[OSC_dev] Everyone Invited - SYNoscopy

[Andy W. Schmeder]

On Dec 16, 2008, at 7:59 AM, Gaspard Bucher wrote:

> What are the reasons why these issues are not part of osc and have to
> be solved for every new project with the risk of everyone
> reimplementing possibly incompatible wheels ?

OSC was formulated with certain design criteria in mind.  One of them  
is that it is stateless, and another is simplicity.  The justification  
for the former is somewhat technical so I won't elaborate right now.   
Perhaps the main reason that OSC has been so successful is because of  
its simplicity...  and, if we added a bunch of required messages for  
"standard interoperation" functions, etc, then the implementation  
complexity would be much greater.  Also, there are some applications,  
such as SuperCollider, where such things actually might be so complex  
as to be infeasible.

The closest analogy is XML, where an application that "uses XML"  
guarantees no compatibility whatsoever with any other application that  
"uses XML" (just like OSC), it only guarantees compatibility with XML  
parsers.  To actually get stuff done, the W3C has built a huge empire  
of protocols that live on top of XML, for example, SOAP, XHTML,  
XForms, and so on.

So, something like this SYN idea, while potential extremely useful for  
certain applications, is simply beyond the scope of what OSC should  
be.  I hope this clarifies things a bit...


> Opensoundcontrol.org could at least give some "best practices" for
> these topics...

Absolutely, it should...


---

Andy W. Schmeder
andy [at] cnmat.berkeley.edu
Programmer/Analyst II
Research Group
Center for New Music and Audio Technologies
University of California at Berkeley
http://cnmat.berkeley.edu