Re: xPL integration

["Kevin Hawkins" <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Glen,

--- In xap_automation@xxxxxxx, "Sullivan, Glenn"
<gsullivan@...> wrote:
>
> Anyone have much experience with xAP/xPL integration?
>
Yes, I've played a little..

> I'm having a play with the MediaNet server, since I have an
exstreamer,
> a rio, and an audiotron, and MediaNet supports at least two of them...
> But it's xPL integrated, not xAP.

Tony has kindly offered to include xAP integration if we help him with
the schema - or the protocol support is in an external module so he
can provide an example and we can code it ourselves..  might be a
better route than bridging.

>
> I understood that xPLHAL had some xAP bridging support, so that is now
> installed as well.

xAP Floorplan has xPL bridging in it too.

>
> So I have a xPL Hub (required, and a separate app from xPLHal,
according
> to the new spec), xPLHal, and MediaNet all installed... I had a xAP
Hub
> installed, but it turns out that xPLHAL is supposed to work as the xAP
> hub.

Yes - this is true so that it can intercept and manage traffic via the
scripting engine.  Quite a lot of extra bits that need to be up and
running.

>
> Does anyone have any generic xPLHAL scripts that dump all messages
from
> xPL to xAP (and maybe vice versa)?

I originally did exactly this and then then found it was a bad idea
due to a problem in the xPLHAL application. xPLHAL runs a script on
the receipt of EVERY xAP/xPL message to determine if one of its
deteminators should run and further process (bridge) that message -
each one creates a thread and you end up with hundreds of threads
running that eventually crash xPLHAL - and hence the hub too :-(.
Here is a comment from the maintainance author of xPLHAL that was
posted to UKHA in the last few days.

John Bent wrote

"It wasn't actually a memory leak - the problem was that if you
flooded the xPLHal server with xAP or xPL messages, it used up too
much memory and fell over!

Under normal traffic conditions, it shouldn't be a problem, and memory
usage shouldn't be an issue - it's just in cases where you experience
a massive amount of packets that the xPLHal server didn't do very well
- this is still something we are improving on an ongoing basis. "

Tony was going to fix this but after his fall out with the xPL crowd
it remained 'todo'.

On the xPL site you will find an example of a script I wrote to bridge
and schema translate xPL OSD message to xAP. That may be a good
starting point for you.

xAP Floorplan does bridging a little differently in that it has
inbuilt support for schema translations from xPL to xAP, and you can
creat and add your own I believe. This potentially will be very nice
as we could have a series of templates to drop in for schema
translations.  I haven't explored too much here (yet).  I feel it
would be nice to support MCE2005 (see below) and MediaNet via this
(although xAP integrated support for the latter is far preferable).

>
> Any other "must have" xPL apps?  Now that I'm
"integrated" I guess I can
> try out some of that stuff as well.

The just released MediaCentre 2005 xPL app is quite nice but TBH I
haven't found much else that xAP doesn't have.  Of course if you just
want MCE2005 OSD then StuartB's app does that really well.

>
> And one other question: is there a media server that has better xAP
> integration?  Frankly, it would have to be pretty damn good to live up
> to MediaNet so far...

Probably not as MediaNet is fairly well featured, I think Tony has a
new release either just done or imminent.   TelCanto has basic xAP
integration which is interesting as it also has uPNP support. There is
also the rather 'long in the tooth / unmaintained' SlimServer plugin
which is very feature rich .  I have a never released winAMP one too
but that would need maintainence if you wanted to play.

Cheers Kevin



>
> TIA,
>
> Glenn Sullivan, MCSE+I MCDBA
> David Clark Company Inc.
>