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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Connolly who wrote (6407)	9/27/1999 4:10:00 AM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

WIND Introduces VxDCOM This article discusses MSFT and WIND stuff being presented at this week's Embedded Systems Conference... Microsoft tailors WinCE for embedded systems techweb.com excerpt... Despite attempts to strengthen WinCE's real-time and distributed capabilities, Microsoft will have to fight for market share in niches such as industrial automation, control and instrumentation if Wind River Systems has its way. At ESC, Wind River took the wraps off VxDCOM, its implementation of COM/DCOM on the Tornado/VxWorks platform but optimized for embedded applications. Industrial control and automation market developers are wedded to the Windows/PC platform and its familiar programming interface, said John Fogelin, vice president of platform engineering at Wind River. "This is well and good in the systems that supervise the network of controllers in a factory," he said. "But on the factory floor, where you want controllers with as small a footprint as possible, developers were being forced to use much larger implementations based on Windows or Windows NT because of the control it gave them over data they received from the factory floor." A control application written under the Win32 API could communicate directly with a spreadsheet application via DCOM, dumping factory-floor data directly into a spreadsheet such as Excel for immediate analysis. While WinCE allowed industrial users to use an OS that was much smaller than Windows NT, the only way it could communicate with the supervising computers was via Intrinsyc's deviceCOM. "Because DCOM is the standard object-handling model on the desktop PC, it integrates with all ActiveX objects and all languages, including Visual C++, Visual Basic and Microsoft Java," Fogelin said. "As a result, an application written in any of these languages can access remote VxDCOM objects without special additional programming effort." VxDCOM allows industrial devices to communicate without any knowledge of device implementation. 'Universal marshalling' VxDCOM obeys the binary COM contract and the DCOM wire protocol with a "universal marshalling" capability that ensures compatibility when transmitting data types to remote systems. An NT host need not be modified in order to communicate with a VxWorks target server via VxDCOM. VxDCOM supports OPC (OLE for process control) as the framework for distributed control. Because VxDCOM includes all data access, alarms, events and common elements in the custom interface kit for DCOM, control programs for devices on the factory floor need not be written in C or machine language; Visual Basic, C++ or any language that can produce ActiveX components will suffice.