Feature request - Websocket support

Since all the browsers (at least the ones that matter) now support websockets, it would be awesome if support could be rolled in to Indigo. I think it would give a tighter integration to those developing their own custom web interfaces outside of the control pages.

Is this something that could be a plugin? If so would a IWS plugin be more suitable? I did notice that CherryPy has a websockets add-on available but haven't tried anything with it yet.

As always, thanks for all y'all do.
Terry

[matt (support)]

Hi Terry,

We have some semi-major re-work to be done to IWS (its Indigo Server communication layer needs to be removed and replaced with the plugin Indigo Object Model). When we do that I will evaluate WebSockets as well.

[jay (support)]

It could be done in a plugin of course...

I'd avoid IWS plugins - part of the afore mentioned changes will break existing IWS plugins. It's likely that API will be deprecated.

Cool, thanks for the info guys - I'm looking at a big re-write here at home so am just exploring options at the moment. I've done some websocket stuff at work and it really seemed to be less problematic than Ajax, long polling, etc.

Jay thanks for the heads-up on the IWS future, I was actually leaning in that direction but wasn't looking forward to learning the intricacies of CherryPy and Cheetah templates.

Since you guys are looking at an overhaul of IWS, an amended feature request is in order: HTML5/CSS3/JS and a nice framework like Dojo, Wink, JQMobile, etc. for the presentation layer with pub/sub to an indigo data bus would kick ass. You could even use Maqetta for an online CP builder.

Terry

[jay (support)]

Indigo Touch doesn't currently use HTML/CSS for rendering so I'm not sure that we'll implement any changes to custom control pages via those technologies - however, we're not really to the point of discussing it seriously yet. The IWS web pages though will likely get a big makeover in that direction.

We may keep Cheetah for the templating and will likely keep CherryPy as the web server since it's so light-weight and all Python. The reason the plugins would not work are more because of how you access Indigo objects - the old IWS plugins and built-in IWS pages predated the IOM by several years and keeping that old data access stuff around, particularly given how few IWS plugins there are, would be a large amount of work for very little benefit. And, frankly, it's not architected particularly well in comparison to the IOM (and it's missing a lot too).

Nothing is yet set in stone of course - we've got bigger fish to fry in the near term - but we are thinking about it.

Hello!
Is there any way to use Websockets instead of RESTful API for Indigo? Using REST is painful when you need real-time updates.

[jay (support)]

Read the second post in this thread...

Yeah, thanks for reply. The topic is pretty old so i thought that may be something changed already. I'm pretty new to Indigo.

P. S. : looks like i can use the code from this topic to write my own mediator server implementation for now. viewtopic.php?f=109&t=13543&p=92925&hilit=sockets#p92925