[GSoC2012] Introduction / Impress smartphone remote control

[Andrzej J. R. Hunt]

Hi,

just a few small (code) organisational issues -- I'm not entirely sure 
where it's best to place the code: there are going to be 3 components:
- The common code (thrift definition)
- The server component
- The android app

I thought it might be most appropriate to create a new folder in the 
main libo directory e.g. "impressremote", which will contain the thrift 
definitions and android app (with space to add more apps for other 
smartphones).

  The server componentI think is best kept in sd/source/ui/remotecontrol 
for the gui part, the actual server code could be there or in 
sd/source/core/remotecontrol.

Since thrift isn't available as a standard package on most distros (and 
windows) would it be appropriate to add downloading and building of 
thrift to the makefiles? Or should I change the choice of RPC to use 
something with simpler dependencies (thrift seems to be most suitable 
from what I've been able to determine, although XML- or JSON-RPC 
wouldn't really be a problem in terms of efficiency, what is more of an 
issue is making these work bidirectionally -- another alternative is 
scrapping RPC and implementing a custom messaging protocol, but this 
would be less flexible for the case that someone wants to extend things 
in the future -- in gmote they have a custom packet implemented as a 
class for every command, with this object being serialised and then 
sent, and deserialised at the other end -- although this wouldn't work 
in our case since the server is in C++, and the client in an arbitrary 
language).

Cheers,
Andrzej