[Xastir] Feature idea for Xastir

[William McKeehan]

Well, the last time we discussed this, I think this is where the discussion
ended (after we managed to get a piglatin translation added to the
repository).

I've been playing and thinking about this a fair amount. What about using
HTML/JavaScript/XML ala Ajax? This would require Xastir having an "http" style
server that would serve up pages and would respond to certain queries with XML
code. For example if Xastir's server were listening on port 8001,
http://localhost:8001/getStationInformation?callsignssid=KI4HDU-2 would
respond with something like
<station>
    <CallsignSSID>KI4HDU-2</CallsignSSID>
    <PacketsReceived>75</PacketsReceived>
    <LastHeard>10/04/2007 14:05:08</LastHeard>
    <Comments>
        <Comment>10/04 14:05 : .open2300v1.10</Comment>
        <Comment>10/04 14:00 :</Comment>
    </Comments>
.
.
.
</station>

Other things like
http://localhost:8001/findStation?callsignssid=KI4HDU-2&exact=1 would cause
the UI to behave as if someone had used the "Station-> Find Station" dialog
box.

To facilitate this, we could provide an Xastir "Object" in JavaScript that
would handle most of the heavy lifting here's a rough (very) start...

function XastirObject() {
    this.myConn=null;
    this.getStationInformation=getStationInformation;
    this.findStation=findStation;

    this.myConn = new XHConn();
    if (!this.myConn) alert("XMLHTTP not available.");
    if (!this.myConn) return;
}

function findStation(CallsignSSID) {
    this.getStation(CallsignSSID, xastirFindStation);
}

function xastirFindStation(oXML) {
    var xml = oXML.responseXML;
    alert( oXML.responseText );
    var station = xml.getElementsByTagName( 'station' )[0].firstChild;

    var newStation = new station();
    newStation.CallsignSSID = station.getElementsByTagName('name')[0].firstChild;
    newStation.find();
}

function getStationInformation(CallsignSSID, fnToDo) {
   this.myConn.connect("http://localhost:8001/getStationInformation", "POST",
"CallsignSSID=" + CallsignSSID, fnToDo);
}

function station() {
    this.CallsignSSID = "";
    this.find=find;
    this.send=send;
    return this;
}

function find() {
    Alert("Ask Xastir to 'find' " + this.CallsignSSID + ".");
}


Does this sound like something that would be useful? Personally, I think this
would let people develop their own APRS "interface" using Xastir to do the
heavy lifting - and I think that if done correctly, this would eventually let
you run Xastir in a daemon mode and only use this interface if you wanted to.

I imagine that adding a simple http server to the code would be pretty
straight forward; the only question would be if that server would be able to
get the data to answer the queries with easily.

Thoughts?
-- 
William McKeehan
KI4HDU

On Wed, August 29, 2007 6:01 am, Carl Makin wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-08-28 at 09:56 -0400, William McKeehan wrote:
>> Has anyone thought about adding a scripting capability within Xastir?
>
>> I'm thinking about something like some VB script (or similar) that would
>> allow
>
> At the risk of getting serious. :)
>
> Lua
>
> http://www.lua.org/
>
> Lua is a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language.
>
> Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description
> constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is
> dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based
> virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental
> garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and
> rapid prototyping.
>
>
> Carl,
> vk1kcm
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xastir mailing list
> Xastir at xastir.org
> http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir
>
>