New Webinterface (4 Viewers)

[Maschine]

thechad, that looks nice Good luck with your project and keep us updated

marcus, thanks for the nice words

Some general thoughts about getting/sending the data (I think this has been discussed before in this thread, but anyway...):

Direct db access is fast, but on the other side very "insecure" because any db-changes can break everything.

Using a webservice is more secure as you have only a small api which you can talk to and changes would not affect the webservice client (like a webinterface). Next point is that webservices are language independent and so every programming language (php, python, java, whatever) could easily do a client for the tv engine. So it's a kind of universal solution. Buuuut: a lot of extra data is added for the "transfer" and serializing/deserializing has to be done. This is a massive impact on the performance. Especially for transfering let's say 3 hours of guide data for 30 channels this could become slow.

Thinking about this I came to the point that asp.net would be the fastest and most secure solution. You can use the TV Server's .net classes directly. Also there are nice little servers that could be bundled with the app and no more need for the biiiig Apache server for such a "small" project.

Well, I hope I could clarify why I chose asp.net and why the other solutions posted here are not that good IMO (this is for the webinterface, for thechad's taks he definately chose the best solution).

Maschine

 

[dvdfreak]

Using a webservice is more secure as you have only a small api which you can talk to and changes would not affect the webservice client (like a webinterface). Next point is that webservices are language independent and so every programming language (php, python, java, whatever) could easily do a client for the tv engine. So it's a kind of universal solution. Buuuut: a lot of extra data is added for the "transfer" and serializing/deserializing has to be done. This is a massive impact on the performance. Especially for transfering let's say 3 hours of guide data for 30 channels this could become slow.

The advantage of using WCF is that communication can be quite a bit more efficient. Unfortunately, this will only work from another WCF client, a web service client would be slower again. But as you talk about ASP.NET obviously this would mean the transfer will will be fast!

And let's not forget that the data needs to be transferred from server to client anyway, even with a direct database access the data is transferred over the network, so it's not that big a deal that it is serialized over XML. In the end, a good web interface is what will make it snappy. Getting the guide data as needed for example, while the user it navigating through the guide will be better than trying to get everything beforehand for example.

Just my two cents I just wish that I had more free time to work on the scheduler service, it is progressing but I'd like to get something into alpha or beta state so I could get some more real feedback on this.