Subject: From: Date:

RE: [ECS] CGI advice needed David Kindred Sun, 30 Jan 2000 12:57:23 -0500

---

Mark,

I s'pose it depends on how much of a Web server you want ECS to be. You
could just use an ordinary socket to receive commands via the HTTP protocol,
and then respond to them with Web page output. Users could design HTML pages
which would post data from HTML forms or via command-line variables to the
ECS server. You could control what the responses would be. That part would
be pretty straight forward.

Remember that, when making this sucker platform independent, you're, for the
most part, going to be working with stateless sessions. Makes things a
little trickier. Clients might have to regularly poll ECS to determine the
status of items, since most Internet comm is in the form of connect->get
data->disconnect, to cut down on bandwidth.

I guess the biggest question to be answered is: What is your target user. Is
it for the general public, or for a bunch of techies like us who don't mind
learning HTML, Perl, etc.? If for the former, then you might want to
consider making some "wizards" to generate the client-side screens in HTML
(or whatever).

Just my $0.02.

--David

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Gilmore [mailto:omnip@usit.net]
Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2000 11:46 AM
To: ecs-list@netbloc.com
Subject: Re: [ECS] CGI advice needed


Per helpful inputs from SCOTT/MARTIN/KENT, I am strongly
leaning towards making ECS a web server.

I have already added test code in ECS to generate a
web page listing all Items and State-dropdowns for each
(generating any required web pages will be trivial).

Any thoughts on how to best make ECS a web server ?
MS VC++ has support for this, but I would like to find
a system-independent solution (if possible).

I don't mind AT ALL if you call today (collect).

Thanks,
--
Mark Gilmore
Omnipotence (ECS home automation software)
http://www.usit.com/omnip
423-745-0026

---