Meeting 2011-10-06: Frameworks

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

Meeting Logistics

• Location: Conference room 1S13, NI Headquarters (11500 N Mopac Expressway, Austin TX, 78759)
  
• Date: Thursday, October 6, 2011
• Time: 6:00 PM
• Duration: ~ 2 hours
• Format: 1 hour presentations
  
  

Sixclear will sponsor food for this meeting. We'll need a head count, so please register here. We will need National Instruments members to register as well.

Meeting Description
LAF members will present on two frameworks

Presentations

• "LabVIEW Sessions and The Death of LV2 Style Globals"
  • Presenter:  Norm Kirchner
    
  • Est. Duration: 45 mintues
  • Topic: Framework
  • Description: Call them what you will, Action Engines, Functional Global Variables, LabVIEW 2 Style Globals, etc etc, but no matter what you call them, I call them spike strips on the road to Scalability. Each of these designs rely on the usage of unitialized shift registers (USR) which have very nasty teeth and have the ability to bite you when you try to scale a particular application beyond it's original scope. Alternative and parallel technologies that are available and easy to use, can give you the same desired functionality, while providing a scalable road the the future. I'll demonstrate some of the how's and show why.
  • Homework: Make a timer in LabVIEW with your desired technology and come prepared to defend it.
  • Norm referenced http://labviewjournal.com, and specifically, this blog post about FGVs/AEs/LV2-globals.  http://labviewjournal.com/2011/08/race-conditions-and-functional-global-variables-in-labview/
  • ESF has a discussion home here https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-12813 but the most recent version is now attached to this post (see below for ESF 2.2.1.13

• "Actor Framework"
  • Presenter:  AristosQueue and AllenS
    
  • Est. Duration: 45 mintues
  • Topic: Introduction to a framework for building LV applications that have multiple top-level VIs (each perhaps controlling its own piece of hardware) needing to communicate with each other. Yes, bijillions of such frameworks exist. This one's design focuses on learnability as a primary feature and on maximizing code reuse as its secondary. Oh, and it means you never ever ever have to write a queued message hander ever again. Ever.
  • Homework: Review this presentation and come with questions. If you want to actually download the framework and play with it, go here.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Norm: please define "timer". Do you want "this is a method for reporting how long this function took"? Or do you want "after N milliseconds, trigger this other function"?

[Christian_L]

re Timer requirements: In order for this to be relevant/interesting I assume you want us to be able to run multiple timers simultaneously.

[NJKirchner]

Aristos:

Make it a countdown timer

Christian:

Its however you would like to make it. The ambiguity was intentional.

[Christian_L]

I'm concerned that too much ambuguity will lead us to compare apples to oranges. Different requirements will result in different 'optimal' designs. Also ambuguity in requirements is one of the leading causes of inefficient design and implementation with the customers that I work with.

[Darren]

I tried to register, and got the error:  "EMPLOYEE CANNOT REGISTER FOR SEMINARS OR TRADESHOWS ON PRODUCTION".

So for headcount purposes, you'll either want to (1) have someone fix the registration page to allow NI people to register, or (2) keep a separate headcount of NI attendees.

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

Darren,

Thanks for the heads up, I will look into it.

Fab

[David S.]

That's normal and expected, Darren. The way our event server works, NI employees can't register for external events (on the production server). Unfortunately, we (Fabiola ) will have to figure out a workaround.

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

NI employees will get an invitation from Rebecca Yeasley, please accept her invitation if you are planning to attend the meeting.

Thanks,

Fab

[AristosQueue (NI)]

For anyone who has been looking at the Actor Framework in the lead up to the meeting, a new version of AF was posted yesterday. The link above is still good to get to the new version.