[mythtv] Intro and Mythweb

[Erin Tomson]

Hello myth developers. I've been lurking on this list for a while and 
decided it's time to introduce myself. I'm Erin. By day, I do computer
graphics work at Pixar. I've been working there in production for 4 
years now, but I'll be joining the tools group soon as a software engineer.

Lately when not at work I've been hacking on mythtv a good deal. My
mythtv box is a Pentium-M system with one PVR-250 and one PVR-350. I use
external DirecTV receivers with serial port control. In addition, I run
mythfrontend on a mac in another room.

I've been working on some changes to mythweb lately, and wanted to run
them by you all. My goal is to add support for mythweb themes that use 
AJAX. (there's a good description of AJAX at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX if you're unfamiliar with it)

An AJAX theme has the potential to be much more responsive, since the 
amount of data that needs to be initially loaded is smaller and changes 
can be made to the database without refreshing the entire page. Many 
tasks in mythweb will be dramatically more fluid.

The downside of this is that it requires a fair amount of code 
restructuring. Currently, mythweb builds large data structures that it 
then passes to the theme for display. That's a slow process, especially 
when an AJAX request may use only a tiny portion of that data.

So instead, I propose that rather than using global variables, mythweb 
would instead provide functions that query and return specific pieces of 
data. Themes that need all the information at once can easily retrieve 
it, while themes that don't can avoid paying the overhead.

I'd say I'm about half way through this process now. I've done a fair 
portion of the restructuring (though a lot of cleanup work remains) and 
I have several of the basic pages working in a new AJAX-based theme.

I'd love to hear any concerns or suggestions, especially from the 
original mythweb developers.

thanks!

-erin