Anybody out there know the status of LuaVIEW?

[Mark Smith]

I did some development that used the LuaVIEW toolkit for my previous employer. For the particular application we had, a scriptable executable was a perfect fit and the LuaVIEW interface was very valuable. Now, the guys at the old place have a new application that would also benefit from LuaVIEW but they've been unable to get any attention from the LuaVIEW owners. Also, the last release of LuaVIEW was for LabVIEW 2009. So, it appears that future development and support may be dead. If anyone knows any different, please chime in!

I'm just hoping someone with knowledge of the situation will see this and provide some insight.

Thanks!

Mark

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Yes I do happen to know about LuaVIEW and its future. We haven't yet defined an exact timeframe of when and what things will happen, but expect LuaVIEW to be maintained and even improved in the future. A few things in the pipeline though no promises they will all be released:

- Fix some minor errors in newer LabVIEW versions with the unit tests

- Make the LuaVIEW core a shared library instead of a CIN

- Provide direct VISA and .Net interfaces in LuaVIEW from a script

- Make it's distribution VIPM compatible

- Get it Lua 5.1 compatible

- Add additional targets (x86 Mac, x64 Mac, x64 Windows, possibly cRIO VxWorks)

[Mark Smith]

Rolf,

I was hoping you would respond! Thanks for the information. I'm really happy to hear that LuaVIEW will be maintained and upgraded since it provides a unique capability that has really worked well. Knowing this, I would not hesitate to use the toolkit for future development.

Thanks!

Mark

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On a sidenote on this.

I just noticed that the luaview mailinglist at luaforge was shutdown as part of the downsizing of that site to a mostly static project directory. Do any people here have recommendations for a mailinglist provider, that we could use for a replacement?

Until we have something else in place as a public mailing list the email addresses luaview-info(at)citengineering.com and luaview-bug(at)citeengineering.com can serve as an intermediate solution, but I would prefer to have a public accessible mailing list for the longer run. Running our own forum solution is unfortunately a to heavy-weight solution for such a project .

[TimVargo]

Any news on how the LuaVIEW refresh is going? Still very quite at its own website.

[viSci]

Just like to chime in here to give my support to any future LuaVIEW development. I have used the toolkit several times in the past 5 years and had very good results.

One thing that I would like to suggest is to make it easier to purchase the toolkit. I know that CIT has been very generous in making the toolkit and LV source code available for

everyone, with payment based on an honor system. At my previous employer, which was a large biomedical company and my current employer, NASA, I requested and received approval

to purchase the toolkit. In both cases, the funds were allocated but it went into a purchasing black hole because the funds needed to be converted to a foreign currency and there was no way to use a credit card to complete the purchase. Perhaps also, a middle tier version of LuaVIEW could be offered in the $100-$200 range. A lot of work went into the LuaVIEW toolkit that justifies the original cost ($1000?) but I think CIT is missing the sweet spot that would open it up to more applications and get the buzz out.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Thanks for all the feedback here. We certainly are listening to this and are considering the remarks seriously.

I'm currently busy getting the LuaVIEW toolkit ready for a new release but the way LuaVIEW has interfaced to Lua, has caused some serious headache in getting it ported to Lua 5.1 (and Lua 5.2 will probably have a few more hurdles, especially on the script side as some differences between Lua 5.1 and 5.2 are subtle but could have rather far reaching effects for certain things).

For those interested to get LuaVIEW working with the newest LabVIEW releases I posted a minor update version 1.2.2 to the website. It fixes the unit test crash for LabVIEW versions >= 2009 (which is really a crash in a LabVIEW node for the Motion Resource), and also has two minor errors fixed in the datalogging framework for those using it. No other changes have been made to it.

We are planning to have a short beta program for LuaVIEW 2.0 on Windows and Linux within about 4 weeks and release the Toolkit officially for all platforms before NI Week. Interested people can send me a PM on this forum to apply for the Beta Test.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Hello to everybody being interested in LuaVIEW.

I’m in the final stages of testing and finalizing a package for the Beta of LuaVIEW 2.0B1.

This new release has a number of changes to the previous release but efforts have been made to keep it as compatible as possible to the last LuaVIEW release.

Following characteristics are valid for this release:

• LabVIEW 7.1 or newer
  
• Uses Lua 5.1.5 as Lua engine (LuaVIEW 1.2 used Lua 5.0.3)
  
• The core library has been changed into a DLL/shared library
  
• Supports LabVIEW for Linux x86, Windows x86 and x64
  
• Distributed as OpenG package, can be installed with the OpenG package installer or with VIPM
  

This Beta is time limited and will stop working after the end of 2012.

If no serious problems are found during the Beta test, the 2.0 release version is expected to be released around end of August.

The release version will include runtime support for LabVIEW for Mac OS X and NI realtime systems (cRIO and Pharlap ETS).

It will also include a binary module to access NI-VISA directly from within a Lua script for at least Windows.

To receive a download link to the Beta package please send me a pm and specify which LabVIEW version and OS you plan to use with this Beta.

Sincerely

[viSci]

Great news! Thanks for all the hard work. LUA on the cRIO? Interesting possibilities...

[Ale914]

Hello all, any news about a new release for LuaVIEW?

[TimVargo]

When Rolf released 2.0.0beta-7 on 8-May-2014, this was the single line comprising the release notes:

"extended the time the library will be allowed to run as beta to end of August 2014"

Offline, Rolf told me that much internal testing was scheduled.  I hope we will see a FINAL release before end of August; or at lease a beta-8, because it is a MAJOR headache for me if this breaks.

[Ale914]

Hi Tim thanks for reply.

I hope to see a new release soon too.

I haven't heard nothing about the beta program, but i suppose to be in late now to partecipate.

[21347]

Sorry for reviving (again) an old thread - but, is LuaView for x64 Windows already available somewhere?

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Sorry for reviving (again) an old thread - but, is LuaView for x64 Windows already available somewhere?

 

It's not yet released. Initially we had planned to add runtime support for NI realtime targets to LuaVIEW. This seemed a fairly straight forward exercise but turned out to be a major effort, especially with the recent addition of two different NI Linux realtime targets. It's in the works and we hope to get it ready for a release at the end of this year.

[viSci]

Hey Rolf - Any word on the release of LuaVIEW 2.0?  Maybe you could throw a small morsel out to your small but devoted Lua fan club