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=====Websockets=====

**This article is in work and not complete.**

For those that would like to roll their own web or other interfaces this plugin provides a standardized protocol for sharing your database to a web browser or other program that can speak websockets. At the moment this is more geared towards sharing a portion or all of your database with something else and not for creating an interface that creates units in XTension though that will be possible too it’s not implemented fully in this version of the plugin.

All communications are in JSON format. Upon connection you will receive a long array of JSON objects describing all the units that the user has chosen to share with this interface. As any of the keyed values in the unit’s data change you will receive another update containing the same unique id but only the changed values will be included. A local index of the Units keyed by their unique ID should be maintained on the client so that changes to unit values can be merged with the existing data and provide events for your interface to change display elements.

The plugin includes a simple webpage with enough embedded javascript to provide a live updating interface to a unit and some simple controls to them as well. It also has a console to show the exact data being sent back and forth. Also included are all the constants needed to read unit data and create commands.

====Talking To XTension====

As of this alpha level release there is no security or support for SSL communications though that will come in the future. At this moment if you negotiate a successful web socket connection then you’ll receive the data dump containing all the units that are shared with this interface. 

All data received from XTension other than direct unit commands, which aren’t supported in the first alpha anyway, will be a JSON object. Inside that JSON object will be arrays containing descriptions of different system objects. As of this alpha only units are sent but global scripts will be added in the near future as well followed by the other objects that XTension creates. The key for the array of units is just “units”. Even if this is an update for just a single unit it will still be contained in the units array. 

If this is a different command or if no units have changed state but some other object is generating the update then the units key may not be present in the JSON object. Don’t assume it will be there.

<code>
{
    “units”:[
         { a unit record...},
         { another unit record...},
         { and so forth}
    ]
}
</code>

====Variable Type Conventions====
XTension uses standard JSON conventions for integers, floats, strings, booleans and dates. Additionally the JSON data may encode colors which will be sent as a string of 3 comma separated values for RGB or if being sent in HSV then will be a comma separated list of those 3 values. 

Additionally you will find another value that describes what the value should be translated into before being passed to an event. For each value in the database there will be another that describes the type of the data. It will be prefixed with the NamedTypePrefix which is “_typ_” followed by the name of the key of the regular value. If you have a string with a key of “name” then there will be 2 entries in the JSON object for that like this:
<code>
{
    “name”:”James”,
    “_typ_name”:”str”
}
</code>

this is mostly unimportant for most objects in the JSON as they are already sent as their primitive type. The exceptions are colors and dates. If you receive an update for those values you may want to coerce them to the proper types before passing them to the update events. The
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