Revision as of 17:40, 28 February 2010

LMCE Remote

LMCE Remote is an iPhone application which can be used to:

• load available lights from LMCE
• display the lights status
• set each light on or off

Screenshots

Intent

Please note, this is not, and is not intended to be a full Orbiter. The goal of this app is to be lightweight so that it remains very responsive even when used over a 3G connection.

Architecture

There were three possible approaches to connect to LMCE:

• Connect directly to the DCE router
  • Pros:
    • seemed to be the cleanest approach, closed to a real orbiter
  • Cons:
    • need to implement the DCE protocol
    • it is unclear how to obtain a list of the available scenarios through this protocol
    • remote access is difficult because of the lack of authentication mechanism

• Connect to the web interface
  • Pros:
    • easy to implement for simple actions
    • easier remote access as the web server is often made available externally
  • Cons:
    • requires parsing HTML for more advanced actions and is prone to errors
    • requires double authentication when used for remote access (apache auth, then lmce auth)

• Implement a web service
  • Pros:
    • can access all required information in Lmce databases
    • very lean and network efficient
    • easily made available externally with apache authentication
  • Cons:
    • The user needs to install the web service on the core before it can be used

I have chosen to go for the web service approach.

Upcoming features

Some additional features are being seriously considered:

• Add a tab with scenarios
• Add a tab to set security mode