README
== Welcome to Flint ==
Flint is a an application which is based on Ruby On Rails and deals
with barcodes. The current use case is a media art installation / juke
box which uses the music playing daemon xmms2.
=== The Story behind ===
I used flint for an interactive media art work at my wedding party. As
a guest you were asked to bring a couple of songs on a disc or flash
drive and a blank white cheque card with a unique barcode was given to
you. Before scanning the barcode for the first time, you had to insert
your disc or plugin your flash drive. Your selection of songs was
copied to the disk. Subsequent scans of your barcode then randomly
appended a single song of your previously stored collection to the
playlist, unless one of your songs was already in the playlist and
hadn't been played yet. Whenever a guest added a song to the playlist,
a song from our list was added as well in order to have an even
mixture of our selection and the selection of our guests. A cron
script was checking if the playlist were going to run empty and in
that case added songs. In addition, 'one-shot-skip-codes' were
available, so everyone could skip single songs once in a while.
=== Architecture ===
The basic Rails application is antagonistic towards the use case
(e.g. the logic that deals with xmms2). The use case may solely be
implemented in the procedures that are stored in the database and may
be manipulated through the provided interface.
Flint consist of three parts:
- a Ruby On Rails backend (use case antagonistic)
- a cron script
- a WxRuby frontend
There is a tiny shell script that starts all three parts with some
delay to make sure the backend is settled before the frontend comes
up.
$ ./start.sh
=== I Backend ===
Requirements
$ apt-get install xmms2 libxmmsclient-ruby libopenssl-ruby libsqlite3-ruby
$ gem install rails
Run
$ script/server
=== II Cron/Daemon ===
Run
$ ruby lib/flint_cron.rb
=== III Frontend ===
Requirements
$ sudo apt-get install libwxgtk2.8-0
$ gem install wxruby xml-simple
Run
$ ruby lib/flint_fe_wxruby.rb
=== API ===
The frontend accesses the following url to submit input and recieve
the information to be displayed. E.g.:
$ curl http://0.0.0.0:3000/options/execute_by_code/123456123456.xml
--
Copyright (c) 2008,2009 Phil Hofmann, released under the MIT license
