Channel Updates
In the case we have a channel update, which of course has to go through Roku approval, and is released once approved, what if that update involves a schema change in our backend database web services?...
Forum Discussion
"sjb64" wrote:
The Roku update thought was just wishful thinking, that I could pull a single web service call to my system, realize the Roku was out of date due to a versioning discrepancy, and trigger an channel update right there and then.
That leads to a pretty awful UX, if you think about it. Reminds me of most "smart" TVs - you want to run one of the streaming apps? Oh but you MUST upgrade the software first, we had disavowed all our previous work! When over-generalizing, i call this the "Android" approach (make developer's life easier) vs "iOS" one (make user experience better). In most such cases - whether intentionally or unintentionally - Roku has been taking the "high road", i think.
Seems like it would be a simple thing for them to do as the Roku is perfectly capable of a midday update (system menu). Either a channel update or a full update, if that's the only way, would have prevented this from even being a question. So wasn't really "instant", so much as an on demand way to do something that would happen on it's own anyway.
Ah, but there is bigger picture at play here too. The Co. does staggered software releases, as experienced by those reading about the "latest & greatest" features on their blog and then trying to force update just to see that nothing happens... for a week of eager-beavering. They do it waves based on player S/N, i think for two reasons: a) to smooth load on the servers and b) if SNAFU gets discovered in the wild (known to happen), as damage control measure they can stop further spread till firmware is fixed.
btw - CICS lol, next we'll have to support VMS, SSP, and 1401 Autocoder. You just dated yourself even knowing the acronym CICS existed.
Perhaps, to a degree. I have been involved in couple of project dealing with such acronyms though LU6.2 never grew on me and i had to google the latter two you mentioned. One was last century, the company was building a universal/unifying OLTP gateway and there was a tool that'd deal with legacy data exchange formats - as part of this i learned really well the DATA DIVISION of a COBOL program (wrote parser for it etc) and then we'd generate serialization/externalization code for C++/Java/VB/etc. The second was less than ten years ago and was about porting the prison/corrections system of one of the states from IMS to something more... this century. My point being, old code comes the haunt you once in a while. Like they say "Old fishermen (chemists, hippies, CICS/IMS etc) never die - they just smell that way"
