Feature request - backend

[mrquincle]

Keep up the good work! If you have time, this is another feature request. For now all processing "happens in the browser". It would be cool to be able to address a backend server that executes commands when a person clicks "Execute". The dataprocessing part is then separated from the GUI part.

This means that on the server the node.js server requires from a backend server the following API:

• getlist (which returns possible nodes with their port names)
• start node
• connect port a on node 1 and b on node 2
• run node (individually or all at once)

This would allow someone to design the control flow of anything which would be still valid after the browser has closed. Think of a node which searches for "picture Obama" with output to an "email" node which sends the picture subsequently. Everything becomes really operational.

[idflood]

Wow thanks, I've never imagined this. That would add so much possibility : ) I've no idea of how to do that but I will see after I've finished a big refactoring test.

[mrquincle]

Hi idflood,

I tried to make the concept a bit "tangible" at http://prezi.com/aq4-q0p2hfbw/do/ We already have something that is called "AIM" which is just a CLI utility (basically just a series of bash scripts on the moment) that accepts commands like "list", "connect", "start", etc. For now, we use YARP, acronym for Yet Another Robot Plaform, which supports these kind of commands and where the connections can range from TCP/IP sockets to a diversity of other communication means (we use only TCP/IP for now). The fun thing is that we can start our modules using your GUI, while the modules are witten in a completely different language (C/C++).

The code is completely available at https://redmine.almende.com in several repositories. For now I have to make sure I can get data back and forth from one of our spinoffs, http://www.sense-os.nl who have collected large sets of sensor data and which requires some oauth integration. As soon I've done that, I hope we can demonstrate it! And, just to make sure, everything we do in this respect, will be open source of course!