Discuss creating a new SageTV Web App...

[NetworkGuy]

I use both the SageTV Web App (desktop) and BMT but for different reasons.

I use the SageTV Web App to make quick changes to media that is already in SageTV. (i.e. change the name of a show, etc.)

I use BMT when the description of a show or movie is missing or wrong and I want to get the correct metadata.

I use PlaceShifter / SageTV Client to perform all of the PVR functions and to change any setup options.

Media Playback via the web app is an interesting idea. Are you assuming this would only be in a LAN environment, or could it serve as a PlaceShifter replacement?

[Taddeusz]

This seems appropriate.

https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-...77f#.8h6zcsw6b

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

This seems appropriate.

https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-...77f#.8h6zcsw6b

That's gotta be the funniest thing I've read in weeks... And they completely missed the fact that to use most of those tools... you really need to have to node installed which is another train wreck

Thanks for sharing.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

This seems appropriate.

https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-...77f#.8h6zcsw6b

Welcome to my world. I feel like that every time I need to do something new

[panteragstk]

Reading that made me realize how happy I am to not be a coder. I'll take being an MDM admin over that any day.

[Taddeusz]

As bad as it sounds JavaScript can be a very powerful tool. Much of the complexity has to do with browser compatibility since the community working on the language itself moves faster than the browser developers can implement the changes. If there wasn't that barrier things wouldn't be so complex.

Then again some of the complexity is probably due to it being a scripted vs a compiled language. Babel and Browserfy wouldn't be necessary for transpilation if JS was compiled.

[Fuzzy]

I am in no way a web coder - but wouldn't server side generation of HTML5 be perfectly fine for this use? Does there need to be JS at all for mostly static display and simple form queries?

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I am in no way a web coder - but wouldn't server side generation of HTML5 be perfectly fine for this use? Does there need to be JS at all for mostly static display and simple form queries?

Kind of referencing that blog post that's just not the way modern frameworks are designed. The Java EE and ASP.NET way of preformatting data server side has just fallen out of favor. This is mainly used to facilitate better utilization of network resources on mobile devices and apps. The server is mainly used to retrieve data using AJAX or Fetch requests. The client side is then responsible for formatting the data for display. Kind of a slight modification of the MVC idea.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

Kind of referencing that blog post that's just not the way modern frameworks are designed. The Java EE and ASP.NET way of preformatting data server side has just fallen out of favor. This is mainly used to facilitate better utilization of network resources on mobile devices and apps. The server is mainly used to retrieve data using AJAX or Fetch requests. The client side is then responsible for formatting the data for display. Kind of a slight modification of the MVC idea.

Oh, I know that it is the trend, but one isn't required to follow trends. ;-)

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

As bad as it sounds JavaScript can be a very powerful tool. Much of the complexity has to do with browser compatibility since the community working on the language itself moves faster than the browser developers can implement the changes. If there wasn't that barrier things wouldn't be so complex.

Then again some of the complexity is probably due to it being a scripted vs a compiled language. Babel and Browserfy wouldn't be necessary for transpilation if JS was compiled.

I started dabbling in JavaScript for the Echo skill I wrote and hate the language. The typing is so weak you never know what you're working with.

[Bagal]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

I started dabbling in JavaScript for the Echo skill I wrote and hate the language. The typing is so weak you never know what you're working with.

The lack of typing can be a problem at times but it's also one of JavaScript's strongest features, for instance let's say I'm calling a REST service and I then want to display that data, in C# or Java I'd need to create a bunch of model classes in order to deserialize* the response and then pass those into the view engine etc, etc, basically a lot of boilerplate that doesn't do much, whereas in JavaScript I call the REST service and just pass the response in to my view directly, no extra code needed.

This is a fairly trivial example but the speed you can create apps in JS is pretty impressive at times, especially compared to standard backend JSP** or ASP.NET web apps.

*I know I could use the dynamic keyword in C# if I really wanted to, but in my experience it's a lot slower than deserializing to a plain object (not sure if there's the equivalent to dynamic in Java these days)

**It's been a long time since I did any Java so I have no idea what the latest frameworks in use are.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

I am in no way a web coder - but wouldn't server side generation of HTML5 be perfectly fine for this use? Does there need to be JS at all for mostly static display and simple form queries?

That's so 2000

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Oh, I know that it is the trend, but one isn't required to follow trends. ;-)

You have to realize, for some of us, working on open source projects (or addons to open source projects) is a means to keep our skill sets relevant, play with new technologies/ideas in a non-enterprise environment, etc. All of my Android experience comes from working on things like this... and in every project, I tend to try and learn something new... just because learning is fun. If this is to be treated my day job... I can guarantee that I would likely just stop developing. Many of us could cobble together a bunch of code to quickly get an HTML page serving up SageTV content in a few minutes... and if that's all I wanted, then fine, but for me, it's much more than that.. I want to use the time spent learning something new in the process... I may end up hating it, in the end, but, at least I've learned it

Originally Posted by Bagal

The lack of typing can be a problem at times but it's also one of JavaScript's strongest features, for instance let's say I'm calling a REST service and I then want to display that data, in C# or Java I'd need to create a bunch of model classes in order to deserialize* the response and then pass those into the view engine etc, etc, basically a lot of boilerplate that doesn't do much, whereas in JavaScript I call the REST service and just pass the response in to my view directly, no extra code needed.

This is a fairly trivial example but the speed you can create apps in JS is pretty impressive at times, especially compared to standard backend JSP** or ASP.NET web apps.

*I know I could use the dynamic keyword in C# if I really wanted to, but in my experience it's a lot slower than deserializing to a plain object (not sure if there's the equivalent to dynamic in Java these days)

**It's been a long time since I did any Java so I have no idea what the latest frameworks in use are.

I was about to say, it's probably a long time since you looked at Java... but I see you covered that already To Tom's point, "not knowing" is huge. The IDE can't actually help you... a simple typo can lead to hours of troubleshooting. While in Java you can use models to represent that data (and I would certainly), that 10 minutes used to create a model saves hours of time during refactoring, auto-completing, compile time type checking, etc. I use JS daily and I use Java daily... And while JS can be a powerful language... it actually requires much more skill to write "good" javascript code than it does for many other languages.

Javascript is good, in my mind, for small scripts, simple validations, etc, but when you start to get over 100 lines of code, specially across multiple files, it's gets unmanageable. It's no surprise that most of our type safe JS tools, like TypeScript and Dart, come from enterprise companies that have to create web applications AND support them for many years, come from companies like Google and Microscoft, etc.

Javascript is a good language, but for language as old as Javascript, you'd think that in 2016 there would be better tools... but when you have no types... how can a tool actually help you

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

I started dabbling in JavaScript for the Echo skill I wrote and hate the language. The typing is so weak you never know what you're working with.

Not sure your level of JS expertise but when doing comparison and logic operations use "!==" or "===" instead of the traditional "!=" or "==" because the type and value must be the same whereas with the latter operators only the value must be "the same".

5 == "5" = true
5 === "5" = false

Of course this can give you more power in that if you are comparing a number and a string you don't have to manually cast the string to a number before doing the comparison.

Of course I'm sure there are cons to the way this works.

[jm9843]

Taking a few minutes to setup linting goes a long way to addressing some of these JavaScript 'problems'.

I'm partial to http://standardjs.com/

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by stuckless

I was about to say, it's probably a long time since you looked at Java... but I see you covered that already To Tom's point, "not knowing" is huge. The IDE can't actually help you... a simple typo can lead to hours of troubleshooting. While in Java you can use models to represent that data (and I would certainly), that 10 minutes used to create a model saves hours of time during refactoring, auto-completing, compile time type checking, etc. I use JS daily and I use Java daily... And while JS can be a powerful language... it actually requires much more skill to write "good" javascript code than it does for many other languages.

I got bit passing a boolean to a Java method. You can't use

someMethod(someBoolean)

Instead you have to use

someMethod(someBoolean == "true")

That's pretty ugly.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

I got bit passing a boolean to a Java method. You can't use

someMethod(someBoolean)

Instead you have to use

someMethod(someBoolean == "true")

That's pretty ugly.

At least you didn't spend hours on it (And yeah, that's pretty ugly)

[wayner]

I am a very heavy user of all three of the web UIs described here and also some of the other plugins like SageAlert, SRE, etc.

I think consolidation is a great idea. Here are my thoughts on this:
I am less interested in doing the initial config via the web UI but there are some config areas where it would be really useful to config via the web such as channel setup. It would be great to be able to see a grid with channels going down and tuners/lineups going across.
Playback via the web UI would be useful for those of us that use iOS devices as there still isn't a great way to play files in this OS.
Modularity would be useful as it would be good to be able to add functionality to the web UI for plugins.
On the main web page I would like to see added information. Currently it shows which clients are connected and what is playing back. I would like to see where you are in the current file and when the last UI interaction took place. For example it would look like this: Kitchen now playing Modern Family - S07E06 Lily's Friend now at 15:25 of 30:05, last UI input 5:02 ago.
It might also be nice to be able to link to external potential sources. Like for a TV show have a link to the TVDB page for that show or the Wikipedia page for that show or a Netflix search for that TV show.

One other thing that is peripherally related to this is that I would like to consolidate information from multiple sources into a "room" web page. Many rooms in my house have IP cameras, SageTV extenders, Harmony connected hubs, plus lights and other devices connected to my Control4 Home Automation systems. So the page would show a picture of the room (or live video screen), indicate the status of the Harmony connected hub, show what SageTV is playing, show the status of light in the room, list any music playing on a Sonos/Echo system. The best place for this may actually be the HA system UI but so far it lacks at doing this.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by wayner

One other thing that is peripherally related to this is that I would like to consolidate information from multiple sources into a "room" web page. Many rooms in my house have IP cameras, SageTV extenders, Harmony connected hubs, plus lights and other devices connected to my Control4 Home Automation systems. So the page would show a picture of the room (or live video screen), indicate the status of the Harmony connected hub, show what SageTV is playing, show the status of light in the room, list any music playing on a Sonos/Echo system. The best place for this may actually be the HA system UI but so far it lacks at doing this.

That all sounds more like a custom situation, but getting that info out of sage via sagex should be totally doable currently.