[olsr-dev] Some thoughts on GUIs

[Thomas Lopatic]

Hi Jannis,

I am not aware of anyone working on a GUI for Mac OS. However, we 
currently put quite some work into improving the web-based interface for 
configuration and monitoring, which is currently implemented by the 
httpinfo plugin.

The current CVS version also includes a preliminary version of what we 
call "TAS plugin", "TAS" being the "Tiny Application Server". This 
basically offers an HTTP server that has an embedded PHP-like script 
language that allows to create dynamic web content. The script language 
has access to olsrd internals and an option is to migrate httpinfo one 
day to TAS, as this means more flexibility, as the individual HTML files 
will be easily editable as they are external to the plugin. (But this 
also requires more CPU cycles. So, we have to evaluate whether this is a 
viable solution for WRTs, for example.)

So, I think that the general direction is towards web-based 
administration. The Windows GUI will one day probably consist of an 
embedded Internet Explorer that enables the user to interact with the 
httpinfo/TAS plugin.

But then again, it would be easy to design dynamic pages for TAS that 
encoded the internal state of olsrd into an XML document and made this 
available via HTTP. The pages could then also parse XML documents inside 
incoming POST requests and modify olsrd's internal state accordingly. In 
this way we'd end up with a configuration web-service.

Any thoughts anyone?

-Thomas