| | Letter From The EditorThis October at the London Connext Conference, I heard more than 20 customers share how they used our products in building solutions to their hard problems. Real solutions. No band-aid approaches, but actual, simple, innovative solutions - and some even shared their next steps! It was inspiring and exciting, and I can't wait for next year's conference!
In the spirit of paying it forward, this month I'm excited to bring you a newsletter showcasing solutions: our customer's solutions, Connext DDS for Android and the Medical Industry, and while we don't feature the story in this newsletter, you should be sure to read about how the European Space Agency is using Connext DDS in Space.
Cheers to inspiration!
Lacey Trebaol, Community Manager | | | | |
|  | Managing Distributed Systems and Teams
Jan Van Bruaene, VP EngineeringFor a small company building real-time communications software to manage distributed systems, our engineering team spans quite a few locations. We are headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and have a development center in Granada, Spain. We also have remote engineers all over the US: Massachusetts, Florida, New Hampshire, New York, Virginia and Minnesota. Managing the engineering team, I ponder daily how to best blend this distributed team together, as if they were all in the same location, brainstorming on new ideas, collaboratively debugging or just goofing around. Here are a few tips on tools and habits that help us work as one. Read more. |
 | 2nd Chances Don't Come Often
Lacey Trebaol Engineer + Community Manager...but when they do, you should jump!
For those who weren’t able to attend our London Connext Conference users group event in October, you’re in luck: we’re posting the presentation content on Community!
To see what all of the excitement was about and catch a glimpse into how our customers are using RTI Connext DDS, head on over to community.rti.com where you'll find this post on the forum. It contains everything we have right now and will be updated when/if new materials become available. |
|  | Now You Can Run RTI Connext DDS on Android!
Lacey Trebaol, Engineer + Community ManagerTo address the needs of developers, we have provided our distributed applications platform, RTI Connext DDS, on Android enabling the creation of publish and subscribe applications for the Industrial Internet of Things... Read more. |
 | How To: Basic Debugging
Richard Williamson, Technical Account Manager, EMEA"I got nothin'". From component to component, node to node or system to system, there are several different layers where parts in a DDS-based application might not communicate. Don't Panic! In the How-To forum of the RTI Community Portal, there are now some simple, Basic Debugging steps and guidelines, that can help you identify why nobody's talking. |
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The IV Tech Challenge at the University of Granada (sponsored by RTI) came to an end a few weeks ago. The winners were four senior students from University of Granada’s Computer and Telecommunications Engineering department. They designed and created Locaviewer - a multi-agent video distribution system for kindergartens.
Locaviewer is a system that allows parents to subscribe to their kid’s topic from home or work and receive live video of the room where the kid is. It also allows the caretakers to monitor the kids at all times.
To learn more, check out their promotional video and stay tuned for their upcoming post on our blog. |
 | Are you interested in programming distributed systems using Common Lisp? Frank Goenninger from Consequor Consulting announced they have completed the implementation of a Common Lisp binding for RTI Connext DDS 5.1.0. If you are interested in the topic and you want to see the binding in action, check out his forum post.
Comfortable with C++11 and C++ Traits? Tired of the old-fashioned, yes clunky :), IDL to C++ mappings? Johnny Willemsen from Remedy IT announced they have a C++11 language binding for RTI Connext DDS 5.1.0 that is compliant with the recently adopted OMG IDL to C++11 standard. Download links can be found in Johnny’s post. |
|  | Now You Have Choices!
Gerardo Pardo, CTOThe DDS API obtained from the OMG IDL to C++11 standard mapping should not be confused with the recently-announced modern, DDS C++ API which complies with the OMG DDS-C++ PSM standard (DDS-PSM-Cxx). Confused? Find how this all makes sense in this blog post. |
| The December 2014 OMG meeting data is rapidly approaching, and there are some exciting developments in the works: RPC over DDS, IDL 4.0, DDS-XTYPES, and more.
The biggest news is the RPC over DDS submission. This specification would allow application developers to use DDS to define services and invoke remote operation on them. For details see the RPC presentation we did at London Connext DDS user conference. RTI (in collaboration with eProsima) has been hard at work on it over the last year. But this 5th revision to the draft is finally ready to be adopted. Significantly many other vendors have joined in support of the RTI/eProsima submission, including TwinOaks computing and PrismTech. The submission still needs to be voted by the OMG Middleware Task Force and pass the Architecture Board review, but with any luck these steps will both be accomplished in December, and if not by the next meeting in March 2015 for sure. I think this specification will be very significant. Imagine being able to invoke remote operations with all the scalability, performance, and QoS offered by DDS!
Next in my list is the IDL 4.0 work. This will be a new version of the OMG IDL that modularizes the IDL and incorporates the new “annotation” syntax and data-types introduced by the DDS-XTYPES specification. These additions will make IDL far more powerful and provide the hooks for meta-data many users have been asking for like ranges, default values, etc. A draft version of this standard was presented by Virginie Watine from THALES at the September 2014 meeting. We have been collaborating with Virginie to make some revisions and we are hopeful we will be able to present a the complete RFC in December. However we will not be able to approve it until March 2015.
I am also looking forward to any progress we can make tackling some of the open issues on DDS-XTYPES, DDS-RTPS, and DDS-Security. These discussions will influence how we processed with the next revision of these specifications.
Last but not least, I am also looking forward to the mysterious Demo & Presentation titled “Collaborative HTML Editing Using DDS” from Nick Stavros (JackRabbit Consulting). Apparently this offers collaborative capabilities similar to Google docs with without any “Servers” in the middle. Sounds like a very interesting idea!
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