wildbill:
It appears that you could reduce this to fewer states (or none). All the recipe needs is a list of temperatures and how long each needs to be maintained. Perhaps additionally a flag to tell the system whether it needs to signal you to take action before moving on to the next temperature. Perhaps a name for the operation it's carrying out.No need for XML therefore - you can just send a comma separated string, copy it into a buffer and parse it as you need to get the next step.
I like where you're going WildBill. I tried this, but don't really know how to pull it off. The XML can be parsed in Python and sent over the wire as a list of CSVs. I was thinking that would go into 3 arrays - names, temps, and times. I suppose I could use a 4th for "needs user input". And if "needs user input[X] = 'yes' then that state can wait until the user input is satisfied.
If you take a look at my code, I was thinking in this direction, but as I said, I'm not sure how to pull it off. I may take another crack at it tonight. The array of "needs user input" may be the piece I was missing. 8)
Thanks,
JR