Hi all, just wanted to sum up some talks and discussions we had off-list about the whole topic of driver generation / providing drivers in other languages. Currently, there are the following two approaches going on:
Driver Generation based on DFDL by Chris: Chris already shared his branch and is working on the generation of drivers based on the specification of the messages and a state machine. This should then generate Code based on Freemarker Templates. Proxy Drivers by me, Chris and also others: We have a thrift based server / client spec. A simple Java Server is implemented as Interop Server and we work on providing client in other languages. This is a separate feature (as Proxy) but in a mode, where the Client itself starts the server in the background, this is an intermediate solution to already provide other language bindings (although at a cost). All work is done in the PLC4X-111 branch and I hope that we will be able to Merge that soon (Chris spend a lot of effort to include all the new stuff in our build). And there is a new thing coming currently which is mostly Driven by Matthias and myself regarding the driver code generation. We went over Chris example code (and the xmls) and our heads nearly exploded as it is so abstract. And as Matthias does a lot with model based code generation we had a long discussion about using a model based approach (probably with a DSL). So we currently try to investigate that a bit but also with a focus on research. In fact, we have the potential that we can engage some students from his institute to participate at the work. In fact, we even started a private Repo where we prepare a Paper to discuss the matter. As this would be our first “PLC4X Paper” everybody is invited to join us and should simply ping me (with github credentials), to get repo access. If we make it through we will will of course list everybody who contributed as author. To make it clear, this work, the DSL based driver generation tries to achieve the same as Chris approach based on DFDL just through another way. And right now I’m unable to say which one is better, could be better and where are the drawbacks and advantages. So we want to investigate that to have a basis for a discussion and decision. In fact, both approaches should be equally powerful, so one could be able to translate one to the other and vice versa, in theory. I consider it highly important to have a good and easy way to develop and maintain drivers as this is the crucial thing for the future of PLC4X. So please feel free to comment or discuss, if you feel like : ) Julian
