February 2014
State of the Community
Lacey Rae Trebaol, Engineer + Community Manager
As engineers we all know that product releases are no joke. The making of a great product is fueled by hard work, and lots of it. It takes teams of people working together to make something bigger and better than any one of them could do alone. The results generated by all of that hard work can be downright inspiring and impressive. But do you know what my favorite part of the release is? It’s the feeling when we ship it to the public. When all of the ducks are in order. Every person in the company, irrespective of their group, has contributed something necessary to getting the product to that point. Seeing it all come together? That’s my favorite part. I love it.
Did I mention that RTI Connext DDS 5.1.0 is being released this week? It is!
To help ensure your transition to the new version is as seamless as possible, as well as keep you informed on the new features and enhancements you’ll see in version 5.1.0, I thought a Special Edition newsletter was in order. We have put a lot into this release and I’m sure that you’ll love some of the great new features such as our new Built-in QoS Profiles and additional support for DDS-XTypes . This edition of the Community Update includes a lot of great content that we’ve pulled together including information on new features, notes on backward compatibility, helpful hints on configuration, and more. For up-to-date product information and more information about the release, don’t forget to visit our blog and follow us on twitter .
I hope you enjoy 5.1.0. We certainly enjoyed all of the work we did bringing it to you.
Lacey
Connext DDS 5.1.0 and the Internet of Things
David Barnett, VP Products and Markets
With more than 60 great new features, it’s easy to get excited about the new Connext DDS 5.1 release. But just as exciting is what Connext DDS 5.1 helps enable: the Internet of Things (IoT). Read our news release for an overview of how 5.1 addresses IoT challenges including scalability, extensibility and adaptability to disparate deployment environments. Then flip through our introductory presentation for a quick review of all the 5.1 enhancements.
RTI Connext 5.1.0: What’s New
Rose Wahlin,Principal Software Engineer
The major themes of the new RTI Connext DDS 5.1.0 are ease of use, and support for changing data types. You can think of this as making your development processes easier at the beginning of your project lifecycle, and enabling your changing data requirements throughout the life of your project. We’ve also thrown in some performance and scalability features to round out the release.
It is impossible to describe all of the features in this newsletter, but the new core features are listed in the What’s New document on our website, or in the Release Notes for each of the tools that can be viewed in the RTI Connext DDS 5.1.0 documentation. I’ve listed out a few things that are particularly cool, or that you should be aware of.
Core Libraries
- Built-in QoS profiles: We’ve created a set of pre-built QoS profiles for various communication patterns and use cases! So if you know you have “Alarm” data in your system, you can use the “Pattern.Alarm” QoS profile (or inherit from it) instead of having to design your QoS from scratch. If you have data that is strictly reliable, you can use the “Generic.StrictReliable” QoS profile. We have created an example on the Community Portal that shows how to use these new built-in profiles to enable monitoring.
- New default transport settings: We’ve changed our default transport settings to support better throughput and faster discovery out-of-the-box. I’m particularly excited about this change, since we’ve been seeing more and more customers building systems with increasing scale and throughput requirements. In the past you would have to tune your transport settings manually in your applications and our tools to get the highest possible throughput, but now you can get this for free out of the box. The one caveat to be aware of is that this breaks out-of-the box backward compatibility with 5.0.0. This is easy to change back, but if you can keep the new settings it will give you better performance. To help guide you if you need compatibility between versions, we’ve created a document to show how to support backward (or forward) compatibility between 5.0.0 and 5.1.0.
- Define your entities in XML: You may recognize this as an experimental feature in 5.0.0 – it’s now fully supported. You can now define your system’s Topics, DataWriters, DataReaders, DomainParticipants, etc. in XML. This allows you to develop your systems more quickly, write less code, and modify your system rapidly with fewer changes that require recompilation.
- Support for Mutable Types: The OMG’s DDS-XTypes standard defines a way for data types to be marked as mutable, meaning that two versions of a data type may have a different set of fields, and that fields can be added or removed from anywhere within the structure. This supports a long-term project lifecycle where data types must be evolved over time in ways that may not be obvious during the initial design. We’ve added support for mutable types in our core and in our tools and services
- So many more... We have so many new features and improvements that I can’t mention them all here. That doesn’t mean they aren’t important, or that you shouldn’t take a look. Please read the What’s New document for more details!
Services and Tools
- RTI Administration Console is our new first choice tool for debugging… It can auto-discover which domains are active in the system, check for QoS mismatches in real time, display the RTI log messages from applications (if you’ve enabled distributed logging, which you should), and administer RTI services like Routing Service and Persistence Service.
- RTI Routing Service can now propagate content filters. This means that if you are using a content filter to specify your interest in a subset of data, and you have a Routing Service between you and the source of that data – that content filter will be sent to the Routing Service which will apply that filter on it’s DataReaders. This can lead to decreased bandwidth usage in systems that use Routing Services to isolate subsystems, potentially allowing much larger scalability of systems.
It was hard to pick and choose which features to highlight, so please take a look at the tools’ release notes to find out more.
Featured Download: RTI Live 5.1.0 CD
Fernando Garcia Aranda, Software Engineer
The RTI Live CD is a bootable Linux distribution (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) with RTI Connext DDS Professional pre-installed, which makes it is a great tool to evaluate our products.
The RTI Live CD also includes several examples to get you started with RTI Connext DDS, as well as the latest experimental features. You can download the RTI Live CD from the RTI Community Portal.
