ON-AIR Ideas

[Allan Kenneth Spale]

I have been doing a little thinking about how to implement an ON-AIR sign
and other hardware components without hacking RAT.  I am not very
knowledgeable about what I am talking about; however, from the little that
I do know, it seems like an option.

I propose to implement a CORBA system where a CORBA object is used as a
"wrapper" to access the object(s) in RAT that would control the audio
transmission.  In this way, whatever program on Linux runs the interface
with the sign could poll RAT to see whether or not "Talk" is pressed.

>From what I understand, CORBA is a system that allows "wrapper" functions
to be placed over existing code and then able to be accessed in other
programs.  The languages covered under CORBA include Java, C++, Smalltalk,
etc.

As another future option, perhaps any hardware devices that are not
intrinsically part of the AG configuration/setup could be accessed via
Jini (Sun's Java implementation of a reconfigurable network environement).  
Jini allows the user to query the network as to what network services
(this includes hardware and software) are available.  Since it uses Java,
one can download the interface to the service via the network connection
to use it.  Also, there should not be a need to have any Jini-specific
hardware because as long as there is a JVM present on the network, the
hardware using Jini can call that JVM via the network.

My mind is fairly rusty on this because I did report on JVM a year and a
half ago and only covered Jini briefly.  I have not studied CORBA in
detail, but it is an open standard that has been around for some time now.
Please correct any incorrect information that I may have given in this
message.

I am going to do some research on CORBA, so if you find any information or
have any comments, please let me know.


Thanks,

Allan Spale
EVL / UIC node-op