August 2013
State of the Community
Lacey Rae Trebaol, Engineer + Community Manager
Our community has been really busy the past 2 months, which makes a lot of sense given all of the important things that have been accomplished. From Web-Enabled DDS to a port for Raspberry Pi and LabVIEW integration, we have been working hard to ensure that your experience with the RTI Community and Connext DDS is not simply a positive one, but it exceeds your expectations.
DDS Standards Update
Gerardo Pardo, CTO
The Object Management Group held its June Technical Meeting in Berlin, Germany. This meeting also featured a DDS Information Day and a DDS Interoperability Demonstration between 7 DDS vendors.
In this meeting the Web-Enabled DDS Specification was finally adopted!! It was a joint submission of RTI, eProsima, and THALES; led by RTI. The standard is significant because it defines an interoperable way for applications to access the DDS Global Data Space over the web. Specifically it defines a mapping of DDS entities to HTTP/REST resources so applications can perform actions--such as create DDS Topics or read or write DDS data simply doing POST/PUT/GET operations on HTTP resources. This technology makes it possible for web-browser/thin client applications (e.g. built on JavaScript) to natively access DDS data without needing any additional libraries or software. An on-line demo of this technology (built using a draft version of the spec) can be accessed on-line at demo.rti.com.
There was also significant progress in both the DDS Security and the RPC Over DDS specifications:
The DDS Security specification is on track to be adopted in 2013. Despite the initial controversy and competition there is only one submission remaining. The RTI submission has been joined by eProsima and PrismTech and it is the only one being considered. The June 2013 RTI draft submission is fairly complete. The plan now is to have a “final draft” submitted and presented at the September 2013 meeting and a specification document to vote on and adopt at the December 2013 meeting.
The RPC over DDS specification is proving quite controversial. In Berlin there were 3!!! separate competing submissions by RTI, eProsima, and PrismTech. During the meeting RTI and eProsima found a way to join their submissions preserving the essential benefits of their two proposals. The approach is summarized in the presentation Sumant Tambe did at the OMG meeting. Going forward there will be just two competing submissions. Because of this I expect this specification to be adopted no sooner than March 2014.
Forum News
Gerardo Pardo, CTO
Forum activity has been on the rise. The month of July averaged more than 3 postings per day!! Some of this can be attributed to the of the increased user-base for RTI Connext DDS. But I think the dominant factor is that users are becoming aware of this resource and the utility it provides: A fast way to get tips and insight from DDS experts both in and outside RTI. It is now common to see answers to questions posted on the very same day!
One thing I noticed is that the source of the questions/comments is very broad. However most answers are originating from RTI “insiders”. It is not completely unexpected but it would be nice to see more broad participation here as well... I know that many of our University Program Members and Students are interested in Internship/work opportunities with RTI and in Industry. If you are one of them, posting to the forum is a great way to get yourself known and recognized as a DDS expert. As soon as that happens I am sure the work opportunities will be very forthcoming :)
Best Practices
Rose Wahlin, Principal Software Engineer
We’ve been generating new best practices on the Community Portal, and a few weeks ago I gave a webinar titled “Repeat Success, Not Mistakes; Use DDS Best Practices to Design Your Complex Distributed Systems.” This webinar describes twelve best practices for being successful with DDS – through architecture, application design, and network and QoS settings. Watch the webinar if you’d like some background on why these best practices are useful, or if you’d like a sneak peek at the new best practices we will be adding to the Community Portal. You can watch a replay of this webinar or look at the slides here: http://www.rti.com/mk/webinars.html
Featured Download
Gianpiero Napoli, Senior Software Engineer
Creating your distributed system without writing a single line of code? Defining behavior without having to compile? Now you can!
We just released an experimental rapid prototyping tool for DDS systems that incorporates both XML definition of all the entities in your distributed system and a powerful and simple way to define their behavior using the fast and compact scripting language Lua! It is already available for Linux, MacOsX, Windows and for the Raspberry Pi!!!! Download it here and let us know what you think on the forum or by writing to lua@rti.com
Experimental Ports
Fernando Garcia Aranda, Software Engineer
We have added experimental ports of RTI Connext DDS for Raspberry Pi and Xenomai in our downloads section.
Raspberry Pi is a tiny inexpensive single-board computer with an ARM processor. You can start developing C, C++, and Java applications following the instructions on this forum post.
Xenomai is a real-time development framework for Linux. You can learn how to set up Xenomai in your Linux environment and start writing RTI Connext DDS applications here, but we recommend you to get started using the RTI Live CD with Xenomai.
Kids can use RTI Connext DDS, can't you?
Sara Granados Cabeza, Software Engineer
RTI was this week in the NI Week (hosted by National Instruments) presenting our newest integration: RTI DDS Toolkit for LabVIEW. This toolkit enables RTI Connext DDS for LabVIEW users. The main advantage provided by DDS to LabVIEW is the capability of communicating LabVIEW programs (or Virtual Instruments) not only with other VIs but also with external programs implemented in C, C++, Java,... To show this functionality we prepared a demo that communicated a Lego Mindstorms robot with other applications, from a Microsoft Excel datasheet to a Java application running on an Android tablet.
What happens when you put together a robot and a tablet? You create a kid magnet. Our booth was full of "Future Engineers" from 3 and on using DDS! Instead of shooing them out, I explained them that messages were published by the tablet and that LabVIEW subscribed to those messages and sent them to the robot. Most of them understood the concept and asked if they could connect to those messages from their phones. So I introduced the discovery concept and opened a Java application in one computer so they could see how it worked. They loved it! Two kids would control the robot at the same time, sending commands from the table and the computer. At some point one of them said to his little sister: "Stop moving it or I'll unplug you so you cannot move it". So we did so, I unplugged the computer from the router and told the girl to send some messages, then I plugged it again et voilà! Reliability explained to a 6-year-old.
Do you want to try it yourself? Download the RTI DDS Toolkit for LabVIEW for free from the LabVIEW Tools Network and get the demo source code (LabVIEW and Java) from our blog.
We're Hiring!
Jan Van Bruaene, VP Engineering
If you fiddle with technology, have a passion for networking and developing software for distributed systems and want to build the underpinnings of the real-time industrial internet, we would love to talk to you. We're looking for talented software engineers in various functions: build and release, devops, core team, tools team and with security background. Check out the available positions and apply today.
