Schwabach, Germany – November 1, 2009. Unified Automation GmbH is the first vendor of SDKs for the new standard OPC Unified Architecture. The ANSI C and the C++ SDKs were the first on the marked and are the base for many OPC UA products today. Those SDKs speed up the development by providing common functionality in a flexible design surrounded by helper classes and functions. These services are well tested and offer faultless and compliant functionality. Thus the developer of the UA product can concentrate on the application that resides on a stable and robust high level code, which is handling all the OPC UA related communication tasks. Implementing the data provider interface becomes very simple, but on the information modeling side some more work is to do. The “address space”, the way a UA server shows its data to the outside world, must be designed, or better said “modeled”, including objects, types and references before implementation is started.
“The enhancement of our SDKs will make the difference on the toolkit market, implementing UA servers can not be made any simpler than that” said Jürgen Boxberger, Executive Director of Unified Automation GmbH “After designing your model, you just decide whether to generate ANSI C or C++ source code and just press the button.”
UaModeler
The new release of the SDKs will include a specialized tool, the UaModeler, which not only simplifies the modeling of information itself, this tool generates the source code required to implement the designed model. The generated code exactly fits into the related SDK. The UaModeler provides graphical design of address space, adding nodes and references and finally generates code by pressing a button, thus it not only speeds up the implementation, it also increases the software quality by producing well structured, error-free code. As implementation is reduced to “modeling and generating” even complex models can be “implemented” very quickly. This tool gives all the SDKs from Unified Automation the lead ahead on the OPC UA toolkit market.
The UaModeler shows hierarchical and graphical representation of the designed model. The graphical representation follows the OPC UA notation and syntax.
OPC UA SDK Features
Besides the new UaModeler the new releases of the SDKs now support additional UA Profiles. The ANSI C Server SDK is now available in an “Advanced” version adding new profiles to the “Embedded UA Server”:
- Standard UA Server
- DataAccess Server Facet
- Basic Event Subscription Server Facet
- Method Server Facet
Additionally supported features are “Historical Access” and “Alarms&Conditions”. These profiles give developers of ANSI C based UA Servers the possibility build functionally rich UA products on literally every platform and every operating system. The new release of the C++ based OPC UA Server SDK comes also with the UaModeler. In the “Professional” version this SDK supports:
- Standard UA Server
- DataAccess Server Facet
- Basic Event Subscription Server Facet
- ComplexType Server Facet
- Method Server Facet
- Node Management Server Facet
- Auditing Server Facet
- Client Redundancy Facet
Additional supported features are Historical Access, Programs and Alarms&Conditions. The development of high performance C++ UA Servers has no limitation in functionality and of course it is platform independent.
UaGateway
Due to the marked demand Unified Automation now offers a C++ based high performance wrapper/proxy to connect ‘classic’ OPC Data Access products. The new UaGateway can be used in both directions at the same time. The wrapper is a small UA Server (only DataAccess) that gets data from its internal COM DA2/DA3 client. The wrapper is needed when connecting new UA Clients to legacy, ‘classic’ OPC Server. The UaGateway additionally supports the opposite direction being a proxy. The proxy consists of a COM based DA2/DA3 server that gets its data from its internal UA client. The proxy is needed when connecting legacy, ‘classic’ OPC Clients to new OPC UA Server(s). However, many other solutions can be obtained using the UaGateway:
- connecting UA Client to COM/ DCOM Server(s)
- connecting COM/DCOM Client to UA Server(s)
- tunneling COM/DCOM through secure UA connection
- data concentration on a single node; single point of access
- firewall-friendly, secure data access to ‘classic’ OPC
The new UaGateway is fully configurable through OPC UA Methods. It will comply with the OPC DI Specification (Device Integration) and will offer standardized diagnosis and configuration capabilities.
Technology Preview is out now, the new releases will be available in Q1/2010.
