About

The Name

As described by german wikipedia Utgard is the outland in norsk mythology. Beyond Midgard (world of humans) and Asgard (world the gods) Utgard is the world of "giants" and "trolls" ... which sounds like DCOM to me

The Mission

The mission of this project is to create an independent OPC library for Java. The main purpose of this library is to create OPC connectivity for the AtlantisProject, but since the target is to create an independent library it may also be used for creating any other OPC application.

Currently the project consists of two libraries:

openscada-opc-dcom: The direct DCOM Wrapper providing plain OPC DA functionality in Java
openscada-opc-lib: A helper library, simplyfing the complexity of the OPC interface from openscada-opc-dcom

100% Open Source

The whole project is available under an open source license including the required 3rd party libraries. Project Utgrad itself is licensed under the GPL (unless noticed otherwise).

100% pure Java

Project Utgard requires not more than an up to date Java environment (Java 1.5.x+). No native code, no JNI libraries or other DLLs/shared libraries are required. This makes it a 100% pure Java project.

So it is possible to connect from your application running on Linux/Solaris/Mac OS directly to an OPC server running on Windows.

Due to the fact that currently only the OPC DA client side is implemented you will of course need some OPC server. Although some solutions for Unix/Linux/... exist you will mostly find Windows based OPC servers. So up to now project Utgard cannot help you running OPC servers on non-windows operating systems.

What Utgard can do for you

Provide you with OPC Client Mappings in pure Java
Help you create OPC Client Applications in pure Java

What Utgard cannot do

Port existing OPC Servers or Clients to Java/any other OS
Create OPC servers in Java (planned but currently not)

Plan

Short Term

Implement Async IO 2.0 Interfaces (done in 0.1.5)

Mid Term

Implement OPC DA 3.0 Interfaces

Long Term

Implement Server Side of OPC DA
Implement other OPC Interfaces (AE, ...)

Additional Information

Some help about J-InteropMappings