hi all

i've made an environmentXML processing library to make it easy to get environmental data from remote feeds from the environmentXML website [ http://www.haque.co.uk/environmentxml/live/ ]. right now there are feeds from buildings and environments in london, washington dc and plymouth, with a couple more hopefully to come soon from tokyo and geneva.

with this library and the enclosed example, you should be able, out of the box, to get data feeds from my office in london; and by changing the DataIn url you can quickly change to get feeds from the other locations.

likewise you'll be able to share your own data feeds by registering them at the website so others can construct things that respond to your environment (contact me for details; not difficult, but it's just not public yet).

you can download the library, example and reference here: [ http://www.haque.co.uk/environmentxml/live/library.php ].

this is my first library so i'd be grateful for any feedback on making it (or the system as whole) better...

usman

p.s. it also requires tex's proXML library [ http://www.texone.org/proxml/ ] for which i'm very grateful since it made a lot of this much easier...

thanks casey! it would be good to have a UCLA feed so i might hold you to that one...
i'm looking forward soon to start making the-things-that-make-use-of-all-these-feeds which is of course the whole point of it!
btw, a friend has (playfully?) suggested he might hook up a muon detector to his feed, this would certainly up the ante!

hi germond

you have the newest version of the library, which works with threads (i.e. it's asynchronous, so you don't have to explicitly use 'update()'), and i haven't had time to update the documentation.

there is an example program which _is_ up-to-date at the very bottom of this page:

http://haque.co.uk/environmentxml/live/library.php

but basically as a result of the latest version (back from the beginning of june)

1. you don't need import proxml and processing.net, you only need import environmentxml.*

2. you initiate by using something like

Code:

dataIn = new DataIn(this, "http://www.haque.co.uk/environmentxml/live/xml/79.xml", 5000);
 

where 5000 is the number of milliseconds between each attempt to grab the remote data -- basically happens in the background automatically, so you can do whatever else you want in the draw() loop without being slowed down;

and when the data actually comes in...

3. you would need this function below, which automatically gets called when the new data is ready

Code:

void onReturnEnvironmentXML(DataIn d){

    // this method is called whenever updated remote environmentXML is available from your dataIn remote URL

    println("found: " + d.getTagValue("temperature")); 
    println("found: " + d.getIdValue(1)); 
    println("found: " + d.getAge()); 

}
 

let me know how it goes (and feel free to email me if there's any difficulty..)

like i said the example at the bottom of that page is fully up-to-date, so if you copy paste it into a new file it should work out of the box...

not exactly possible; environmentXML makes use of a small subset of proXML's capabilities.

the thing is that environment xml is basically a very particular 'dialect' of xml, which we're basically using to connect remote machines, devices, environments.
so the most important item in our case is the "value" attribute (of a <datastream>) -- the assumption is that either you know the datastream id already, or you know one of the tags of that datastream, (the tag is formed using PCDATA between <tag>'s) so that you're just trying to find the value for that datastream.

if you have more general xml requirements, then proXML is definitely the way to go.