xAP newbie - HA oldie!

["Adam Stevens" <adam@xxxxxxx>]

Morning,

I've been playing with home automation for several years, although I'm
not overly active on any of the mailing lists.

As I'm also a developer, over the years I've written various utilities
to better integrate various stuff (Caller ID, Temperature control etc.
See http://www.the-firs.org/).

I've recently "discovered" the xAP protocol, and although I'm in
the
process of testing a few of my home grown applications for general
release, I get the feeling that in some cases I'm reinventing the wheel,
where thanks to some of the existing xAP modules, this doesn't have to
be the case.  A case in point is Meteor caller ID, and SAPI (text to
voice).

For example, currently, I have an application which reads and decodes
Meteor CID information, announces via SAPI, logs to a DB, and broadcasts
CID information over UDP, which is then picked up by an number of
"client" programs running on PC's.  It looks to me like most of
this can
already be achieved with various xAP tools.

Therefore, I'm wondering if it's better to bin my work, and make the
move over to integrating it with xAP.  Rather than worrying about
decoding Meteor CID information for example, I could concentrate on
Sipura CID (network VoIP device).  If this also broadcast via xAP, then
I guess it would be compatible with the xAP Desktop, or any of the other
xAP modules.

I could also change my client program to receive xAP, rather than (as it
does at the moment), use it's own "protocol" for communication. 
Am I
correcting in thinking that the "standard" xAP port is 3639?

What's the drill with "releasing" xAP software?  I can host the
stuff
myself, but it there a procedure to get it listed on the xAP web site?

Thanks,
Adam.