From BUGwiki

Contents 1 The Problem 2 The Solution 2.1 Materials 2.2 Design 2.2.1 Display System 2.2.1.1 Webkit + GTK + Python 2.2.2 Twitter Interaction 2.2.3 Text Message Interaction 2.2.4 Communication Backend and Browser 2.2.4.1 Comet/AJAX (xmlrequest) and Java 2.2.4.2 Webkit and JavaScript Bindings 2.2.4.3 socket.io

The Problem

Not enough signs on Broadway.

The Solution

We will create a digital sign system using a BUG and a projector. Passers by can interact with the sign via Twitter and text message. Based on the messages that the sign receives it could ...

• Display the message.
• Show a Google Image Search/Flickr search result related to the message.
• Move some sort of game piece.
• ...

Materials

• BUGbase running Linaro-based rootfs
• Projector

Design

Display System

Web browser (which one?)

Webkit + GTK + Python

We can use Webkit, GTK, and Python to create a full-screen web browser.

Here's how I got it working:

opkg install libwebkitgtk-1.0-dev
# BEGIN BROKEN DEV TOOL WORKAROUND #
mkdir -p /opt/buildbot/slave/build_repo_full/build/tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/
mkdir -p /opt/jenkins/workspace/oe-buglabs-sw2.1-scratch/oe-tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/
ln -s /usr /opt/buildbot/slave/build_repo_full/build/tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/usr
ln -s /usr /opt/jenkins/workspace/oe-buglabs-sw2.1-scratch/oe-tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/usr
# END BROKEN DEV TOOL WORKAROUND #
wget http://pywebkitgtk.googlecode.com/files/pywebkitgtk-1.1.8.tar.gz
tar xzf pywebkitgtk-1.1.8.tar.gz
cd pywebkitgtk-1.1.8
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install

Here's a Python program that creates a window and opens a given url:

import sys
import gtk
import webkit
site = "http://www.google.com"
if len(sys.argv) == 2:
  site = sys.argv[1]
print "site is", site 
window = gtk.Window()
view = webkit.WebView()
view.open(site)
window.add(view)
window.show_all()
window.fullscreen()
window.connect('delete-event', lambda window, event: gtk.main_quit())
gtk.main()

Save it to a file called pywebkit_example.py, then set the display and run it like this:

export DISPLAY=:0.0
python pywebkit_example.py http://webkit.willfixeverything.com

You should see a full screen browser open up and display the page.

Twitter Interaction

Which libraries/APIs?

Text Message Interaction

Which libraries/APIs?

Communication Backend and Browser

Socket.io? xmlhttprequest() polling? etc?

Comet/AJAX (xmlrequest) and Java

Ajax for Java developers: Write scalable Comet applications with Jetty and Direct Web Remoting

Webkit and JavaScript Bindings

If we use webkit then we might be able to create JavaScript bindings that could be used to communicate with the webkit container. We could then write JNI bindings between this program and the Java backend. Or we could use some form of IPC. Either way, the JavaScript binds would simplify the client (browser) code.

socket.io

There is a Java library for socket.io. It seems to require Jetty 7.2.2 because later versions of Jetty changed the constructor interface for at least one of the classes that is used by the library.