ROS comes with implementations of a lot of complex algorithms something that the entire open source community is grateful about. In ROS terminology, these are known as stacks.
Lately, the people @ willowgarage have been investigating pushing the user interface access of the PR2 to the web. For this, they have come out with the rosweb interface stack.
Rosweb interface installation is a quite simple. Follow the instructions from
http://www.ros.org/wiki/webui
There's one problem with the rosweb interface. Its still under active development. The preview that i have downloaded doesn't quite do anything. Moreover, i haven't yet got their samples to work as well. It connects to the roscore and i can see some info about the roscore from the web but that's it.
The serverside programming is done using cgi. So, loads of languages are supported. However the api sdk released as part of rosweb interface which includes the webui restricts itself to C and python. The ui is handled by a template system called clearsilver ( hence, the presensce of .cs files ) whose api is only in C and python. Thats perhaps the cause of the restrictions.
Also, the people @ Willowgarage have not yet openly discussed the architecture they wish to be put in place, especially when they want to answer to the problem of scalability ( incase they want to give access to multiple robots from a remote locations ).
Overall, I'm not quite impressed with the current release, as I've haven't got to make any use of this stack.
So, that got me thinking and I have decided to come up with my own version of the ROS web interface, one that goes a long way from just being an interface to a robot to explaining an overall web architecture for robots.
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