[AG-TECH] New Gentner Software

Robert Olson olson at mcs.anl.gov
Thu Jul 26 18:56:22 CDT 2001


At 09:52 AM 7/27/2001 +1000, Markus Buchhorn wrote:

>Well, if we're adding wishes to this list... :-)
>
>Allow this control application to run over the network, so that one 
>operator can manage multiple nodes, or a remote operator can manage a 
>given node.

Oh definitely -- so that I can also control the node from my laptop while 
sitting on the couch :-)

>At first blush, a web browser would make a very nice harness for this. 
>Perhaps implement as Apache modules? (apologies to Jay ;-) ). Save you 
>having to develop at both ends of the network pipe (as with e.g. a Java 
>applet).

I'm thinking the architectecture would have some number of agents connected 
to the actual devices (gentner, PTZ camera, remote-controllable apps) that 
speak a common interface (XMLRPC maybe) via some published API. The API 
would include mechanisms for authorization and authentication so that 
control would be exported only to those a site wanted to allow control.

Given that web servers then can speak XMLRPC (there exist client libs for 
PHP & perl/mod_perl...) an apache backend could speak to those. A custom 
client could also be built, speaking to the same XMLRPC agents.

>We could also pick up some of the hacks that allow you to drive the 
>various PTZ cameras through a web page. It could also hook into 
>monitoring/logging systems...

Yup. The LBL folks already have a daemon that will run the Canon & Sony ptz 
cameras. It doesn't speak XMLRPC, but it could be modified to do so or a 
translation agent built.

--bob
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/ag-tech/attachments/20010726/6b0812e3/attachment.htm>


More information about the ag-tech mailing list