Hi all, I am a member of the Apache PLC4X podling. There we are implementing drivers for communicating with industrial hardware. Now we had started with manually implemented Java drivers, but it has always been our goal to ship drivers in multiple languages.
As we are currently starting work on the C++ versions, it was time to work on some way to universally define these protocols and have the drivers in each supported language generated. As a first step I wrote DFDL schemas and tests using Apache Daffodil and this worked perfectly for defining the format of the messages being exchanged. Now I still had to model the protocol itself: Which message with what content is sent at which time? How does the information provided by users get in requests and out of responses? So I was looking for some way to specify a State machine in XML … I stumbled over SCXML And can you imagine my surprise when I noticed Apache has something for this in its toolbox? Right now I’m working on writing such a SCXML schema mixing together SCXML + DFDL + Custom extensions to achieve the goal of fully specifying these protocols. So far it’s looking good, but I would like to ask, if someone here (ideally with SCXML experience) would be interested in joining us and working on this. I know that the activity on the SCXML project seems to have been … well minimal. But still I think it’s a good option. Any opinions, suggestions, things I should consider? Chris
