iCorsaro

Simulation and Operational Technologies have historically evolved in isolation and with very little cross-fertilization. This has led to a divergence of technologies, skills along with the necessity for ad hoc integration of simulation and operational systems.

This situation is swiftly changing due to a convergence of the simulation community toward operational technologies such as the Object Management Group Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems (DDS). In this blog post I will summarize the motivations behind this convergence and provides quantitative indications, when data is available, of the induced benefits.

The commoditization of network connectivity is providing the foundation for the Internet of Things – a system in which data flows seamlessly, at Internet Scale, between network-connected devices, mobile devices, industrial and information systems. Yet, network connectivity alone is not sufficient. Another key building block for the Internet of Things are standards for interoperable data sharing -- without standardised open data sharing there is no Internet of Things.

A less catastrophic interpretation of the Maya calendar sees Today -- the 21 of December 2012 -- as marking the beginning of a New Era -- an era in which the Earth and its inhabitants will undergo a positive transformation. I am not trying to argue in support of this thesis. I just want to point out how inspiring it can be to believe it for a moment. All of a sudden everyone would feel motivated to be a better person, respecting our mother earth and all the life forms with which we share the third stone from the sun, the blue planet.  In a world where we abuse our mother earth, discriminate people based on their sex, color, religion, or income, it is sure that we have a lot of space for improvement.

Many of you have been using simd-cxx v0.x for productively hacking DDS code. Some of you, are probably aware that simd-cxx v0.x has been the main driver behind  the recently adopted OMG DDS-PSM-C++  standard -- in essence the new C++ API for DDS.

If you like simd-cxx v0.x be reassured,  you’ll love the new standard and simd-cxx v1.0 (http://github.com/kydos/simd-cxx) -- its Open Source implementation for OpenSplice DDS

In my last blog post I reviewed the Open Source definition from the Open Source Initiative. Today I will tackle the “Free Beer” vs. “Free Speech” aspect of Open Source and  debunk some common misconceptions.

I thought that most people in the software business understood what Open Source is and when Software can be defined as Open Source. Recently, I was struck to see a company calling Open Source something that it really is not. To tell you the full story, they have even coined the term “Open Source 2.0” – perhaps in an excess of marketing creativity? This poses the question of "when is Open Source genuinely Open Source"? I am still puzzled trying to understand why this was done. Was it genuine ignorance? Intentional confusion?  I anticipate this stunt is going to be critically judged by the open source community.

While waiting for this judgment, I felt it would be useful to summarise what genuine Open Source is and when software can be defined as Open Source.

DDS has popularized data-centric architectures and it has made it easier than ever to design distributed systems that are loosely coupled, fault-tolerant and that expose self-healing behavior.

First of all I want to whish all of you a very Happy, Healthy, and Peaceful 2012.

I am just back from a week-long business trip in India. Perhaps the best way to get great inspiration for starting this brand new year.

With OpenSplice v6 we have introduced several different new features but there is one in particular that I've been wanting to cover  for some time. Tonight, once dinner was over (very good vegetarian variation of the Risotto alla Milanese which I cooked myself) and kids were in bed I was about to begin my evening Yoga when I had this funny feeling -- had I become a Fimble? Not as far as I  could tell, but at the same time I  felt that before devoting myself to Yoga I had to write about this one thing.

So what is it?

Escalier provides a Scala language binding for DDS currently targeting the Open Source DDS implementation OpenSplice. The beauty of Escalier is that it takes advantage of the nice features provided by the Scala language (check out the Scala web site for tons of good documentation on how to get started with Scala)   to provide a very concise and elegant API for DDS.