Solutions

OPC Unified Architecture goes beyond the limitations of existing OPC interfaces and provides solutions for numerous new use cases. The functionality and enhancements of OPC UA offer various possibilities for implementing and using solutions on different platforms.

For standard use cases Unified Automation developed standard products using the advantages of OPC UA. These products can be used out of the box and can be combined with other systems supporting OPC UA or legacy OPC standards.

To cover special use cases, Unified Automation provides platform independent Software Development Kits based on the portable OPC UA ANSI C communication stack. All SDKs can be ordered with platform layers for Windows, Windows CE or Linux. Additional platform layers are available on request.

Deliverables and OPC UA SDKs

To avoid confusion on deliverables, toolkits, SDKs and examples the following table gives an overview on deliverables. The OPC Foundation provides OPC UA Stack implementation on GIT-Hub in a dual license model (RCL for members, and GPLv2 for non-members). However, Unified Automation's commercial SDKs (for everybody) adding convenience functions, general functionality and tool support to the pure OPC Stack. For rapid development and professional support you will need a commercial SDK/Toolkit.

Language Platform UA Stack PubSub Stack UA SDK/Toolkit UA Examples
High Perf C99 all
ANSI C all x/
C++ all*
.NET C# .NET Framework
.NET C# .NET Core, .NET6/8 / / / /
Java Java SE 6,7,8 or 11 /
Delphi Windows 32/64 x

* all platforms that (at least) support C++ compiler (multi-tasking/multi-threading)
available at Unified Automation GmbH (commercial license)
available at the OPC Foundation (RCL for members, GPLv2 for non-members)
x not or not anymore available

OPC Foundation

The OPC Foundation provides deliverables for its member companies. These originally have included three OPC UA Stacks (.NET, ANSI C and Java). The OPC Foundation was the official manager of the code base for all the three UA Stacks. The .NET UA Stack was developed by the OPC Foundation, the Java UA Stack was developed by Prosys, and today’s mostly used ANSI C UA Stack was developed by ascolab. In addition the OPC Foundation provides a sample implementation of an UA Server and Client in .NET (C#). This sample code is misleadingly called "reference implementation", and was taken as the base for many other .NET SDKs including the .NET Standard implementation on Gib-Hub.

NOTE: Most of he OPC Foundation provided delivrables were withdrawn form the public Git-Hub including the “pure” Java UA Stack and the AnsiC-Stack, hence not maintained anymore by OPC Foundation. A real Java SDK is available from Prosys and real AnisC SDK is available from Unified Automation GmbH.

 

Unified Automation GmbH

Unified Automation offers complete OPC UA SDK/Toolkits (not only "pure" UA Stacks) to members and non-members under commercial license model. We fully concentrate on platform independent development and in addition to (a forked an fully maintained version of) the OPC UA Stack our commercial SDKs come with additional features and functionality, examples and professional support to simplify professional development of OPC UA enabled applications. Besides running on literally all platforms we provide different platform adoption layers for x86, ARM, PPC, Atom, etc. and we support several operating systems like Linux, Windows CE, Solaris, QNX, Euros, vxWorks, etc.

  • Cross Platform Development—base framework
  • Embedded Device Development—small footprint
  • Enterprise Application—rich information model
  • Legacy Support—upgrade to state of the art technology
  • Demonstration and Education—evaluation usage