[gephex-devel] gephex-0.5: OSC and link serialization

[Georg Seidel]

Hi All,

I try to summarise here a discussion I had with Martin regarding
some ideas Martin had to improve the gephex-0.5 plugin (de)serialization
and on how to introduce OSC support.
Martin: please correct me if I missed something or got something wrong.

Starting point was the observation that we wanted to build OSC support
into the core of gephex-0.5. The most basic and at the same time most important
use of OSC we could think of was support to change inputs of effects via OSC
(e.g. control a xfader).

At the same time we already have seen for a long time, that the current way
of serialising and deserialising links (via the get and set commands which
call the methods of the link object) is not very good for several reasons:

   * there is no general format how to serialise different data types
     (color, images, ...) so the user has to remember each specific format
     (e.g. color is "<r> <g> <b>" with spaces)

   * for some types, there is no one natural way to serialise/deserialise
     (e.g. you might want to serialise images to different formats, using
      different kinds of resolutions, ...)

So the idea to solve this is:

   1/ define standard serialisations of all used types to OSC

   2/ define a standard mapping between these OSC formats and s-expressions
      (for the command line we think this is a good format, e.g. a color
       could be represented as (color <r> <g> <b>))

   3/ remove the serialise and deserialise method form the link interface

   4/ add "creator" units which accept OSC input and initialise a link with
      this serialised value

An additional idea to better handle constant links would be to give these
creator units a specialised interface. They could accept an OSC type on
construction.


Best Regards,

Georg