Javascript, server side program calls
deicist
Manchester, UK
Hi all, I bought a PSP last week, and while the games are cool the system has so much more potential that's been locked out by Sony for commercial reasons... grrr... anyway, I've decided to have a play around and see what I can get my PSP to do. First off I'd like to make it into a remote for my media centre. This should be do-able in theory:
run a web server on the media centre linked to a database of music / videos etc..
present the PSP with a html page to browse the media library
when the user hits play launch the correct player for that media type on the media centre.
Now, the browser in the PSP supports a subset of javascript...which I've never used before. I'm a fairly competent programmer though (Delphi, visual basic and a smattering of C++) so I'm not anticipating too many problems. I've also never played about with linking programs to web front ends, or database driven apps so it's going to be a fun learning curve. I just wanted to see if anyone can anticipate any problems before I get started. I'm planning on using the visual studio express web developer edition for the programming.
run a web server on the media centre linked to a database of music / videos etc..
present the PSP with a html page to browse the media library
when the user hits play launch the correct player for that media type on the media centre.
Now, the browser in the PSP supports a subset of javascript...which I've never used before. I'm a fairly competent programmer though (Delphi, visual basic and a smattering of C++) so I'm not anticipating too many problems. I've also never played about with linking programs to web front ends, or database driven apps so it's going to be a fun learning curve. I just wanted to see if anyone can anticipate any problems before I get started. I'm planning on using the visual studio express web developer edition for the programming.
0
Comments
The meat of this project will be in setting up your database and connecting it to your webserver. You need a webserver that supports database connectivity such as PHP, ASP, or ColdFusion. Once you have a webpage that displays your files from the database, the commands you'll use to launch the appropriate media player will be functions in PHP or whatever dynamic web language you choose to use.
Take care when setting up the webserver. Make sure it's only accessible from your LAN and not the outside world. The idea of everyone in the world being able to launch programs on your media center shouldn't be too appealing.
I'd recommend using ColdFusion because it's better and simpler for a first-time web programmer to learn than PHP. Though PHP is free. Both languages also have commands for interacting with the server's file-system. You might want to use them to search for newly added files on the media center and insert records for them into the database, since I doubt you'd want to manually update the database on a regular basis. The choice of which database to use is up to you. MS Access is pretty easy to use but can corrupt relatively easily, so keep backups.