OpenSCADA Development Blog

In the last few days step by step a new interface connector was added to the Atlantis project. This gives OpenSCADA a new object oriented communication interface beside the already implemented socket protocol. The integration builds already contain the ICE specific modules. There is still work to be done but ICE will be part of the soon to be released version 0.6.0. For details on ICE and the OpenSCADA ICE Connector read on …

The ICE framework from ZeroC (http://zeroc.com) can be compared to technologies like CORBA, DCOM or SOAP. Read this page for a more detailed introduction in the ICE framework.
Adding a ORB like communication interface to OpenSCADA was a plan from the beginning of the project. Due to the fact that DCOM is mostly Windows based and CORBA has some disadvantages with e.g. firewalls a plain client/server, session based socket protocol was implemented first. But since ICE has solutions for handling firewalls and broken connections it is easy to base the next connector on this framework.

The ICE interface also opens up OpenSCADA more easily to other programming environments like C++, Python, .NET and PHP. It is also planned to port the socket protocol of OpenSCADA to other languages. There already is some start of a C++ implementation. But ICE already contains alls this functionality. So once the implementation of this interface is considered more stable we definitely will seem some fun in C++ or C# or even PHP

Of course ICE is also available under an open source license (GPL) so it fits perfectly into OpenSCADA.