Hi Chris,

Your PLC4J refactoring roadmap looks great. Prioritizing removal of Netty 
dependency is really good.

For all the rest - How much does this refactoring impact the overall API and 
other languages?

I would vote for a release after PLC4J is Netty independent as this is a major 
milestone.

Cheers,

Lukas

Am 27. November 2025 11:41:00 MEZ schrieb Christofer Dutz 
<[email protected]>:
>Hi all,
>
>As many of you might know, mid of this year I applied for several public 
>research funding rounds with the main goal to refactor PLC4J to rid ourselves 
>of some of the technical debt we have piled up. Most of the work was around 
>rewriting the current SPI to work entirely without Netty. Beyond that to 
>implement a Transport layer that supports multiple connection instances to 
>share one transport instance (Like needed for ModbusRTU and BacNET, …) Also to 
>allow multiple transport instances being used by one connection instance (Like 
>for Profinet and Cesar’s S7 variant).
>
>Now it seems that both applications were judged favorably. Now I could need 
>some input from you guys where you see more need for cleaning up.
>
>So far, the tasks I applied and which I just got informed that they received 
>Funding are:
>
>
>  *
>Implement new SPI
>     *
>Implement new Read-/WriteBuffers that work without third party dependencies
>     *
>Update the code generation framework
>     *
>Implement a  new system for pluggable transports
>     *
>Implement the code for the concept of a layered protocol drivers
>  *
>Update the existing drivers to use the new SPI
>
>The second package I would try to change the other would be:
>
>  *
>Implement a new Code-Generation for PLC4J based on JavaPoet (Getting rid of 
>freemarker (at least for Java))
>  *
>Implement a new connection-cache component
>  *
>Implement a new Scraper alternative (able to use subscription-based triggers)
>  *
>Implement a new Base-Driver that emulates subscriptions by using the new 
>scraper
>  *
>Fix the issues in the S7 driver allowing us to merge the two back together
>  *
>Add some Audit-Log functionality, that allows us to better diagnose issues
>
>Does that make sense from your perspective?
>Anything missing you think I should focus on?
>
>I think a bit quicker feedback than usually here would be helpful, as I need 
>to finish the Sovereign Tech Fund paperwork as soon as possible.
>
>Chris

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