I been wrapping head around this as I had a necessity to watch CANopen
traffic decoded by plc4x. I ended up building fairly basic web page
which displayed most recent frames (so I could stay with local socketcan
transport), yet it was far from useful or portable. Recently I also did
struggle a lot with bloody modbus. My usecases are often focused on
making the commissioning to generate further software configuration.
My little research in topic of desktop applications ended up at javafx
which allows to make it small and compile to native binary thanks to
graal. My experiences with RCP platforms are rather bad (I did some
small Eclipse RCP projects), even if I have no issues with OSGi. Problem
I see in RCP platforms is sparse development documentation, I also
perceive both Eclipse RCP and Netbeans as focused mainly on organizing
navigation while strongly depending on UI frameworks (jface/swt or
swing/awt). Effectively you still need to build tables and so on, but
with much more overhead.
Please do not take above too seriously in context of Netbeans, I don't
know much about it and its flexibility. I don't know how to build it
with Maven, hence it feels strange.
For the Kotlin stuff and frameworks there - I can say that any UI
project which Google is pushing is a red flag to me. Looking at GWT,
Angular 1.x (I used both) I simply fear that they can step back from
"experiment" after a year or two leaving everything to the community. I
looked at kootlin and javafx a while ago and there is not much happening
there. I don't know if is because of maturity, javafx issues or shift to
other UI approaches.
As I had no time to work on it I just postponed that to a future. Yet, I
still dream from time to time about proper "fieldbus.app". ;-)
Cheers,
Łukasz
On 23.06.2022 14:46, Michal Harakal wrote:
Hi,
I would be also interested in, having a strong opinion on technology stack, but
fully open to design and function.
My suggestion is writing a Desktop App with Kotlin Jetpack Compose for Desktop:
Props:
* modern, state of the art, way to write reactive UI (natural way to implement
unidirectional data flows architectures)
* JVM target
* open source, backed by Google And Jetbrains (they use it in their critical
products)
* Kotlin provides 1A class interoperability support with Java and JVM
* since Jetpack Compose is originally created and used by Android, you can have
an Android App out of the box, with little effort
* integration with Jetbrains Intellij
* even if you don't know Jetpack Compose Framewrok, you can contribute too with
your Java/Kotlin skills imedialtely on domain/bussines etc. parts of code ..
* easy to learn
* with multiplatform support are native apps with their native UI frameworks
(e.g. iOS)
Cons:
* Still in Alpha
* backed by Google and Jetbrains
* Kotlin is probably not the number one programming language here
Best regards,
Michal
Christofer Dutz <christofer.d...@c-ware.de> hat am 23.06.2022 10:55 geschrieben:
Hi all,
Again, I was in need of a simple application to simply monitor the values on a
Modbus device (I’m currently configuring my Wago PFC200 Modbus Slave interface).
I could use stuff like the “Modbus Poll” GUI tool, but my trial expired and I’m
not willing to pay 130€ for this limited functionality.
So, I thought, it would be an awesome addition to PLC4X if we had some sort of
GUI application, that uses the Discover functionality to find possible PLCs and
list them in a tree view.
If the use double clicks on one of these connections, it connects and possibly
executes the Browse functionality and lists up what it finds.
I know that I could simply start working on something like that, but I thought
this would also be a great thing for someone else to implement as it doesn’t
require too deep knowledge of PLC4X internals.
And I suck at building beautiful UIs :-)
Anyone interested?
Chris
