posts a text script using
this interface the python app do a POST on /rooms/33/scripts (passing
the user script encoded as JSON, for instance) and a new script is
created.
It can be accessed by the url
/rooms/33/scripts/88
Why I would love it:
- I would have a very interesting internet radio channels to listen at work.
- It would facilitate a lot interexchange of livecode snippets because
they would be url-addressable, browsable and searchable.
- Its Open. Everybody can see everybody livecoding on the internet.
Some problems:
- Security (very free scripts executing on the server side?)
- I'm not sure how to implement it.
- The web app could be done with Rails, Django
- The versioning with git
- The language of the scripts... no ideia.
- Where to put all these scripts running? On the web
application memory? What if we have many of instances of that
application?
- Lag. We have to cope with internet speeds so we might loose some
coder-code interactivity.
A couple of references:
1 -
http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/1/19/rails-1-2-rest-admiration-http-lovefest-and-utf-8-celebrations
2 -
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260/
3 -
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html
/*---*/
That's it.
m
Received on Tue Apr 08 2008 - 17:56:50 BST