Plugin to drive random apps on server

[tedson]

I now have a geforce 8400gs looping back through an HDPVR on my server. The netflix plug-in never looked so good on my clients. This started me thinking. I want to watch dvds via the placeshifter. I could do this by playing the dvd on the server and then watching it via the loopback. Other things could be accomplished this same way. My wife likes the picasa slide shows for photos. So I could fire up picasa and just display the slide show on the loop back channel. So the real question is...

How hard is it to write a plug-in that will take the commands from the remote on a placeshifter client or on an hd200, fire up an application on the server and somehow pass those remote commands to the app.

I build and sell a home automation app Easy Automation so if I can just get sage to forward commands to it, I'm golden.

I could wrap it the other way, and build a plugin for easy automation that accepts ir commands and drives sage, but that wont help me with forwarding the ir commands from a placeshifter client.

Any thoughts, a good tutorial on building plug-ins you can point me at? My java is rusty but probably still functional.