Keep It Standard Stupid!

[swatts]

Evening All.

If you went to Austin for the CLA summit I trust you had fun and returned home safe, sound and brainy.

If you picked up the tone of my previous blog posts correctly you'll appreciate that I don't really like acronyms. I apologise for subverting one of the better ones for the title!

One of the keys to simplicity in my opinion is to standardise, by this I mean employing techniques that are accepted as the norm. The theory behind this is pretty well researched.

In the Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman talks about

New situations become more manageable when existing pattern knowledge can be applied to understanding how things work. Consistency is the key to helping users recognize and apply patterns.

It saves a lot of extra brain-work and the skills are more transferable.

The additional benefits - If there is a vibrant user-base you know that it will be supported, added to and will have an active eco-system. Within LabVIEW you know it's base purpose will be worked on and improved. If you are employing some peculiar edge-case you are risking no improvement and quite possibly deprecation.

Some Examples

Databases for Storing Data

There's a load of ways to store your results, but databases are the only one that's worth mastering. There's a great deal of support online and MySQL and SQLite have thriving communities with huge amounts of tools and help available. Type MySQL into Google and you'll get over 100 million hits, I think that's enough material for anyone.

SQL for Talking to Databases

It's all very well using a LabVIEW toolkit to plug data directly from cluster into a table, but if you want a skill you can build on have a bash at SQL. It will end up as one of the most useful tools in your toolkit. Again a search on Youtube for SQL Tutorial resulted in over 500k hits.

UDP for Communications

Inter-system communications is a rich area for toolkits, add on technologies, APIs etc etc. The biggest successes I have had are home-grown low-level protocols just chatting out of UDP (either broadcast, direct or a combination of both). It's robust, simple, low level and there are tools out there to sniff it. People get obsessed with security, but all of our systems are on secure networks and security can get added if you need it. Where-as it can make debugging and programming difficult when you don't. Google 58 Million hits.

TCP for Bulk Transfers of Data

One of the issues with UDP is that it is so basic, there's no handshaking and it can't handle large lumps of data. If you need this capability then you can use the TCP API. It's only marginally more difficult to use and we use UDP for inter-system messaging and TCP for transferring data.

OPC for Scada

In Industry pretty much everyone uses OPC for parking centralised data in distributed systems, it will be beneficial for us just to do the same. A write tag to OPC vi is not such a difficult abstraction to get my head around that I need to use a Network Shared Variable. 33 million hits on Google for OPC.

ODF for Documents

One day I'll find time to finish my ODF toolkit and when I have done that we should use ODF for all documents, spreadsheets and reporting.

Event Structures for Events

Events are really handy for passing data about, they have a great attribute in that they are strongly typed and yet still I have reservations (Chris Roebuck gives an extremely sound argument for the counter view and writes some lovely code based on this). For me Event Structures are for events, any other use is against the standard and therefore an additional burden.

Queues for Queuing

Back in the days of yore (BQ - Before Queues) and before Mr Mercer provided the wonderful queue API in LabVIEW we rolled our own. As we know we're now in the AQ period of history.

That was circa 2000 and we still have something similar in todays code.

This is how much we love Queues!

Globals for Global Data

As I've discussed many times Global data need's viewing with suspicion, however if you need it you'll find the most efficient and easy to understand method is just to use a global.

Feedback Nodes for Local Permanent Data Storage

I know they're a bit peculiar, named wrong and have a weird interface!

but compared to the previous technique of using shift registers in a while-loop (i.e. an accidental side-effect) I think it has a much clearer purpose.

So my friends the take out from this article is that it is better to use some technique or tool that is standard and popular even if it is not the "best".

Lots of Love

Steve