[maemo-developers] web based local application GUIs

[From: Jesse Guardiani]

I've been thinking a lot lately about Kagu Media Player's future. The
project has come a long way and all of us devs have learned a lot in the
process. But Canola is coming out soon (or so it seems) and we're reaching
the limit of what is maintainable with a pygame based UI.

I've decided that I'd really like to separate the frontend code from the
backend code so we can have multiple frontends (pygame, gtk, etk, cli, WWW,
etc).

This would mean that the Kagu backend process would be a daemon (aka a
service, depending on your education environment).
And the frontends would communicate with the backend process somehow. I see
a few possibilities here:

1.) Rpc (aka web services)
2.) Dbus
3.) Direct SQLite DB interaction

Dbus seems like an obvious choice, but Kagu would be incredibly chatty and
I'm not sure if Dbus is capable of handling the bandwidth. In addition, dbus
would limit GUIs to running on the device itself, rather than the world at
large. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's something to consider.

SQLite is the least friendly method, IMO, as it involves file locking and
other nastiness. No thanks.

Rpc seems like the best overall choice, but how common is Rpc on Maemo?


The other concern I have is process management of the backend Kagu daemon.
How will it be started? How will it be stopped?

A GTK, PyGame, ETK, or even CLI client could start the Kagu daemon for us.
But what about a WWW client? Is there any way to start the daemon simply by
accessing a URL, like http://localhost/kagu ? If Apache was installed on the
device then an apache script (mod_php or mod_python) could start the daemon
for us and proxy any requests. But that seems too bulky of a solution.

I've seen this page discussing WWW applications as local applications on
Maemo: http://maemo.org/community/wiki/serverbrowserappdevelopment/  But I
couldn't find the mailing list discussion it references.

Any suggestions for these problems? Any ideas? Comments?

Thanks!

-- 
Jesse Guardiani
Software Developer / Sys Admin
jesse at guardiani.us
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