January 2014
State of the Community
Lacey Rae Trebaol, Engineer + Community Manager
I’d like to wish all of you a Happy New Year! RTI is kicking off 2014 with quite a bang!
First up: webinars. On January 30, we’re presenting a webinar where you can learn all about what the Internet of Things is and what it means for your applications. On February 27, you should clear your schedule at 11:00 a.m. PT because we’re going to tell you all about our latest product release: Connext DDS 5.1. This presentation will include descriptions of new functionality as well as notes on enhancements. There will definitely be time for you to ask questions and have them answered by our very own VP of Engineering (Jan) and our VP of Products and Markets (David). I’ll be attending both, and you should too. Register today.
Next, we have all kinds of new content over on Community, including one of my favorites - Case + Code. Rose talks about it a little later in this newsletter. After taking a look, head on over to the forum to post your comments. Remember: your feedback helps us give you more of what you want.
Have a great day and a lovely 2014,
Lacey
DDS Standards Update
Gerardo Pardo, CTO
The December 2013 OMG Technical Meeting was held the week of December 9-13 in Santa Clara, California. The venue was the Hyatt hotel next to the Santa Clara convention center. This is literally next to the new San Francisco 49ers stadium (Levi’s stadium). It is an impressive sight as it can hold almost 70000 spectators… I wonder if the OMG will still be able to afford meeting at this hotel once the stadium opens…
One of the meeting highlights was the Software Defined Networking (SDN) session held Tuesday afternoon. There were presentations of each of the 5 RFI responses: RTI/Cisco, Dell/Xflow, Computer Associates, NEC, and Mikodura. The presentations and RFI responses and these presentations are all available from the OMG web page, archived under the MARS (Middleware and Related Services) subgroup. A common thread in several presentations and discussions was the need for developing an information model of the observable state and the controllable services--one of the key points in the RTI/Cisco response. The consensus was that the next step would be to issue an RFP to develop such standard information model. This is good news: It would open the door for using middleware technologies such as DDS to interact with SDN systems in a standard way!
The MARS session featured presentations on the DDS Security and the RPC over DDS submissions.
The vote on the DDS Security submission was delayed to March 2014. This was due in part to the request of some of the submitters and reviewers--there are several teams currently evaluating the submission and they have not yet provided feedback. There are still a few gaps in the submission document itself that need to be closed before the vote.
With two competing submissions, the RPC over DDS session was as controversial as it had been in the last few meetings. The AB had provided initial feedback to both. The feedback to RTI/eProsima was that defining 6 different profiles made the submission complex and could complicate interoperability if different vendors implemented only some of the profiles. The feedback to PrimsTech was that it left many things underspecified.
Some of the differences on the two RPC over DDS submissions appear irreconcilable and a competitive vote seems unavoidable. To aid this an “evaluation team” was formed. The evaluation team will produce a report on comparing the two submissions at the March 2014 meeting and the vote will occur at the June 2014 meeting. RPC over DDS is an important specification for the DDS ecosystem, so if you are a DDS user and you are interested in joining this evaluation team, send us email and we will put you in touch with the organizers!
Challenging Tomorrow's Engineers
Sara Granados Cabeza, Software Engineer
Every year, the School of Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering of the University of Granada organizes a "Technical Challenge" for its students. The challenge consists of creating a small company-like working group that develops a product solving a real-world problem. Each working group needs to study the proposed problem and follows a complete development cycle (from designing it to presenting it to a customer) to find a solution. This initiative shows the students how a company works and what they will find once they graduate. To improve the experience, the winning solutions receive a prize!
This year one of the challenges has been proposed (and sponsored) by RTI. The students will need to develop a multi-agent-based distributed video system. This system should provide scalable and reliable video streaming over DDS and should be configurable by the final users. Once the final user sets his/her preferences, the system should self-adapt to provide those preferences without any further interaction with the user (like changing from one camera to another). This system could be applied to sports or conference broadcasting.
For more information on the challenge, or to post questions for those of you who are participating, visit the ETSIIT Technical Challenge forum on the RTI Community Portal.
Case + Code
Rose Wahlin,Principal Software Engineer
There can be a big leap between taking your first look at RTI Connext DDS and fully understanding the power of data centricity, QoS, and the other concepts that make RTI Connext DDS such a powerful tool. To make this easier, we’ve been hard at work writing code to help you get started building real systems. We call this Case + Code, and it consists of real-world use cases with code, XML configuration and IDL data types.
We have an excellent selection of feature examples already, that are geared toward showing how to use individual QoS and APIs. The goal of Case + Code is to go beyond this to kickstart your project and help you to build your real applications.
We’re starting out with three Case + Code examples:
Vehicle Tracking: This use case can apply to any system that is tracking multiple vehicle positions and the example shows an air traffic control system. It focuses on the data model for representing multiple vehicles as well as the QoS tuning for latency vs. throughput tradeoffs.
Video Streaming: This use case shows how to stream video using DDS. It focuses on the QoS for streaming media.
Real-Time Sensor Data across a WAN: This use case shows how to connect your real-time systems together over the cloud, and send the right subset of your data where it is needed. It focuses on configuring a system to send data over TCP and using the Routing Service to send a subset of data across a WAN.
We will be creating more examples over the coming months, so share your feedback!
We're Hiring!
Jan Van Bruaene, VP Engineering
The next wave of the Internet will connect machines and devices together into functioning, intelligent systems. The Internet of Things is exploding as devices take advantage of the expanding speed, quality, and affordability of networks. RTI leads the market for the machine-to-machine (M2M) communications that drive this wave. Our software platform allows machines to communicate efficiently, with high performance and with a large number of other machines (M2M). We are looking for talented software engineers to join the team building the core platform. We’re also looking for engineers interested in secure middleware. Take a look at the opportunities: http://www.rti.com/company/careers.html. We want to hear from you. We want to hear from you.
