ShaunR

Thinking a bit more about this. We already have an editor where we could add the messages rather than usurping the dynamic terminal. After all. It's really just pulling in and simplifying dynamic events so that no primitives are needed and adding a viewer for the message paths. The only outstanding question is what do we do about generating the events to remove the last primitive (Generate User Event)? The more I look at this, the easier it becomes to implement

It's a good idea but it's an awful implementation. You can smell that it's awful from the amount of infrastructure replication from diagram to diagram so eventually it all looks the same with minuscule differences. That's *not* reuse! Scripting isn't the answer here. A better approach would be similar to the "Named Events" that I once played with. Of course, I don't have the ability to draw wires between the producers and subscribers in there that Jeff can do, but the Event Structure becomes housing for your code populated with the appropriate events and data terminals dependent on your message-either in another loop on the diagram or in a completely separate VI (we'll call Actor ). So. With the above in mind. Say we didn't even want to have the VIM node (which is just really defining the message or, more practically, the user events and data terminals that appear in the Event Structure) and we could just pop-up on the Event Dynamic Registration terminal and define our message. That could then be available throughout all our code (we can argue about scope later). So Like Jeff, 1 is the "expanded" code and 2 is the iconised abstraction. Now. Of course. Jeff uses wires and we could use wires here too to represent the message paths between the loops and icons if we were NI devs. But if we are going to use another interface, lets just use it to view the message paths. Rather than straight-jacketing the developer to the alternate view and lot's of [slowly scripted] boiler plate code, we are viewing the actual programmed code and can debug the messages. (the blue dot is the probe and the probe content are on the right). All the complexity has been hidden and simplified-which is what we want. Now we have a system that is in the same spirit as the hierarchy and class windows and very little boiler plate code. Additionally, "actors" can be launched dynamically and we can still debug them. The LabVIEW developer only needs to lay down a loop with an event structure and pop-up on the Dynamic Registration terminal to create or subscribe to messages. When subscribing, the events and the data types are propagated in the structure just like normal user events. We could even use the Dynamic Registration on the right side to send messages back to the producer or other subscribers. If the latter were the case, then the producer in the examples shown, could simply be a value wired to the right-hand side Dynamic Terminal of an event case (in the timeout case with 10ms wired) instead of the Generate User Event shown.

Unicode, as I outlined earlier, is the only thing in that list that needs to be prioritised. Comparing 2 VI's in LabVIEW becomes moot if they switch to XML (as I also outlined). .NET can go hang - it's not cross platform - and we can already pass NuLL pointers, it's just not a LabVIEW type.

Oh. that reminds me. I really should clean up this xcontrol (the toolbars). I've also got a Tab Control one too, if anyone is interested.

A decade is about how long things need to percolate through the learning institutions to reach a critical mass of employees skilled in it. Relatively speaking - yes, it is "whiz-bang" when compared to Javascript. C++ et. al. Even Rust is 10 years old. C# is 20 We really haven't moved on much from about 30-40 years ago when there was truly spectacular explosion of ground breaking invention and innovation in software and hardware by some very special people...and one of those was LabVIEW. We've tweaked, revised and added spokes to the existing wheels on the back of huge leaps forwards in hardware technology that has hidden the industry's mediocrity.

You don't need a Ph D thesis. Some people thought they could do <INSERT PROJECT HERE> better with the latest whiz-bang stuff and convinced management they could do it. I've seen it a hundred times.

Not really general purpose (yet?) but you mentioned IoT so Node-Red is worth looking at for the not-too-distant future.

Considering the distribution issues with Linux variants - and often within the same variant - where even things compiled on a different machine often won't work unless everything is "just-so"; that was at best a pipe dream. The main reason I stopped supporting Linux for ECL was for this very reason. The only safe way to build executables is on the target Linux variant - preferably on the same machine - and for that you would need the full LabVIEW. It's one of the main reasons why interpreted languages are so prevalent on Linux platforms (PHP, Python, Javascript etc).

NXG had an inherent fatal flaw. It wasn't (and would never be) cross platform. That was exacerbated by the slow progress of development to the point that NI lost the T&M market to Python. It was a good decision, rarely seen by large multinationals. The good news is that they figured out how to represent VI's as XML properly and convert the VI format to it. We have already seen that format creeping into LabVIEW in the form of projects and libraries but the VI's themselves remained propriety. Porting the ability to represent VI's in XML would be a huge improvement to LabVIEW enabling source control tools to work properly-the bane of LabVIEW for over a decade. The other much needed LabVIEW improvement is internationalisation. We have had UTF8 for a long time but have been unable to display it. Instead, we had a *hack* that never worked right and never would with the resources allocated to NXG. It's been fraught to try and display it and other means were found. If the lessons learnt from NXG means we can display UTF8, that would be another huge improvement to LabVIEW and, I think, easier than UTF16/32 without impacting current string manipulation. I'm ambivalent about the IDE. It works fine enough for me to develop but it is a poor user interface for applications. I got around this user interface problem a long time ago with Websockets so, although a bit more effort, it's not a big issue anymore. I hated the restrictive framing of NXG and it seemed to promote huge monolithic diagrams with the zoom facility. The standard LabVIEW IDE encouraged me to make small, encapsulated code modules and I could see many parts of the architecture at once when debugging. If shelving NXG means the first two issues get addressed by either more effort or porting; those alone would mean, IMO, LabVIEW has a future - a bright future. It would once again be a cross-platform equivalent to all the other text languages with all the advantages *over* the other languages that it originally had.

Just welcoming an old friend to the forum

Well. Aren't we a ray of sunshine nowadays

AQ leaves, NXG gets shelved. Insert your rumour-mongering and conspiracy theories here

Yes. Linux hates spaces

You have obviously never done Agile Development proper then since it is an iterative process which starts with the design step just after requirements acquisition. It's not a fear of failure, it is a fast-track route to failure which usually ends up with the software growing like a furry mold. But anyway. It's your baby. You know best. Good luck :)

Uhuh. Seat-of-your pants design; the fastest way to project failure.

This is the standard way to do service discovery. My "Dispatcher" implementation had a "broker" that ran on the local machine to act as a gateway to services that registered with it on that machine. External (or local) clients would then contact it to discover services and it would hand off comms to the service for direct communication. It behaved as a router rather than the usual broker and meant it didn't become a bottleneck for high speed transfers. Your framework would be a good match for the above implementation since it already has all the publish, subscribe and routing features, IIRC.

That's fine. I just don't like to distribute modified software that I produce where the licencing isn't explicit - which is why I asked you for one (thinking you had produced it as the original author).

OK. I've deleted the backport since the licence is indeterminate. I thought it was a library you had created.

Backported to LV2009. what's the licencing for this? Edit. Removed software due to indeterminate licencing.

The major use case for UDP I would have is for COAPS (which, incidentally, has service discovery rather than node discovery). Most node discovery methods require a known entry point (gateway, router, default port etc) and it's hard to get away from that that in a reliable way across numerous network architectures.

Very hard to do but can be done-non trivial. You will obviously have to talk to your client and find out exactly what they mean - get one of the USB sticks they use . Maybe you'll be lucky and they just mean using the LabVIEW application as the windows shell, which I do on production-line machines.

It's a compromise between convenience and security and partially solves the "trust" issue by having really, really trustworthy organisations There have been other alternatives proposed but the "trust" issue has never really been solved adequately, to date. I trust me so my certificates are great (for me). The problem with that is then distribution. SSH. which is arguably the progenitor of modern TLS, got a lot of things very right. We haven't really moved on from that model except to make a whole new business sector for the key management.

I don't think there is anything off-the-shelf, to my knowledge - Bluetooth has it's own encryption scheme. I think you are looking at using some existing TLS client/server implementation and replacing the underlying Socket connection with a Bluetooth connection. Edit: Thinking a little more. there may be another way. the caveat would be it would only work for RSA certs in this scenario, There is an example of RSA Encrytion/Decryption. You could load an x509 cert, extract the keys and use the encryption functions to encrypt the bluetooth data. This wouldn't handle the authentication but it's some of the way there. It might be possible to check the authenticity separately from the encryption but I'm not sure at the moment.

You can't outsource security If you understand that all TLS communications are interceptable by governments because of CA's, then you might also be reticent when dealing with some governments.

Congratulations. It will go great and it's a fantastic area to grow into. You won't regret it but i very much doubt you will be back at NI - it'd be a step backwards.