RE: Pluto

["Ian Lowe" <ianlowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> ahhh that's better...

Indeed. Burns barely makes sense to a native speaker. ;)

> Wasted efforts? I don't believe I ever said that. I do believe that
neither have yet achieved the
> goals originally thrashed out on this list* - those goals may have
changed.. but they were certainly
> what I wanted in a protocol.

I think you are being rather harsh - we have produced a set of tools which
can *very* easily tie together the various HA systems. The ease of use
elements are coming, but progress is slow - and that's the whole discussion
again...

The problem from day one has been getting people to test the stuff in
anger.
Recently we had a bunch of work throughs on the xPL forums - debugging an
install as a new user hit problems.

The value of even a couple of people willing to describe their own
environment and live through a series of bug fixes is incredible - you can
see the tools improve over a series of days rather than weeks or months.

In the course of the xPL Project we have had maybe four or five people
*ever* extend us this help. It's nigh on impossible to produce rounded user
friendly tools in that environment.

*but* we are still trying to build in ease of use - the determinator system
which means that people who don't know how to script can build useful
environments is one example.

Ages have been spent trying to get together the building blocks for
friendly
user tools, things like xml descriptions of what messages do which provide
no real benefit to the low level guys, but will help with cross plaform
tools..

Thing is... Who wants to spend time at night building software when it's so
hard to get people to even test it?

Pluto is a business, we are all hobbyists doing this in our spare time.

> Well, Xap is a 'fat' protocol, xpl is slim - isn;t that one of the
reasons
xpl was born?
> You also seem to believe xpl being a 'bastard child' is a bad thing. I
don't.

In context, you weren't exactly being flattering ;)

That being said - engage with us! Seriously.

One of the things Pluto seems to do is abstract the various devices out
into
a database - homeautomator used a similar abstraction process, and the idea
of database stored displays.

It's probably not a massive leap of logic for us to say that we also have
been looking at abstracted displays, whether that's an html page, a little
application, and applet running on a PDA, whatever. Way back when, I hoped
that xPL being added into home automator would provide that interface.

As you know, it didn't happen - then. How about now?

Ian.