[maemo-developers] web based local application GUIs

[From: Tomi Ollila]

On Mon 26 Nov 2007 22:16, Igor Stoppa <igor.stoppa at nokia.com> writes:

> Hi,
> On Mon, 2007-11-26 at 13:11 -0500, ext Jesse Guardiani wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>> This would mean that the Kagu backend process would be a daemon (aka a
>> service, depending on your education environment). 
>
> If possible, please no, not another daemon. We are already plagued by a
> large number of (mostly unnecessary!) daemons (i don't remember on top
> of my head how many exactly, but it's a 2 digits figure) that have
> trickled over the years in the standard stack.
>
> The metacrawler is a good example of why you don't want to write a
> daemon.
>
> To write a daemon is to ask for trouble since your sw will use memory,
> cpu time and power all the time. Also bugs will be more critical.

In the beginning of this year (2007) I wrote a tool called httpcmdd
http://www.iki.fi/too/sw/httpcmdd/ which I planned to use another, perl
based program on N770/N800. It is a persistently sleeping, standalone
daemon which uses just a kilobyte or a few of (userspace) memory and does 
not do anything unless request comes in. The main reason I have not
developed The Application for it is that Localhost Inet Socket Connections
Does Not Work in Offline Mode! (with a close second lack of time).

A small httpcmdd script could check whether a daemon for a particular
purpose is running and if not, start it. Then it could redirect connection
to the port of that daemon...if connections worked. In this case the
"connection refused" problem I mention below exists. With the "unix socket"
method I mention in httpcmdd web page and small modification in server
code could "fix" even that problem. 

> What's wrong with something that runs on-demand? 

A separate gui client which starts the server and browser on demand?...but
LISCDNWiOM!! ;)
and, when server exits after a (long) idle timeout browser just gets 
connection refused -messages... if browser could be made able to launch
such a server in this case that would be nice...

> Unless you rely on having dbus to start and stop the service ... that
> would probably be ok.
>

Any good solution for running http-based applications offline and on-demand
(user just using browser bookmarks) on these Internet Tablets would be nice. 
Maybe there is enough interest to make this happen ?

>
> -- 
> Cheers, Igor


Tomi


>
> Igor Stoppa <igor.stoppa at nokia.com>
> (Nokia Multimedia - CP - OSSO / Helsinki, Finland)