Hi Julian,
That's what I mentioned in the other email.
We have to be careful with the term OPC-UA Support and differentiate between
OPC-UA Server and OPC-UA Client (PLC4X opc-ua client)
I was talking about a OPC-UA Server ... you seem to be about a client. For the
Server we wouldn't need the feature you are mentioning.
Chris
Am 18.04.19, 11:27 schrieb "Julian Feinauer" <j.feina...@pragmaticminds.de>:
Hi Chris,
there are two ways.. and you are doing the other one, I think : )
You are talking about the OPC UA interface for other drivers, or?
There, you do that implicitly by your config, so this is fine.
But, especially when we start to implement an OPC UA Driver, this will fall
on our feet : )
Julian
Am 18.04.19, 11:19 schrieb "Christofer Dutz" <christofer.d...@c-ware.de>:
Hi Julian
I don't agree that we have to do the other first.
Right now I was thinking about building a configuration that could
offer a complex type structure to OPC-UA clients but map simple Addresses to
elements of such a tree.
So I think we could start without refactoring.
Chris
Am 18.04.19, 09:15 schrieb "Julian Feinauer"
<j.feina...@pragmaticminds.de>:
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
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-----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
