Technologies

The code will all be released under a free and open source license, but I'm not sure which one yet. I want folk to run this, and to contribute, so I'll obviously be as helpful as I can. Once it's all up and impressive, I may well provide commercial support, to help folk integrate it into commercial products, or simply offer pre-installed pretty, quiet boxes.

BeOS

The bulk of the code is in C++, using the Be APIs, in particular attributed files, live queries and messaging

Writing things for BeOS doesn't permanently shackle us to the pretty dormant BeOS though. The OpenBeOS team are making great strides towards a BeOS binary compatible system. Other projects are aiming at source-compatibility or something close. BeUnited is good place to find out about all of these.

For now all development and testing is being done under a stock BeOS 5.0.3. As and when the OpenBeOS folk release some of the kits, I'll be sure to test against them too. If OpenBeOS fixes any of the niggles with BeOS' behaviour then we could start conditionally compiling some stuff, but that's a little premature at the moment.

(We're now developing primarily on YellowTab's Zeta, but that doesn't mean we're only going to use that in the end)

XMLTV

The format for the listings feed, it casts magazine style listings into a reasonably sane form, leaving the unpleasant, grubby work of cleaning up the information to others. There is still work to be done in finding a good naming scheme for retrieving the listings, presumably over HTTP.

RDF

Soon, for the sharing components which are presently being roughed out. They will likely offer a range of annotation styles, but the central communicable form will almost certainly be RDF.

Web services

An array of supporting Web services are needed to support simple collaboration from one videdot installation to the next, these are written to run in Apache with mod_rewrite, PHP and postgreSQL - based on the Future i toolkit.

Similarly, collaboration in development will rely on public resources run through Future i, mainly on the Web, but also CVS, mailing lists and so forth if they are useful or desirable.