Bulldozer00's Blog

PrismTech‘s Angelo Corsaro is a passionate and tireless promoter of the OMG’s Data Distribution Service (DDS) distributed system communication middleware technology. (IMHO, the real power of DDS over other messaging services and messaging-based languages like Erlang (which I love) is the rich set of Quality of Service (QoS) settings it supports). In his terrific “The Present and Future of DDS” pitch, Angelo introduces the new, more streamlined,  C++ and Java DDS APIs.

The UML activity diagram below illustrates the steps for setting up and sending (receiving) topic samples over DDS: define a domain; create a domain participant; create a QoS configured, domain-resident publisher (or subscriber); create a QoS configured and type-safe topic; create a QoS configured, publisher-resident, and topic-specific dataWriter; and then go!

Concrete C++ implementations of the activity diagram, snipped from Angelo’s presentation, are presented below. Note the incorporation of overloaded insertion operators and class templates in the new API. Relatively short and sweet, no?

Even though the sample code shows non-blocking, synchronous send/receive usage, DDS, like any other communication service worth its salt, provides API support for blocked synchronous and asynchronous notification usage.

So, what are you waiting for? Skidaddle over to PrismTech’s OpenSplice DDS page, download the community edition libraries for your platform, and start experimenting!