Talk:Rotor controller

From EWiki

shack-rat shack communication thoughts

We could possibly run the HTTP server right on the board, but that would make for a somewhat underpowered and inflexible system. It would be easier to implement and require less equipment, however.

I'm inclined to go with the two-system approach, with the real internet-facing server running on an x86 box in the shack. It would run a simple Linux install, with Apache as the web server.

Once we're running in Apache we have a lot of options for what to write the server in. We could use C with CGI and do it at a really basic level, but that may be painful, especially on the output side. My inclination is to use PHP with fsockopen() and a really simple low-level protocol for the communication. When the user hits a page that causes the server to do something, it opens a socket, writes some data to it, and closes it.

However, we do have the question of concurrency. What happens when multiple people are doing things simultaneously? I think the simplest thing to do is to simply ignore it. The requests are going to end up simply setting a value in memory on the controller, which is atomic, so we can just let things rip.