[Bacnet4linux-developer] Re: bacnet4linux project work

[Steve K. <st...@ka...>]

Hi Ronald,

> in your last e-mail you told me that you are working on getting the 
> objects into structures. How many work is done for that until now?

I have not done much work getting the objects into structures.  I have 
mostly been getting the existing services working correctly with generic 
encode/decode functions and removing the hard-coding, trying to make the 
core functionaly very stable.

> Another point I would like to discuss is how the objects can be accessed 
> from other processes. The background is that we want to implement the 
> stack into a server device, which has quite a number of different 
> objects not only the device object the bacnet4linux stack currently has.
> Did you already thought about the interface and how the objects present 
> value can be updated from other processes? Maybe we can add an open 
> interface that it is application dependend if a database is used or any 
> other storage mechanism?
> Maybe you have any good idea for that.

Several of the developers have discussed ideas for the outside interface 
to bacnet4linux.

One idea was using it for shell scripting, which would allow scripting 
of tests over the BACnet network.  This would most likely be stdio and 
argv/argc kind of API stuff (command line).

Another idea for an API is a general library that someone can use to 
create their server device or their client device.

The other idea is that this stack runs and fills a data store (RAM, 
file, or database) and the data can be read from and certain properties 
written to that data store, using database, virtual filesystem, or 
webservices.  The BACnet committee recently proposed and sent to public 
review the BACnet WebServices portion of the standard (and we just got 
back a bunch of review comments to review at the meeting in Orlando). 
Maybe that is something that will be a good interface specification for 
this project.
ftp://ftp.bacnet.org/Add-135-2004c-PR1-draft.pdf

> I'm just working on implementing event notification, but this will 
> require also a more detailed object representation and some more object 
> states so your work to get all the objects into structures is highly 
> welcome. By the way I saw that there is also a feature request for that 
> event notification.

I hadn't seen that feature request yet.  Feature requests are a great 
way to drive development.  A developer sitting at their computer on a 
Saturday looks at the feature request list or bug report and says to 
himself or herself, "I can do it!" and signs up for it and does it.  You 
are welcome to sign up for the event notification feature.

I am currently working on the command line interface feature so that I 
can try some scripting, and so I can drive the partitioning of 
bacnet4linux into a library.

Best Regards,

Steve

P.S. I signed you up on the developer mailing list, and posted this to 
the developer mailing list so that the developers can see what is being 
discussed.  If that is a problem, you are welcome to unsubscribe and 
accept my apologies.
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