Standard Communication Protocol for Events in VSM

[Daksitha]

Idea

It would be fantastic if we can use a topic base communication the states of the nodes in the project. This will enable outside applications to work with VSM based on its current status.

For example, a global json including project metadata, and node information, and timestamp for synchronization

{
    "project": "Emma",
    "author": "xxx",
    "nodes": [{
        "active_nodes": ["waiting_for_smile", "play_idle_anim"],
        "super_node1": {
            "n1": "state_on",
            "n2": "state_waiting",
            "n3": "state_off"
        },
        "node_SSI": "state_on"
    }],
    "timestamp": "UTC_time"
}

Protocols

We could use the lightweight communication protocol such as mosquitto-mqtt or XMPP which has features such as authentication and recording of messages with higher level of security features than mqtt.

Outside applications can listen to the published data stream by using an ip address and a topic name.

[fnunnari]

A few comments:

• Active nodeS, because there can be more then one at a time.
• If there is already a list of active nodes, then the "state_X" is not needed.
• Not sure if it is possible to determine whether a node is waiting. Normally the wait is implemented through System.wait(): not easy to intercept.
• Such protocol would be helpful to display the scene flow status, but not to interact with it, as normally the logic of the flow is controlled by the code of the thread running the commands of the node.
  • in any case, for a complete display, we should add also the information of the edges.