October 2013
State of the Community
Lacey Rae Trebaol, Engineer + Community Manager
One of the many reasons that TED talks are so popular is that people love to see people who are passionate about something talk about their passions. Whether it’s exploring how trust and playfulness can spark creativity in the workplace, or the challenges and benefits of working to become a courageous and vulnerable person, or even finding love online by implementing a rather clever algorithm. It connects with us. It resonates. It inspires. Basically, we dig it.
I recently had the opportunity to work with our CEO, Stan Schneider, on some impromptu videos where he talks about all kinds of things that he is really passionate about. Today, I’m happy to be able to share one of these with you: Stan speaking on Middleware and the Internet of Things. He gives you a great description of middleware - what it is and where it fits in your systems - and then moves into the bigger picture: the Internet of Things. His excitement is contagious and the technical content is great.
If you’d like to read more about the IoT, check out this glossary entry for it in our Community Knowledge Base. We'll be updating this as we publish more content on the topic in the coming weeks.
DDS Standards Update
Gerardo Pardo, CTO
The September 2013 OMG Technical Meeting was held in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was a busy and eventful week indeed!
The highlight was the information day on “The Internet of Things (IoT) - Navigating the Future of Information Technology” on Wednesday 25 September. I found the presentations remarkable and forward thinking! Joe Salvo, Business Integration Technologies Manager at General Electric delivered the Keynote; one of his key insights was that while most of the “things” in IoT will be “dumb” devices, many--the most interesting ones--will be “intelligent” systems capable of autonomous decision making and peer-to-peer collaboration. The kind of communication patterns where DDS shines :) Stan Schneider (RTI CEO) went on to describe the protocol soup used for IoT applications (DDS-RTPS, XMPP, MQTT, AMQP, CoAP) identifying key differences and where each fits best. Les Santiago (IDC Analyst) provided a forward-looking analysis of the market and predicted a TAM of US $ 2 Billion(!) for DDS technology by 2020… Count me in!! . Ben Calloni (Lockheed) discussed security and assurance issues in IoT. Presentations by several DDS vendors showed how DDS is already being used in many IoT applications. If you missed the event the recorded videos and presentations are available at this OMG web page.
As I mentioned the meeting was action packed… Here are some of the other significant events:
(1) The Application Instrumentation Specification was adopted! This specification (OMG link, Slideshare link) provides a simple way to instrument applications so that their internal state can be accessed by remote applications and tools in order to supervise the correct operation of the system. All this with minimal impact on the application so that it can be used even within real-time threads. The Application Instrumentation API is available in C and Java. RTI was the main submitter to this specification and already has an open source version of the Application Instrumentation API available at the Community Portal.
(2) DDS Security continued its steady progress. I did a two-hour presentation (OMG link, Slideshare link) on the latest version of the document (OMG link, Slideshare link). The reception was very positive. No new issue or vulnerability concerns were raised. Several in the audience commented that it is critical that the DDS Security specification is adopted soon; ideally in December (as currently scheduled). I think this is a very real possibility as the specification document is close to complete... So if you have any feedback, now is the time!
(3) Discussions continued on the RPC over DDS submission. This one is especially contentious and I expect it will take a while to resolve.
(4) Two new RFIs were released: DDS for Enterprise Edge and Software Defined Networks (SDN) Application Ecosystem.
Forum News
Gerardo Pardo, CTO
Twenty (!) postings to a single thread in the forums? Building RTI DDS from the source code must be an interesting subject indeed!! A remarkable thing about this thread is how community members are helping each other directly. Thank you Geoffrey (Gorlak) for starting this thread, contributing the premake scripts to build RTI DDS, and helping people to use them. Thank you also Fred, Ryan (ral625), and Fernando for your insightful postings there!
Has anyone noticed the flurry of questions on how to implement various application scenarios using RTI Connext DDS? Machine Learning, Voice over DDS, Cryptography in DDS, Reconfigurable Manufacturing with DDS, NS-2 network simulation for DDS, etc. I am told that this is the result of the increase use of DDS for teaching and projects at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM). Located in Dhahran, next to Saudi Arabia’s biggest oil fields, KFUPM is the premier engineering University in Saudi Arabia! I visited Dr. Basem AL-Madani, chair of the Computer Engineering Department, in 2012 and I could see first hand how their excellent program and research facilities were attracting the best students from the Middle East. We welcome these new members of the community and wish them success in their projects!
RTI Employees Engaging with the Community - SVCC 2013
Sumant Tambe, Senior Software Research Engineer
RTI has maintained its thought leadership in the DDS community by participating once again in the largest developer community event: Silicon Valley Code Camp (SVCC), Oct 5-6, 2013. This year, SVCC arranged 229 technical sessions for nearly 4500 attendees free of cost. This is the second appearance for RTI at the SVCC spreading awareness about the OMG Data Distribution Service standard to a broad technology community. The focus of this year was on the C++/C++11 track where Dr. Sumant Tambe of RTI presented a generic template library for developing data-centric messaging applications in C++11. Modern C++ has phenomenal capabilities that allow DDS programming without code generation or leaving your IDE window for that matter. If you visit the RTI Community site, the slide-deck is available.
Liberate Your Log Messages with DDS!
Sara Granados Cabeza, Software Engineer
When working with a large enough system, you need to control the errors and warnings produced. Sometimes, it's as easy as storing them in a file and recovering them when needed. But, what if your system is a critical one and you need those messages as they are produced? Or what if you do not have physical access to those computers? RTI Distributed Logger is a multi-language API that allows you to log your error/warning/debug/etc. messages in DDS and read them wherever you need. You just need to initialize the RTI Distributed Logger and call to a log function (depending on the error level). Many of the RTI tools (as Monitor and Administrative Console) are prepared to receive and display these messages. And what more importantly, you can configure your own applications to subscribe to them and act as corresponds. Check our shipped examples and “DDS-ize” your log application.
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, and tools team. A security background is highly desirable. Check out the available positions and apply today.
