[OSC_dev] Everyone Invited - SYNoscopy

[Gaspard Bucher]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 8:55 PM, Andy W. Schmeder
<andy at cnmat.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 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...
>

Thanks for the reply. I perfectly understand the need for simplicity
and lack of state. I really like this aspect of osc.

There is currently a lot more programming involved when adding support
for osc then midi because the hard work of finding midi enabled
devices and easing connections is done in the os nowadays.

I have been playing with the OpenSoundControl in Max5 and it's ... raw
compared to what we can easily achieve with midi.

Let's just be patient.

Gaspard