Handwriting recognition

In this week I still worked on the webservice and its interface. It becomes more and more stable :) Beside that I had to write an application that will handle the communication between the iLiad and my webservice. I simply called this “Bridge”. Why is this necessary? There are two reasons:

1. The webservice should be as general as possible. That means that is mustn’t only work with the iLiad. So there’s the need for a “translator” between both.
2. The webservice is called via XML-RPC which is a synchronous protocol. That would mean that the iLiad had to wait for the webservice and the user could not proceed in working with it. Therefore I introduced the bridge. iLiad and Bridge “talk” to each other by XMPP, which is a asynchronous chat protocol. Thus the user can send data to the webservice and is able to proceed working immediately.

It was really fun for me to implement this bridge, because I could test it by using a chat application and writing messages to it. Yes, I am talking with my own application ;)

Another advantage of this proceeding is that any component can be tested alone. I don’t need the iLiad for testing the webservice or the bridge and I don’t need the webservice for testing the iLiad.