Draft announcement

Bob, Matej, please find a suggested draft announcement below. Let's review in the Wednesday telecon.

Greg


pvAccess Specification, 2nd Public Working Draft and request for comments
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Colleagues,

The EPICS V4 Working Group would like to invite you to review the 2nd Public Working Draft of the 
pvAccess protocol specification. 

PvAccess is a high-performance network communication protocol for signal monitoring and 
scientific data services interconnect. It is designed to support the structured data types 
of the EPICS V4 "shared memory" data exchange system called pvData, for optimized 
interoperability of control system endpoints. Primary features include unsigned integer support,
channel arguments, and delta encoding.  It is a successor of EPICS Channel Access, and is the 
wire protocol at the heart of EPICS V4.

Please find the specification at: http://epics-pvdata.sourceforge.net/pvAccess_Protocol_Specification.html [1]

Java and C++ reference implementations of pvAccess are available [4]. Other implementations 
in these or other language bindings are welcome.

EPICS V4 is presently in BETA. Version 1.0.1 may be downloaded from [4]. 

References

[1] pvAccess Protocol Specification, http://epics-pvdata.sourceforge.net/pvAccess_Protocol_Specification.html
[2] The EPICS V4 homepage, http://epics-pvdata.sourceforge.net/
[3] Documentation page, http://epics-pvdata.sourceforge.net/literature.html
[4] EPICS V4 download site, http://sourceforge.net/projects/epics-pvdata/files/
[5] Source code, java http://epics-pvdata.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/epics-pvdata/pvAccessJava/, 
    C++ http://epics-pvdata.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/epics-pvdata/pvAccessCPP/ 
    NOTE: Due to continuing implementation development, at present the Hg tip for C++ should NOT be used. 
    See instead the tagged releases, eg 1.1-BETA. and the files on the download site [4].   
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