Local Development of Receiver Apps

[chrisjpowers]

So far developing a receiver app has been a pain -- you have to constantly deploy the new receiver code to a server, and then Chromecast seems to aggressively cache, so I had to regularly reboot the Chromecast to get the newest content.

Two possible solutions:

1. Figure out how to get the Chromecast to see your local server on the network. I tried registering an app using my built-in Mac .local hostname, but it didn't pick it up. Maybe change DNS on the router?
2. Create a development environment that stubs out Chromecast functionality and fakes it with other code instead. I gave this a quick shot, replacing the Chromecast messaging with Websockets messaging for communication, and having all callbacks succeed by default. This is nice because it means you wouldn't actually need a Chromecast device on the network to do development, but it's more work and could be brittle. The rough code is at https://github.com/chrisjpowers/chromecast-away/tree/websocket

Thoughts?

[tomkersten]

@chrisjpowers You can register the IP address of your laptop as the URL for your receiver app when setting up/registering your Chromecast. I had it set up to pull from a hosted static HTML page that was running on the python SimpleHTTP server. I used the IP address of my device (laptop) plus the port and it worked fine...

I don't believe the ChromeCast should cache it if the headers don't "promote" it to be...b/c I would think it'd be just like Chrome in that regard (ie: it should respect applicable headers)...I think.

That being said, I have done nothing with the receiver-app side of things. When I was thinking about this a while back, I was always planning on using either SSE's or Websockets for communication (likely SSE's, b/c it's simpler and not 2-way communication).