Touchscreen is a platform building interactive kiosk displays. We built it to show off our data center, which houses some of the worlds most important open source projects, and for status displays within our network operations center. We have plans to build a status dashboard for our development team as well.
Touchscreen 2.0 is nearly complete rewrite of the framework. The original version was written using OpenLaszlo a language that compiles XML and Javascript into Flash applications. OpenLaszlo served its purpose but was a niche language that very few people knew, or would use elsewhere. Ever increasing browser speeds, better support for SVG & canvas, along with great Javascript libraries such as Jquery and Raphael have enabled us to rewrite touchscreen using well known technologies.
Plugable Content
Touchscreen provides slideshow functionality, with a plugin system for content. Screen plugins can be mixed and matched as needed. Each plugin can supply its own html, javascript code, and settings. Touchscreen automatically generates a user interface for editing plugin configuration.
The screens themselves are nothing more than HTML, css, and javascript. Many of our screens use graphs and other images compiled elsewhere, or uses AJAX to grab data and content from other sources. To get around the cross-site scripting prevention within the browser, touchscreen has a built-in proxy for loading pages.
Controlling The Display
The displays have a control channel via a Message Server, a server that allows messages to be queued and retrieved through a REST API. The message server implementation supplied with Touchscreen supports multiple queues, and can support multiple controllers each with multiple display screens. It has also been designed to respond quickly
For now our control application is an animated menu written with (mostly) static html. A summer of code student is implement a dynamic menu system
The Setup
Server room display:
- 42″ LCD
- 17″ Touchscreen LCD
Network Operation Center Display:
- 32″ LCD
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