TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY BOARD MEETING

Date: 4/12/2023

Meeting Attendance:

Name Title Attended
Chris Gill Professor, Computer Science & Engineering, Washington University St. Louis ✓
David (DJ) James Tech Director for Software, DRS Land Systems ✓
Andrew Job Founder and CEO, Plotlogic X
Adam Mitz OpenDDS Product Lead and Distinguished Engineer,   Object Computing ✓
Matt Mueller Enterprise Operations Branch Head, United States Navy X
Marc Neeley VP of Architecture, Object Computing X
Jason Schindler 2GM Managing Director, Object Computing ✓
Johnny Willemsen CTO, Remedy IT ✓
Justin Wilson Principal Software Engineer, Object Computing ✓
Jen Wiese OpenDDS Community Engagement Manager, Object Computing ✓

The Meeting Was Led By: Justin Wilson

Agenda

  • Transition to Unity Foundation
  • Future of the TAB
  • Priorities
  • Previous Release: OpenDDS 3.24
  • Next Release: OpenDDS 3.25
  • OpenDDS 4

Transition to Unity Foundation

  • https://opendds.org/news/2023/03/17/transition-to-unity.html
  • The Unity Foundation wants to use software and technology to help underserved communities
  • Part of their scope is incubating open source software like OpenDDS
  • OCI is no longer managing open source software Foundations and the day-to-day maintenance of OpenDDS
  • Unity Foundation is a not-for-profit which clarifies OpenDDS Foundation’s not-for-profit status => higher service tier at GitHub
  • OpenDDS core team members Justin Wilson and Fred Hornsey joined Unity Foundation in February
  • Practically, what does this mean?
    • 1 engineer (Fred) dedicated to the maintenance, development, and release of OpenDDS
    • ~.5 engineer (Justin) dedicated to OpenDDS Foundation business and occasional development
    • OpenDDS Foundation will continue to engage in support contracts, training, consulting, and open-source development
    • OpenDDS Foundation will not develop proprietary code
    • Same ambitions, different timeframe
  • Object Computing’s Role
    • Will have 1+ members on the Technology Advisory Board as well as the Board of Directors
    • OpenDDS Contributor
    • OpenDDS Foundation Ambassador Sponsor
    • Projects that include OpenDDS
      • For internal stakeholders or for clients
      • Resulting code may be open source or proprietary

Future of the TAB

  • The OpenDDS Foundation Technical Advisory Board will continue to act as the voice of the user community regarding development
  • The OpenDDS Foundation will be seeking out additional members to serve on the TAB
    • The OpenDDS Foundation requests that current members include project managers, architects, and developers in future TAB meetings

Schedule for future TAB meetings

  • From a scheduling perspective, the OpenDDS Foundation is attempting to
    • Publish a release of OpenDDS in the first or second week of each quarter
    • Have a TAB meeting the week after the release
    • The TAB meeting will review the most recent release and discuss items for the next release
    • During the non-release months, the team will focus on articles, webinars, and other community engagement initiatives

OpenDDS Foundation Priorities

  • Funded work
  • Increase the user base - make OpenDDS easier to use, support for container-based and cloud-based deployments, IoT scenarios, server-side deployments, monitoring, utilities, etc.
  • Increase the developer base - make OpenDDS easier to develop, modernize code base, architectural improvements, etc.
  • Maintainability - reduce the cost of maintenance and future development.

OpenDDS Releases

  • OpenDDS 3.24
    • April 2023
    • Core - bug fixes and performance improvements
    • Security
      • Participant can sign own permissions with single CA
      • Secure writers and readers in same participant couldn’t communicate
    • RtpsRelay - bug fixes and hardening
    • DynamicData/XTypes - bug fixes, improvements from testing
      • Added content filtering with dynamic data
    • DevGuide is now ReStructured Text in repository
  • OpenDDS 3.25: CMake
    • July 2023
    • Background
      • Users build OpenDDS using an optional configure script, MPC, and a build tool like make or Visual Studio
      • OpenDDS documentation steers users to MPC for their own projects
      • From demand, OpenDDS has some support for CMake for user projects
    • Objective
      • Configure and build OpenDDS using CMake
      • Complete support for using OpenDDS via CMake
      • CMake will become the default in OpenDDS 4.0 and MPC support will either be deprecated or dropped
  • OpenDDS 3.25: Runtime Configuration
    • Background
      • Parts of OpenDDS can be configured using command-line arguments
      • More parts can be configured using a configuration file
      • Even more parts can be configured programmatically via various APIs
      • Some parts can be reconfigured on the fly, e.g. the RtpsRelay
    • Objective
      • Add support for environment variables
      • Consolidate and simplify configuration
        • Everything can be configured via command-line, file, or environment variable
        • Will make OpenDDS application easier to deploy via containers
      • Support for multiple configuration files
      • Better support for dynamic reconfiguration
    • Methodology
      • Every configuration variable has a canonical name, e.g., OPENDDS_CORE_DCPS_CHUNKS
      • Process command-line options from left to right processing files as the come
      • Apply environment variables at the end
      • Command-line option to opt into the new behavior
      • Configuration key-value pairs stored in an “Internal DDS Topic”
      • Users can write configuration to the topic directly (or indirectly through existing APIs)
      • Components of OpenDDS that need dynamic reconfiguration will subscribe to the topic
  • OpenDDS 4
    • October 2023
    • Theme is removing things to enable future development
      • Upgrade compiler baseline to C++11/14
      • Remove JMS
      • Remove Excel plugin
      • Remove internal statistics collection
      • Remove monitor
      • Remove udp and multicast transports
      • Fold idl2jni into opendds_idl

What is “Internal DDS”?

  • Application of DDS concepts (Topic, DataWriter, DataReader, DataReaderListener) to the internals of OpenDDS to facilitate data sharing, modular design, and testing
  • A formal approach for reacting to changes in a decoupled way
  • Example: NetworkConfigMonitor
  • Internal: discovery, connectivity, transport
  • External: configuration, monitoring, statistics

Agenda for Next Meeting

  • Date: TBD in July 2023 (Evening)
  • Note: We are alternating mornings and afternoons (Central Time) to accommodate timezones for all TAB members
  • Topics: TBD

Q&A:

Dr. Gill: Summer Undergraduate project at Washington University (mirrors) - maybe add ROS…

Johnny: If OpenDDS Foundation is taking on Support, Training, etc, won’t that be another competitor to OCI and RemedyIT? - No

Johnny: Would be nice to have a heads up that a release is coming (2+ days notice) so people can prepare environments. Had some issues and testing takes quite a bit of time.

MINUTES ARCHIVE