Re: Ada / Automation fellows

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Fri, 27 Mar 2015 14:19:14 -0700 (PDT), slos wrote:

> For having fiddled around your web site and CV, I believe you that the
> systems you create in Ada are bigger than the average ones that "Ada for
> Automation" wishes to address.

It is my private site, not much related to automation actually. The firm's
site is this:

http://cbb.de/home

And the systems vary from ARM SBC to large plant automation systems.

> In some of our products we use this technology :
> http://www.atvise.com/en/

Interesting. We design SCADA more or less anew each time. Customer's
requirements vary too greatly. Quite often a corporate look and feel is
mandated etc.

We have an OPC UA server, as well, but rather as nice-to-have if somebody
asks. The DDL is not OPC UA, it has the architecture of a software bus,
push, no dedicated servers or gateways.

> It's HTML, SVG, JavaScript... and I was impressed by the achievement.

I am not a fan of Web-based automation systems. It does not feel good. It
does not properly separate control and UI, which is a big step back to me.

Freshly introduced WebSockets is just acknowledge of superiority of the
communication architectures we have been using for decades before HTTP ever
existed. Now I'm wondering how it would be for somebody to implement
something as nasty as OPC UA stack on top of WebSockets in JavaScript at
the client side... (:-))

Maybe Gnoga can change that, some day. I don't know.

> And so I was looking for some free alternative and found MBLogic which
> uses same web technologies and Python for the logic and web server :
> http://mblogic.sourceforge.net/index.html

From my experience the visual design of the UI is such a minor thing for an
automation system developing, that it does not really matter what kind of
GUI library you would use. We did it in almost all frameworks LabWindows,
DiaDem, Win32 GDI, C#, Web and so on. All GUI frameworks are designed alike
(and wrong from the automation and real-time control POV). So the problems,
solutions, workarounds are basically same. But it is probably less than 1%
of what should be done for a medium-sized automation system anyway.

> I was wondering how to put this on top of AWS and learning how to draw
> with Inkscape when Mister Botton came with Gnoga, pushing my wheel
> further...
> Gnoga seems to fit perfectly in my project and I guess we can use AICWL
> when high refresh rate is required for example. I still need to figure out
> how to connect easily the GUI, SVG and the logic.

Cairo fully supports SVG surfaces (AICWL is based on Cairo). AFAIK, David
planned to experiment with this in Gnoga...

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de