[mythtv] Caller ID

[Ben Bucksch]

Ken Bass wrote:

>2) Your design created an XML telephone event structure that was specific to
>caller id and would require myth to understand that structure. I wanted a
>generic notify capability that works with stuff other than caller id and
>doesn't require any knowledge on the mythtv side (minimize coupling). My
>design creates a <mythnotify> XML structure than can allow any
>container/textarea to be updated that exists within an OSD theme.
>
>3) Your design hardcoded the XML structure in the cidbcast program, mine
>reads it from a file and replaces keywords. This allows changing the XML
>structure without changing the program.
>
The disadvantage is that now (the template of) the caller id server 
needs to know about MythTV (and even its theme structure?). Another way 
might have been to use a caller id specific XML for transfer over UDP 
and then to use XSLT on the MythTV side to convert it into the 
MythTV-specific format you use now. This would not require any knowledge 
on the MythTV side about the type of notification, apart from a simple 
XSLT template, which could then also be adjusted to the requirements of 
the themes. The advantage of this is that the communication protocol is 
then not MythTV-specific, but your server could be used by other apps as 
well.


Anyways, thanks for this. Could be a nice infrastrucure to alert about 
time-critical events.