Release10

New & Noteworthy

It's better then ever! ;-) But if you like details, read on …

Overall

Based on Eclipse 3.8.1openSCADA is now based on Eclipse 3.8.1 and companion projects from the Juno release train
"1.0.0" for everyone

Every project that is part of the "1.0" release also is versioned as "1.0.0". This was different in the past where the release was 0.18.0 but some modules (Utgard) had 0.9.0 as version.

Well except for the "docdocdoc" project ... ;-)

APT repositoryThis time we also have a apt repository at "apt.openscada.org" which hosts some .deb files which can easily be installed into an 64bit Ubuntu 12.04 without much trouble. Other Ubuntu versions should be possible, but are untested.
Fork of j-interopWe forked j-interop for debugging purposes. The main reason was to have the source available easily for debugging. Next we ended up replacing Java Utils Logging with SLF4J. We liked it, so we kept it. Also this version of j-interop is OSGi-fied. We try to bring the changes back to j-interop.

Features

since Release 0.18

(star) brand new protocol (NGP)added new NGP Protocol
  • supports dynamically negotiated features
  • supports stream compression
  • supports TLS
  • multiple serialization formats possible (currently there are two: NGP and Java object serialization)
  • supports easier setting of timeouts (connection parameter timeout)
  • timeout handling is now somewhat more clever
    • the old NET/GMPP protocol also runs into a timeout if it isn't able to send/receive ping/pong in time, so it would close the connection even if still data is sent, this is something the new protocol avoids
  • the serialization itself is genereated via an EMF model, using Acceleo, so adding new fields is pretty easy

Support for proxying another
master server

To provide a hierarchy of supervisor stations, a master server is now able to proxy items from another server.

  • proxy DA items
  • proxy AE items
  • HD items are not proxied, there is a new HD server type: HD slave, which watches changes in the filesystem, so HD data can be easily replicated from a remote server, for instance via rsync
New AE features
  • added "fail value"
  • added "item description"
  • supply message with item description in some cases (list alarm, boolean alarm, ...)
  • flexible hierarchy, not limited to two levels (location, component) anymore
  • demoting of alarms, for instance if a device is in maintenance, every alarm will only show up as a Warning
  • flexible alarm configuration, acknowledge and severity is now separated
  • generating of events can now be suppressed (not recommended)
Modbus
  • modbus client (master) implementation (there will be some major changes in the future, configuration will be more like that for S7)
GUI improvements
(DAKARA) 
  • more widgets
  • integration of INFINITY chart
  • dynamic visibility in detail dialogs (dependend on script evaluation, for instance based on user roles, or piven properties)
  • boolean Alarms can now be changed via dialog
  • fixed some minor bugs
Configurator improvements
  • project is now defined via an "*oscm" file
  • complete configuration can now be aggregated in model, so there aren't any excel files anymore which are not in the model
  • excel file as input file is not possible anymore, only ODT

(star) Time Series Chart
(INFINITY project)

  • because there is no decent chart for displaying timeseries based on SWT, we had to implement one, ourselves
  • the chart itself is separated from any openSCADA specifics, so it is usable in a totally different context
  • of course there are some abstractions which make integration in any openSCADA context easier
  • openSCADA timeseries based on data items or hd items are configured via an EMF model
  • the chart can be updated in real time
  • supports multiple axis, multiple timeseries

  • integration with Draw2D, there is also already a widget in DAKARA to integrate charts in a DAKARA VI-View

  
  
  
Customizable alarm styles
  • openSCADA has a predefined style for alarms, which is now changable to a different style set, also in a client the style can be changed by the user

  

Improvements Admin Client
  • some minor usability tweaks 
    • double click opens connection
    • configuration import dialogs remembers last import file
    • connection tree has some additional nodes where connections are sorted by URI, protocol, ...
  • JFreeChart removed, replaced with our own INFINITY implementation
  • summary alarm explorer
  • connection statistics (status, send/received bytes)
New sample project

Documentation

Not really satisfied with the existing documentation tools, we build our own DocDocDoc which is of course better than everything else (wink)

Some features are:

  • automatic extraction of system properties from java code (via JDT)
  • automatical gathering of license information
  • bundles are documented within, these documentation snippets are then gathered to a large document
  • extensible
  • only renderer at the moment is HTML, but there will be more

The first (obviously not very complete) version is found here: http://download.openscada.org/documentation/R/1.0.0/html/system/