A few months ago I announced the "PHP for LCD Smartie" plugin but now I decided to make it more powerful by not limiting it just to PHP.
The result is "CGI for LCD Smartie", a plugin to make LCD Smartie even more powerful by adding a way to call scripts in any language, like PHP itself, Ruby, Python and even MS-DOS' Batch.
When it was "PHP for LCD Smartie", the code I made had a flaw that made LCD Smartie prone to hang or skip the screen if the called script took too long to respond. To solve it, I came with a client-server based solution: the plugin is a client that make requests to a server in a separate process. These requests are made by the command line (to execute the language interpreter with the right parameters), plus interval and timeout values (in milisseconds). The server receives the data and puts the request in a queue. The queue is processed every second but the command line of a request is executed and stored at every X value set by interval. At every Y value set by timeout the request is removed from the queue. If the server detects that a request is similar to another one already put on the queue, it will send back the result stored in cache and reset the timeout value, keeping the stored request alive to be executed in the next cycle. See, the hard work is done by the server and the client has just to connect and ask to the server what it wants, without hanging LCD Smartie.
CGI for LCD Smartie is:
- Made in VB6 - with plans to port it to C++
- Open-source
- Hosted at Github - https://github.com/MendelGusmao/CGI-for-LCD-Smartie
It’s under development for about 2 days and for now I don’t have any usable or testable. Feel free to make suggestions and to correct my poor english
.Cheers!
