[Lintouch-announce] Lintouch Development Weekly News - January 30th, 2004

[Martin Man]

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Lintouch Development Weekly News
http://lintouch.org
January 30th, 2004
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Welcome to the seventh issue of the Lintouch Development Weekly Newsletter
codenamed "Need less RAM ? Run Runtime (Lintouch) :-)"

Everyone following these weekly news should know that we expect Lintouch API
freeze at February 1st. Without too much whistles & bells, I'm announcing,
that the API freeze will happen. We will devote the February to make the
code robust, documented and usable by my mother (well that's not granted).

But let's start from the beginning. I've reworked _libwtngcp_ - the
Communication Protocol Library so that it does not depend on any network
facilities such as sockets, IP addresses and others[1]. The library takes
care of message decoding/encoding process, protocol flow logic (handled
under the hoods by finite state machine diagram) and uses for input and
output plain char * buffers. This means that is not bound to any particular
networking API, can be thoroughly tested, and can be easily interfaced to
various programming languages.

    1. http://lintouch.org/pipermail/lintouch-cvs/2004-January/000951.html

At this moment library handles _connected_ variant of the Lintouch TCP/IP
Communication Protocol[2] and can already send the most important messages
needed for server/client communication.

    2. http://lintouch.org/cvs/lintouch/docs/specs/lintouch-cp.html

Jiri (aka jbar) jumped hard to the server and his results are pretty
impressive. Several lines of code (much less in the C land) do what they
should and it seems that all problems on the server side will have to be
solved by fixing the implementation or design bugs in C code of our libwtng*
libraries. Go python, go.

Hynek imported its Modbus TCP/IP[3] library written in python to private
swac CVS for testing. Its library can already send/receive changed bits
(called `coils' in Modbus jargon). Additionally he started to write Modbus
TCP/IP Master Plugin which, when plugged to the Lintouch Server, will allow
us to control Modbus TCP/IP Slaves.

    4. http://www.modbus.org

Patrik is continuing hardly on Lintouch Runtime UI & code polishing, his
walk through TODO list is clearing the bugs which will be the most visible
ones, surely the work which deserves a big appreciation.

Thursday, devoted to bug squashing resulted in first (alpha quality) version
of Lintouch Runtime and Lintouch Server which (if you are lucky and have
been really nice to your computer over the past year) will work together[5].
Server will serve a project and allow you to use _Loopback_ plugin which
simply loops back all changed bits. Runtime will connect, download a project
from the server and let you to press Buttons to change bits and see they are
changed through Lamps.

    5. http://lintouch.org/pipermail/lintouch-dev/2004-January/000357.html

Download, compile, run, let it crash and report... is the only thing I'd
like you to do over the next week, collect bugs, gdb backtraces and wishes,
they will be fulfilled.

Brush up on your bugzilla[6] knowledge, this will be our daily bread from
now on....

    6. http://lintouch.org/bugzilla

Good work guys, we are reaching the long awaited milestone, we will do our
best so that we can have a really cool Lintouch 1.0 release party... one
beer from me for explained bug, two beers for bug properly fixed :-)

That's all folks for this week, if you have any comments, corrections or
ideas to be published, feel free to contact me directly[0].

    0. mailto:mman at swac.cz.

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