Hi Markus,
I agree with you.
And, as one can see in my mail.. there are multple efforts which are currently
going.
So perhaps, if we focus a bit, we should reach first results pretty fast.
But I think one necessity is a refactoring to a complex type model.
I will file a Jira for that.
Julian
Am 18.04.19, 09:06 schrieb "Markus Sommer" <som...@isb-fn.de>:
Hi all,
I was at the Hannovermesse and the industry clearly relies on OPC UA. If
PLC4x could realize a very fast OPC UA, this would be a massive advantage over
other manufacturers.
Best regards
Markus
Freundliche Grüße
Markus Sommer
Geschäftsführer
isb innovative software businesses GmbH
Otto-Lilienthal-Strasse 2
D - 88046 Friedrichshafen
Tel.: +49 (0) 7541 3834-14
Mob: +49 (0) 171 537 8437
Fax: +49 (0) 7541 3834-20
E-Mail: som...@isb-fn.de
Web: www.isb-fn.de
Geschäftsführer: Markus Sommer, Thomas Zeler
Sitz: Friedrichshafen
Registergericht: Amtsgericht Ulm HRB-Nr. 631624
Important Note: This e-mail and any attachments are confidential, may
contain trade secrets and may well also be legally privileged or otherwise
protected from disclosure. If you have received it in error, you are on notice
of its status.
Please notify us immediately by reply e-mail and then delete his e-mail and
any attachment from your system. If you are not the intended recipient please
understand that you must not copy this e-mail or any attachments or disclose
the contents to any other person. Thank you.
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Julian Feinauer <j.feina...@pragmaticminds.de>
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 17. April 2019 09:07
An: dev@plc4x.apache.org
Betreff: [DISCUSS] The State and Future of PLC4X
Hi all,
as we had a lot of non-technical discussions and topics the last time (the
coming of age of a software project, I guess) it’s time for us to go back to
the real fun part and do technical shit.
I had a lot of discussions (on list and off list) with several people like
Chris, Matthias, Björn, Tim and others and wanted to share my thoughts on the
future of PLC4X as I see it (from a solely technical perspective).
Currently, I see several “fronts” or centers of activity (or where I think
we should spend it).
* Language adoption – We should define and deliver APIs and bindings
for other languages to bring what we currently have to other people and other
communities. The activities we have there are currently (from my head): Markus
and C++, Björn who wanted to investigate C# and the “Interop Server” which I
played around a bit (in fact, Matthias made a python binding yesterday…)
* Driver Generation – This is a well-known Topic which is currently
driven by Chris. This is a large topic, which includes
* Model Generation (currently dfdl and state-xml)
* Templates for many languages (will partially derive from above)
* A build process, to wire both together
* Some kind of Test Suite to check the correct generation of drivers
* Automated Documentation / Spec Generation (!!
* Ecosystem / Tools – We have a set of tools that are based on PLC4X
and which enable to do things which where unthinkable before. Some are
* Scraper – A tool to scrape massive amounts of data from multiple
PLCs based on a yml configuration, this is mostly driven by Tim
* OPC UA Server – Yet to come. Maps OPC UA requests to PLC4X
requests which then go native to the PLCs. Matthias started some work on this,
Tim looked over it and I think Chris plans on implementing something here also
* We had multiple discussions about tools that “guess” something
about locations of variables or their types. Chris brought that up yesterday
and plans to do something there, Matthias and I discussed this several times
and we plan to also do something with one or two students there
* New programming models – As plc4x is open, it allows us to implement
new programming models on top of it. The best example I can give is OPM, the
JPA equivalent of PLC4X. The idea is to work with POJOs and annotations and
EntityManagers (as Beans) and have a “type safe” and Business-esque way to
communicate with PLCs.
Here I see a lot of potential and possible next steps could be (discussed
by Matthias and me)
* “Richer” Typesystem (not just primitives and Arrays as currently)
which covers complex objects
* Mapping of complex objects from POJOs to PLC segments (Like
structs in S7 or ADS)
* Auto-generation of annotated POJOs from PLC programs (much like
JPA or the C# ORM does that based on an existing database). This could be a
“killer-feature” as it would really allow type-safe end to end communication
with the plc with zero plc specific knowledge
Other Topics in this area that can be named are
* A connection pool to share / reuse connections for efficiency
(which was implemented by Sebastian and is absolutely crucial for us!)
* A central monitoring component (similar to how a Webserver
monitors each side access and the results and latencies and so..), I am
currently working on this and hope to provide a PR soon
Of course, all of this is solely based on my personal opinion or things
that came out in discussions with other involved people.
For me, this structure makes sense and perhaps it helps us to “broaden” our
scope a bit from the initial focus (drivers, drivers, drivers) to the new
picture which evolved over the last to years.
Of course, feel free to agree, disagree or participate with other opinions.
Julian
PS.: I could offer to bring this in a more “presentable” form and prepare a
short “overview” talk about this for the next meetup, if interesting
