About Orchextra

Orchextra is an XML service providing a streaming MP3 server. It is based on Streamsicle which in turn uses the Fluid MP3 streaming server.

Why have you done this?

We like Streamsicle but we wanted a richer front end that wasn't tied to Servlet's and allowed the presentation to be kept seperate from the data. We also didn't want yet another pet-store demo to showcase XML applications on the 1060 NetKernel.

What's different to Streamsicle?

As a Jukebox nothing. What we've done is take the MP3 server layer of Streamsicle and turn it into an XML application. This meant providing an XML interface to the Streamsicle service which means we can seperate presentation from control and data. Since everything is XML we can add things like skins. You can create your own skins pretty easily.

XML also makes the configuration much easier since we're using XML form processing to configure the fluid server.

Other things we've done. We built a very simple XML Session manager that means we can do session stuff without requiring a full-blown Database backend. This let us add user login and userid on the playlist so you can see who's got bad taste. It also means we could provide a seperate admin sub-system.

We hope you like it. We hope you'll improve on our absolutely lousy skins!

History

Orchextra has evolved as a test application in parallel with the development of the 1060 NetKernel. Some aspects of its architecture show this all too clearly - legacy stuff that should never see the light of day. It would be a 'good thing' to refactor to take advantage of newer NetKernel properties, in particular the new dependancy based caching architecture - maybe we'll get round to it sometime.

Since we've been most concerned with the XML application layer we have an adequate MP3 Server layer but haven't maintained or kept up to date with the evolution of Streamsicle and Fluid. We know for sure there are missing features in the MP3 server layer.

License

Like Streamsicle, the Orchextra application is licensed under the GPL. However Orchextra is an application that runs on the 1060 NetKernel which is licensed under the commercial open source 1060 Public License. If all you want to do is use Orchextra it's free. If you make a distribution of the 1060 NetKernel make sure you check the 1060 Public License since it is somewhat like the GPL and requires you to make your source code publicly available and other things.

Thanks

This application is a reworking of the original Streamsicle concept.

We'd like to give a big thank you to Matt Hall and John Watkinson who created Streamsicle. To Lars Samuelsson for the Fluid streamer. And to the Streamsicle contributors:

Dan Heller, Jordan Share, Kwan Skinner, Evan D. Hoffman, Adam Slayer, Robin Rosenthal, Jan Struyf, Paul C. Ward.