[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       orocos-dev
Subject:    [Orocos-Dev] The road to RTT 2.0: towards a sustainable distributed
From:       Herman.Bruyninckx () mech ! kuleuven ! be (Herman Bruyninckx)
Date:       2009-02-21 11:35:07
Message-ID: alpine.DEB.2.00.0902211227480.32222 () roble
[Download RAW message or body]

On Fri, 20 Feb 2009, faconti at pal-robotics.com wrote:

[...]
> 5) 1-to-1 mapping to other robotic framework IS the key to get more
> people into Orocos and re-use software. On the other hand, I would
> suggest to learn from other projects and collaborate with them to create
> just ONE framework with takes the best of the middleware family (did does
> not means that it need to be big and complex... actually, I think the
> best solution is to keep it as much scalable as possible).
>
I want to come back to this particular remark... Since the conception of
Orocos, we had this 'design requirement' in mind, and in a prominent place
even. Our answer to this was and is to provide functionalities in small
chunks, with APIs and classes that really belong together without the
possibility to make the library smaller. This is a rather different
approach than most projects, who put too many couplings between classes and
concepts that could be separated, because they are too much driven by one
single application. I think this holds true for Willow Garage also: I have
never read any information from them that they want (parts of) their
software to be usable in machine tools, or satellites, or space robots...
Orocos _does_ have this ambition, and we are working towards it at the
expense of a lot of configuration options and many small libraries. (We are
not yet there, since I know we can decouple already quite some of the code
we have in smaller libraries...)
The long term vision in this context is to develop a toolchain that
supports the users/application builders in working with this "configuration
hell" in a decent way; this "long term vision" is becoming a "medium
term" vision, because it is the ambition of the BRICS project :-) Stay
tuned :-)

BTW, I am still looking for a full time developer to take care of that
toolchain support! If you are interested, available for four years, and
experienced in Eclipse and its Rich Client Platform (or motivated enough to
become an expert), please give me a call!!!! :-)

Herman

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]