Ok … a little earlier than expected … please comment :-) Chris
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Apache PLC4X (incubating) PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API. Most important issues to address while moving towards graduation: Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large percentage of codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people from other companies, but will have to continue these efforts for establishing a healthy Apache community. Onboarding of new committers: With PLC4X several people on the team are not very familiar with the Apache Way. We have started and will continue our efforts on this onboarding. Make our first release Any Issues the Incubator PMC or ASF Board might wish/need to be aware of: In contrast to previous reports some of the concerns regarding availability and usability of specifications have been resolved. Especially for using the Modbus and the OPC-UA specifications Christofer was able to get official permissions from the corresponding foundations to use the specifications. These permission Emails have been filed in the private list for documentation. One of the external foundations (Profinet) doesn’t have a free membership. In general, the CEO of the European branch of the Profinet Foundation has signaled that it should be possible for the ASF to become a member and have an outside company pay the membership fees, but we have to discuss the details (With them as well as the ASF). How has the community developed since the last report? Christofer has invested most of his time in March spreading the word about PLC4X. A first POC has been created for the company “Kampf Schneid- und Wickeltechnik GmbH & Co. KG” which is currently going into production An article about Apache Edgent and Apache PLC4X has been published as a cover-story in the German JavaSPEKTRUM magazines Industrial IoT special edition (https://www.sigs-datacom.de/digital/javaspektrum/). One PLC4X talk has been accepted to the Apache EU Roadshow 2018 in Berlin and one will be at the Silpion Techcamp in Hamburg (https://techcamp.hamburg/) in the first April week. The dev-list subscriptions has gone up by one from February, we are hoping to increase the number in the next few weeks (However quite some emails come in from un-registered users that have to pass moderation). We now have a Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ApachePlc4x as another channel of communicating interesting PLC4X facts. How has the project developed since the last report? Sebastian worked hard on replacing the scripted Jenkins pipeline definition to a declarative version. After receiving the permission to use and implement the Modbus protocol, the Driver skeletons have been setup, but no real implementation of the protocol itself has been done yet. We are still hoping for volunteers to step up as interest in implementing the Modbus protocol has been explicitly mentioned by community memebers. Thanks to infra’s new self-service service we are now able to resolve problems with out-of-sync websites on our own and a lot faster than before. We recently received the requested project VM, which we are currently setting up. Hopefully as soon as that’s done, we’ll be able to run tests on the non TCP and UDP protocols. The work on the RawSocket Netty transport which is a requirement to implement protocols that are IP based, but are not TCP or UDP has continued and we are currently working on some of the quirks on Linux based operating-systems. We added Netty support for IO over serial ports and will be using this in the Beckhoff module as a first protocol. We are still working on the S7 Protocol fragmentation and hope to be able to finish this in April. Also we discussed on the list about how the others would think of initiating a first release of PLC4X. How does the podling rate their own maturity? We have a mix of new participants and experienced Apache people involved. So far, the new participants have shown great willingness and success in adopting the Apache Way. However, we still need to continue: the on-boarding increasing the diversity of the team Also, will we need to decide and establish all the processes involved in releasing software at Apache
