OCAP Introduction, Part I: Running Ocap RI

The open cable TV application platform (opencable application Platform,ocap) is a platform for the cable television industry. Targeting set-top boxes and TVs, OCAP provides a standard, hardware-independent basis for interactive applications that enhance the consumer's cable TV experience. OCAP consumer-oriented name is the Tru2way;tru2way certificate including many well-known companies on the consumer electronics market.

The OCAP specification is formulated by the CableLabs Trade association. This document is exposed to the CableLabs Web site and is accompanied by a number of related specification instructions. The OCAP 1.1.2 document is up to 667 pages long and is built on many other documents, just like any other good specification description. The complexity of this platform makes it impossible for those who will become OCAP developers. This series of three articles is designed to make Java™ developers interested in building a program for this platform and to use the OCAP reference implementation (Reference Implementation,ri) for effective development efforts. In this first installment, you'll learn a lot about OCAP, download and install RI, and run some applications in this RI. In the second section, I'll explain how to create your own OCAP application: Use the command line or the Eclipse IDE. Finally, the third part is an in-depth introduction that allows you to build your own OCAP RI. This section also includes a high-level guide for source code.

Note: Currently only microsoft®windows® distributes and supports OCAP RI. However, you can also build this RI on the linux®, which I will introduce in the third section.

OCAP Stack

From an application perspective, it is useful to consider OCAP as an API collection. This includes graphical APIs displayed on the screen, Demodulator APIs for finding and displaying TV channels, and many other APIs. However, although it is useful to think of OCAP as an API stack, this is too simple. OCAP prescribes a number of other behaviors, such as a device that should have at least a few demodulator and how much disk space a OCAP device should be equipped with.

As for Api,ocap built on the standard Java ME technology. Figure 1 shows the OCAP stack:

Figure 1. OCAP Stack