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I'm using a standalone bridge called FLOSC.jar to communicate between Flash and MaxMSP over OSC ports. Flosc is an open source Java project.

My main question is: how easy/difficult would it be for a Java novice like myself (tho I'm experienced in higher level languages) to write the same bridging functionality into my own java program using the classes provided by the flosc project?

Can someone please take a look at the source and let me know what files I need (there's a confusing number of them!) and give me an outline as to how to go about this?

Thanks a lot!

cronoklee
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My advice to you is to just use FLOSC. For one thing, 9 source files/classes is not a lot for what you are doing. If it was something with 50 classes/files, with tons of extra functionality that you don't need, I'd say if the task you want to do is small, maybe you could rewrite it to get rid of the bloat. But in this case I don't see the point of a rewrite since your version of it would probably have close to the same level of complexity. You're going to want to have an OscMessage class, an OscPacket class, a TcpServer class, etc, etc.

It's almost never a good idea to rewrite something that works unless you have lots of time on your hands and you want to learn about a technology. If FLOSC doesn't work right or is buggy, that's another story -- then sometimes it's easier to rewrite than debug when you didn't write the buggy code in the first place. But again that depends on how much code you have to rewrite.

As to whether it would be difficult for you, that's hard to tell -- what do you mean by "higher-level languages"? How much programming experience do you have?

eeeeaaii
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  • Thanks for the reply @eeeeaaii. The problem with the flosc jar file is that it has to be opened and the bridge started separately from the other two programs. Since Max supports custom java objects I was hoping I could negate this step for my users and have the bridge automatically started by max. I've years of experience with php, actionscript and javascript but have just started with Java. – cronoklee Apr 19 '11 at 18:59
  • The issue is whether Max can set up a server socket. I can tell you for sure that Flash can't -- everything in Flash is designed around the model of it being a client. if Max can act as a server than you could possibly bundle the code from FLOSC into a java object -- if that's what you mean by a rewrite, then I think I misunderstood you -- I thought you mean rewriting the code from scratch. Anyway if Max can't act as a server then you're SOL and you need to use the third program. Hope that helps? – eeeeaaii Apr 22 '11 at 19:32
  • Excellent, thanks @eeeeaaii. I think mxj (the object that runs java in max) can handle a java server socket. This page seems to suggest it can: http://www.cycling74.com/forums/topic.php?id=10532 so it looks like I can work from there. – cronoklee Apr 24 '11 at 10:55