[Bacnet4linux-developer] RE: Stuff I've been working on

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

Hi Rod,

> Read and respond to this message at: 
> https://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=3010049
> By: thenbomr

I'm posting this to the developer list so that other developers may see it.

> Okay, I now have functional code that reads and writes XML formated data for
> initialization of the BACnet database. This code uses the open source package
> 'expat' for parsing the XML data file.

Great!

> Also, I now have functional code that exports the BACnet database as a virtual
> filesystem, so any application that can open and read files on a linux filesystem
> can access the data in real-time. This functionality relies upon the open source
> package 'fuse', to provide the 'file system in userspace'. While this method
> of exporting data is fairly nice in terms of simplicity for the 'client' application,
> it is a major CPU hog if you want to use it to continuously poll for new data.

Great feature!  So it might need to reside on a standalone server...

> In response to that shortcoming, I also have developed code that exports the
> data using IPC message queues. A message is stuffed into the queue on each COV
> monitor received. This allows a client application to block pending receipt
> of new data, and turns out to be very efficient. A simple client application
> demonstrates all of the code required to hook up to the BACnet stack. This seems
> to address the wishes of one post in the 'feature-request' facility of
> sourceforge.

Great!

> All of the code I've written is based on the 0.3.6 release, and I've modified
> the Makefile in ways that assume the user has the expat and fuse libraries installed.
> I really don't know how this assumption squares with the philosophy of the package,
> so I haven't uploaded anything to the CVS repository yet. If I was any good
> at writing Makefiles, I'd probably try to put in some kind of conditional building
> to either use the external library functionality, or not. I'm thinking maybe
> this should be a branch point in the evolution of the package, but I don't really
> know how that works, either.

Regarding the makefile: since this project is getting more and more 
dependencies, perhaps now it is time to start using autoconf/automake. 
It has the features that you are looking for.
http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/

Regarding merging:  we can try it.

Regarding a branch or new project:  I guess we need to see after we try 
to merge.  Quite a bit of the BACnet code will be common for most of the 
projects, but some will be quite different.  If you want to create a new 
project for what you are doing, you can do that too, and we can copy the 
stuff that we want from that code set into the main project.  I have 
been working on trying to make the code into a library of sorts, and 
creating many little utilities using the library.

Let me know what you want to do and I can guide you through it.

Regarding philosophy: don't get me started on philosophy!

I am looking forward to seeing this new stuff working!

Best Regards,

Steve
-- 
http://www.kargs.net/