Re: EXCLUSIVE - WebBrick State engines

["andythirtover" <andy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi dearest Group

Andy Harris here, erstwhile designer of the WebBrick.

WebBrick has been around for about three years, basically myself, a
few friends and a company called Symphony group were the only people
to have them.   However I met up with a chappy called John Guyatt who
thought they might have commercial value.

State Machines refers to the software architecture, in that there are
8 state machines that can receive triggers.  When they are triggered
they will follow their configuration rules till complete, or triggered
again. (triggers are electronic, UDP, and HTTP based [and two special
cases for analogue and temperature])

This gives a completely deterministic behaviour, if you know what the
state engine is configured to do, you know what it will be doing.
This means that you can write distributed programs on generic hosts
that do stuff, whilst the basics of safety and local control are
handled by the WebBrick.

For example, you could have a State Engine that does a Toggles a
heating element on, another State engine might perform an 'OFF' if a
local temperature gets too high.  It'll do this with or without a
network connection.

Ah, I could write for ever on the little devils, but that would be
rude, so I'll leave it here for the moment.

Regards



Andy