szsori Wrote:I think what pretty much everyone is missing is that if a proprietary system is supported immediately, when that system becomes outdated or hard to find, it should be relatively easy to switch to the next system to support. The same would need to be done with a reference design, since drivers and hardware change over time.

Say AppleTV is the first supported platform. What's to prevent the developers from also supporting the Mac Mini when that comes out. Then imagine that the AppleTV officially flops and nobody can buy them anymore. The developers just select the latest platform in the same price range that will do what they need it to do.

Since it's linux, it would take all of a week or two to get the new drivers into the distro and do some proper testing. They don't need to stop supporting AppleTV at that point either, since XBMC-Linux will probably be pretty stable on that hardware at that point. Basically all that's needed is a platform that's going to work for at least a couple years, just to keep the extra work to a minimum.

Gamester17 Wrote:I think that you are probably right on this, since XBMC will be a cross-platform software using the very same code base (and not seperate source code trees), best would be be if we also used a small cross-platform webserver and a cross-platfrom web-site running on that webserver. That way even if you run XBMC nativly on an Xbox, or on a x86 Linux-computer, or a future new game-console port, both the webserver and the website for remote-control would still look and function the same (as they share the very same code on all platforms).

XBMC uses GoAhead WebServer as its current code for this, and it was the best webserver for Xbox version of XBMC at the time it was implemented. It is very small, designed for embedded systems, and is cross-platform already. Unfortunatly GoAhead Software Inc. who maintain the original branch of the GoAhead WebServer seems to have stopped development of the source code in December 2003, (and I at least can not seem to find any projects with forked version of the GoAhead WebServer on which development have continued since then, can anyone of you?).

...the main limitation of the GoAhead WebServer is the lack of native ASP , PHP, and JavaScript support, which I agree is quitesome limitation, (as right now you can really make websites for it in standard HTTP and/or AJAX without JavaScript). The main iisue we have here is that no developers on Team-XBMC seems to have had a personal interest in maintaining the webserver source code, and no outside / third-party developers have stepped up and submitted any patches to show that they would be willing to help us update and maintain the webserver code (either by replacing it with a other webserver library or by adding additional libraries/code which add additional function):
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_Web_Interface
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=1358

Still LiquidIce629 and crew managed to do marvels creating a XBMC remote-control website for XBMC using AJAX (and no JavaScript):
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=18680

Also nad have extended the HTTP-server support with his HTTP API which enables many more ways to control XBMC via HTTP:
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=WebServerHTTP-API
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=8760

PS! The webserver in XBMC is not meant to serve as a standard webserver, end-user are not suppose to use it to host their private website on, it is only ever meant to be a remote-control-interface for XBMC (and maybe at most also a way to access your local media-files remotly)

inkubux Wrote:I personally think that you shoule use lighthttpd for this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighttpd
It's a well proven web server which is small, fast and can run PHP.

Gamester17 Wrote:I am not sure the BSD license is compatible with GPL which is what XBMC is licensed under(?)

Quote:The GNU project has called this clause "obnoxious", explaining that as people changed the license to reflect their name or organisation it led to ridiculous advertising requirements when programs were combined together in a software distribution—every occurance of the license with a different name requires a separate acknowledgement—and citing the requirement for 75 such acknowledgments when advertising a 1997 version of NetBSD.[1] In addition, it presents a legal problem for those wishing to use BSD-licensed software under the GPL: the advertising clause is incompatible with the GPL, which does not allow the addition of restrictions beyond those it already imposes.

The advertising clause was removed from the official BSD license text on July 22, 1999 by William Hoskins, the director of the office of technology licensing for Berkeley,[2] in response to a request from Richard Stallman.[citation needed] Other BSD distributions removed the clause, but NetBSD still uses the original version of the license and many similar clauses remain in BSD-derived code from other sources.