Re: Ada / Automation fellows

[slos <new.stephane.los@gmail.com>]

Le samedi 28 mars 2015 10:05:48 UTC+1, Dmitry A. Kazakov a écrit :
> 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
I think I had figured this out of your CV.
> 
> 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.
In another life I have used several SCADA from the market like PcVue, WinCC or Intouch.
They would do the job often, never needed to redevelop one but your customers may have strange requirements.
> 
> 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.
Well, I don"t see why you could not separate control and UI with web technologies.
> 
> 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... (:-))
Some people prefer web based UI and some native applications.
I can understand that both have qualities.
> 
> 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.
In normal automation applications, UI is done with those previously mentioned SCADA systems by people who do not have / need computer programming knowledge.
With those tools, they draw and animate symbols quite easily without a single line of code.

> 
> > 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...
Cairo draws SVG but the interesting part in SVG, apart the vectorized drawing, is that it integrates into the DOM and then by changing some property, for example the class, it can be animated using JavaScript via WebSocket.
Then, designing the UI requires only some art skills with Inkscape.
Symbols can be used to populate synoptics, and with some attributes and CSS3, animated quite simply I think.
I am quite sure that can be achieved with Gnoga even in its current state.

And as David said in some other thread, one can get best of both worlds by combining GTK / CAIRO / AICWL and Gnoga in his application.
> 
> -- 
> Regards,
> Dmitry A. Kazakov
> http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

BR,
Stéphane