Community-led development "The Apache Way"
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## Description: The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API. ## Issues: None ## Membership Data: Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (a year ago) There are currently 16 committers and 10 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is 8:5. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Lukas Ott on 2020-03-17. - Stefano Bossi was invited as new Committer on 2020-09-04. ## Project Activity: Version 0.7.0 was released on 2020-05-25 and we are working hard on making the 0.8.0 ready for release. In the past few weeks we did quite a number of bug reports and feature requests which have mostly been addressed. Also in the last few weeks a lot of new folks have been showing up, one was already invited to become a committer and some which will probably be invited pretty to join the community soon, if they continue the current level of activity. Especially the new PLC4PY initiative, where a group of community members and new folks have started working on porting PLC4J to Python is currently seeding more activity in the community. Another notable initiative is one to bring support for CAN bus communication as well also the efforts to port PLC4J to C. ApacheCon@Home will be having 3 talks where PLC4X is a main topic or a sub-topic and we are looking forward to it. ## Community Health: - dev@plc4x.apache.org had a 11% decrease in traffic in the past quarter (554 emails compared to 619) - issues@plc4x.apache.org had a 71% increase in traffic in the past quarter (250 emails compared to 146) - 39 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (129% increase) - 26 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (85% increase) - 273 commits in the past quarter (-20% decrease) - 13 code contributors in the past quarter (-7% decrease) - 21 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (-38% decrease) - 16 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (-52% decrease) - 225 Github Stars (up by 24) - 373 @ApachePLC4X Twitter account followers (up by 18)
## Description: The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API. ## Issues: None ## Membership Data: Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (a year ago) There are currently 16 committers and 10 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is 8:5. Community changes, past quarter: - Lukas Ott was added to the PMC on 2020-03-17 - Etienne Robinet was added as committer on 2020-03-28 - Otto Fowler was added as committer on 2020-04-30 ## Project Activity: - 0.7.0 was released on 2020-05-25 This quarter was pretty much dominated by us porting the last drivers to the new generated drivers system. Also were we working hard on preparing things for the 0.7.0 release which was our first release of the new generation of drivers. Also did Chris start on his EU research funded project on porting PLC4X to the C language with a final goal of running PLC4X drivers on Apache MyNewt. This new initiative brought to the table a number of new contributors. Otto who was invited to join the project was one of these. In general the number of conference talks dropped to 0 in this period due to COVID-19, but quite a number of online meetups have been talked about: - "Hands On": Reading Siemens S7 with PLC4X" was in German on 2020-04-01, and english was 2020-04-09 - (Industrial) IoT with Open Source - an Overview on "Monthly Industry 4.0 and IoT Meetup Stuttgart" was 2020-04-21 - IoTSydney: 2020-04-30 We’re continuing to make good progress on most topics. As it is one of the projects major barriers, that we usually aren’t allowed to officially mention which companies are using PLC4X, we decided to add a page of “adopters” to our website, where companies can get themselves listed. We decided that the process should generally work via GitHub pull requests as this way we would have the responsibility on file. https://plc4x.apache.org/users/adopters.html So far we haven’t had any requests to adding other companies. ## Community Health: The community is in great shape and due to the increased diversity of the codebase we have seen new folks join in on discussions or even joining the project. We are hopeful that this trend will continue. It also seems that in the past few weeks the inter-project cooperation has increased. Here I’d especially like to point out the Apache StreamPipes and the Apache IoTDB project. Stats may be different, as at the time of creating the report the report tool wasn't working so I had to compile them myself - dev@plc4x.apache.org had a 56% increase in traffic in the past quarter (655 emails compared to 419) - 15 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (-42% decrease) - 13 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (-35% decrease) - 357 commits in the past quarter (-33% decrease) - 15 code contributors in the past quarter (-11% decrease) - 33 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (10% increase) - 33 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (17% increase) - 201 Github Stars (up by 29) - 355 @ApachePLC4X Twitter account followers (up by 50)
## Description: The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API. ## Issues: Currently nothing would require board attention ## Membership Data: Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (a year ago) There are currently 14 committers and 9 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 7:5. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Łukasz Dywicki on 2019-07-28. - Alvaro del Castillo was added as committer on 2020-01-29 - César García was added as committer on 2020-02-03 - Niklas Merz was added as committer on 2020-01-29 - Lukas Ott was added as committer on 2020-01-03 - Dominik Riemer was added as committer on 2020-02-04 ## Project Activity: - 0.6.0 was released on 2020-03-01 In December we had a 3 day code retreat, where a large portion of the core-team meet and worked on addressing some of the most important architectural challenges in preparation to porting all of our drivers to the new generated codebase. In general we have started to maintain and fix a lot of reported issues in the 0.6 branch which we now consider a LTS release branch. The version 0.7.0 is a huge refactoring as we completely rewrote the core of PLC4X and are currently deleting all existing drivers, replacing them with new version which we generate from our new code-generation tool. Still 1-2 drivers to port, but most of the others are already finished. We completely relaunched our website, giving it a way more appealing look and feel as we think the old website was preventing people from giving PLC4X a chance. We are currently in the process of preparing the ASF to become member of a list of 4-5 industry foundation in order to allow us to legally be able to provide some drivers and or mention them on our website and other public information material. We have had Meetups/Conference-Talks/Workshops: - PLC4X full day workshop: Building IoT (02-03-2020) - Talks: Building IoT - Essen (03-03-2020, 04-03-2020) - Talk: Stuttgarter Innovationstage (03-03-2020) - Talk: OOP - Munich (05-02-2020) Perhaps worth mentioning: In December Christofer applied for European research funds via NLnet Foundation and was recently informed that his application was granted. So if this really will happen, then these funds will be used 100% for driving the C-type drivers for PLC4X as well as an Apache MyNewt integration. ## Community Health: This year the number of contributors has grown quite a bit. Also the number of people showing up from different companies has increased significantly. Also starting this year we started to invite people as committer first and stopped instantly inviting them as PMC in one go, as we noticed some people became less active after becoming PMCs. At the same time we lowered the bar for committership a little and redefined how we interpret the term "committer". We treat committers as people who are committed to PLC4X and PMCs who have proven to be so for a prolonged period of time (not too long) - dev@plc4x.apache.org had a 59% increase in traffic in the past quarter (494 emails compared to 309) - issues@plc4x.apache.org had a 444% increase in traffic in the past quarter (305 emails compared to 56) - 23 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (21% increase) - 20 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (42% increase) - 490 commits in the past quarter (62% increase) - 17 code contributors in the past quarter (13% increase) - 28 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (21% increase) - 27 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (28% increase) - 172 Github Stars (up by 18 since last report) (up by 30) - 305 @ApachePLC4X Twitter account followers (up by 33)
## Description: The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API. ## Issues: There are no issues requiring board attention. ## Membership Data: Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (8 months ago) There are currently 9 committers and 9 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is 1:1. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Łukasz Dywicki on 2019-07-28. - No new committers. Last addition was Łukasz Dywicki on 2019-07-28. However we just invited Lukas Ott to join the project as a comitter and he has accepted the invitation. We are now waiting for his ICLA to be recorded on file. ## Project Activity: Releases: - 0.5.0 was released on 2019-11-25 Community Events: - 2019-09-09 - 2019-09-12 ApacheCon NA 2019, Las Vegas, US (Multiple talks and hackathon) - 2019-09-24 IoT Hessen, Kassel, Germany (From the chip to the cloud with Apache) - 2019-10-22 - 2019-10-24 ApacheCon EU 2019, Berlin, Germany (Multiple talks and hackathon) - 2019-11-26 ElasticSearch UG Meetup, Frankfurt, Germany (Introduction Logstash PLC4X Plugin) - 2019-12-03 Apache IoT @ JUG Saar, Saarbrücken, Germany (From the chip to the cloud with Apache) - 2019-12-11 Apache NiFi + Hacking around the IoTree, Frankfurt, Germany (Apache NiFi PLC4X Integration) We have been continuing to port existing drivers to the new code-generation framework. Also have we been implementing new protocols (Mostly based on paid gigs from the industry). A lot of bug-fixing has been done and we're looking forward to a big refactoring and brainstorming Hackathon form 2019-12-17 - 2019-12-19 in Weinheim, where we are going to work on a proposal for the version 1.0.0 API. ## Community Health: This quarter for most of the time activity on the mailing-list and in the commits had dropped to worrying levels. This was mainly related to high workload on the day-jobs of the community members. However in the past 2-3 weeks a lot of new people have joined discussions and submitted PRs and the existing committer- and PMC activity has picked up again. - dev@plc4x.apache.org had a 8% decrease in traffic in the past quarter (349 emails compared to 379) - issues@plc4x.apache.org had a 73% increase in traffic in the past quarter (132 emails compared to 76) - 19 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (46% increase) - 13 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (62% increase) - 309 commits in the past quarter (-20% decrease) - 23 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (91% increase) - 20 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (66% increase) - 29 contributors which have contributed code to the git repo (up by 3) - 142 Github Stars (up by 18 since last report) (up by 43) - 272 @ApachePLC4X Twitter account followers (up by 86) We are very happy to see more people joining in from companies reporting to use Apache PLC4X.
## Description: The mission of the Apache PLC4X project is creating a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API. ## Issues: There are no issues requiring board attention. ## Membership Data: Apache PLC4X was founded 2019-04-17 (5 months ago) There are currently 9 committers and 9 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is 1:1. Community changes, past quarter: - Łukasz Dywicki was added to the PMC on 2019-07-28 - Matthias Milan Strljic was added to the PMC on 2019-06-03 - Łukasz Dywicki was added as committer on 2019-07-28 - Matthias Milan Strljic was added as committer on 2019-06-03 ## Project Activity: Releases: - 0.4.0 was released on 2019-05-26. Community Events: - 24.05.2019, Frankfurt (GER), Meetup: Industrial IoT goes Open Source: Apache PLC4X Talks & Party - 18.06.2019, Erfurt (GER), Meetup: Industrie & IoT: Die perfekte Verbindung mit Flexibus & Apache PLC4X - 29.08.2019, Frankfurt (GER), Meetup: Apache PLC4X Community Meetup We have been working hard on the generated drivers side and are currently approaching the finishing line on this feature. In parallel we had some major refactoring of internal components such as the Scraper. A lot of work has also been put into adding new integration modules (Logstash) as well as improving existing ones (Apache Kafka Connect) Also did we have some major improvements and bugfixes resulting from feedback from enterprise usage. Also the project is currently discussing the introduction of a computational layer (most probably in a sub-project) mainly based on a proposed code-donation. ## Community Health: Slack has been more adopted for initial discussions and gossip, therefore discussions on the mailing list have concentrated on technical discussions. Also two of the main contributors have lately been very consumed with outer-project activities. - dev@plc4x.apache.org currently has 63 subscriptions (increase of 10 since last report) - dev@plc4x.apache.org had a 50% decrease in traffic in the past quarter (373 emails compared to 732) - issues@plc4x.apache.org had a 48% decrease in traffic in the past quarter (75 emails compared to 143) - 11 issues opened in JIRA, past quarter (-73% decrease) - 7 issues closed in JIRA, past quarter (-63% decrease) - 380 commits in the past quarter (7% increase) - 12 code contributors in the past quarter (-25% decrease) - 9 PRs opened on GitHub, past quarter (-65% decrease) - 9 PRs closed on GitHub, past quarter (-65% decrease) - 26 contributors which have contributed code to the git repo - 99 Github Stars (up by 18 since last report) - 187 @ApachePLC4X Twitter account followers (up by 12 since last report) Even if the mailing list numbers could give reason to feel otherwise, we think our community is very healthy and growing at an increasing rate. More and more potential committers are starting to work on different topics.
## Description:
- Apache PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial
programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with
a shared API.
## Issues:
- there are no issues requiring board attention at this time
## Activity:
- We have made great progress with the code generation and we're working on
first next-gen drivers for Java.
- Just recently a bug has been found and we're currently starting to work on
a bugfix release 0.4.1.
- We have split up our core repository into a plc4x-build-tools repository,
which contains maven plugins and build related tools in order to keep
releases simple.
- On 2019-06-18 Christofer Dutz had a talk on Apache PLC4X at IoThüringen
Meetup in Erfurt, Germany.
- In total 5 talks dealing with Apache PLC4X have been accepted as part of
the ACNA 2019 CFP.
## Health report:
- The last month has been a little quieter as usual, as some of the major
contributors have been busy with paid work tasks or fairs as well as with
tasks related to other Apache committees in preparation for ApacheCon NA
2019 in Las Vegas (TAC, Conference Plan, IoT Track-Chair duties).
- As most of the tasks mentioned above have been finished, we are expecting
the pace to pick up again.
- Some new names have been popping up on the mailing-list.
## PMC changes:
- Currently 8 PMC members.
- New PMC members:
- Björn Höper was added to the PMC on Mon May 13 2019
- Matthias Milan Strljic was added to the PMC on Mon Jun 03 2019
## Committer base changes:
- Currently 8 committers.
- New commmitters:
- Björn Höper was added as a committer on Wed May 08 2019
- Matthias Milan Strljic was added as a committer on Mon Jun 03 2019
## Releases:
- 0.4.0 was released on Mon May 27 2019
## Mailing list activity:
- dev@plc4x.apache.org:
- 53 subscribers (up 8 in the last 3 months):
- 620 emails sent to list (519 in previous quarter)
- issues@plc4x.apache.org:
- 7 subscribers (up 1 in the last 3 months):
- 85 emails sent to list (70 in previous quarter)
## JIRA activity:
- 24 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 13 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
## Other Numbers:
- 81 GitHub Stars (Up by 15 in last month)
- 174 Twitter Followers (@ApachePLC4X account) (up by 8 in last month)
## Description:
- Apache PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial
programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with
a shared API.
## Issues:
- none
## Activity:
- Part of our team attended the European Union EU-FOSSA2 Hackathon in
Brussels, which was a huge success. Not only did we work on quite a lot of
different topics, but we managed to win 2-3 new people for the project,
some of which have become quite active since then.
- We managed to add OPC-UA client support with a new Java OPC-UA driver. This
was a highly requested feature in the past.
- Our multi-language configuration work has progressed very well and we
hardened our build to do some pre-build-diagnostics in order to assist new
contributors with setting up the project. We are currently fine-tuning this
tooling. At the moment our build works fine with: Java, C++, C# and Python
on Mac, Linux and Windows systems and we are able to release all of these
with our standard release procedure. This has been proven by our first TLP
release (Apache PLC4X 0.4.0) which is also the by far best tested and
reviewed RC we ever had. Maximum KUDOs to our team for this.
- We are currently working hard on finding ways to generate the boilerplate
code for the drivers. Multiple people are working on different proposals
for this. We are expecting to consolidate these into a new workflow within
the next few months.
- On 24th May 2019 we had our first Meetup as TLP and used this to also do a
little graduation party where a big part of the community attended
## Plans for the future:
- We hope to consolidate the code-generation initiatives and form a standard
code-generation workflow for the project.
- As soon as that's done we will start converting more and more protocols
into a form so we can generate the drivers in the future.
- Also do we need more working ports of existing drivers for generating
code-generation templates for other languages than Java.
## Health report:
- We would claim that the project is currently very healthy. We have several
prospects for being invited into the PMC soon.
## PMC changes:
- Currently 8 PMC members.
- Matthias Strljic was added to the PMC on Mon June 3 2019
## Committer base changes:
- Currently 8 committers.
- Matthias Strljic was added as a committer on Mon June 3 2019
## Releases:
- 0.4.0 was released on Mon May 27 2019 (Our first TLP release)
## Mailing list activity:
- dev@plc4x.apache.org:
- 52 subscribers (up 7 in the last 3 months):
- 754 emails sent to list (363 in previous quarter)
- issues@plc4x.apache.org:
- 7 subscribers (up 1 in the last 3 months):
- 150 emails sent to list (0 in previous quarter)
## JIRA activity:
- 44 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
- 21 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months
## Other activity and social media:
- 172 Twitter followers of the @ApachePLC4X account (up by 12)
- 67 GitHub Stars (up by 1)
Apache PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API. # Project Status: We are currently in the post graduation phase. All post-graduation tasks have been performed and project activity is picking up again after finishing the pre- and post-graduation work. Also did we invest a lot of effort in preparing the project (especially the build) for upcoming activity with additional languages such as C# and Python. The graduation media coverage was quite extensive and did bring a lot of inquiries from outside entities which we are currently processing. There is a lot of potential for new contributors as well as cooperation with other open source initiatives. # Issues, the board needs to be aware of or act on: none # Activity since last report: This is our first report as TLP, so this answer will refer to the time since the last podling report, which was last month. Mostly pre- and post-graduation work. Handling inquiries from external entities as a result of the graduation media attention. A lot of discussions about other languages and driver generation have been has on the mailing list and the build was prepared for the challenges of the near future. # Plans for the near future: A delegation of 3 PMCs and 2 non-PMCs will be attending the European Union EU-FOSSA2 Hackathon in Brussels with the goal to grow the public awareness as well as the community. We are currently working on setting up a Python API where we will be testing providing an intermediate solution to the unavailability of native drivers in other languages by bundling a Java server with Python client. In parallel there are currently two initiatives for defining a way to formally specify industrial protocols and to generate native code in multiple languages from these definitions. These efforts will be an ongoing effort for the next months. We will be having a first PLC4X Meetup in the next month or two where we will also be doing a little graduation party. # Numbers: Mailing List Subscriptions: 45 (up by 2) Twitter Followers: 160 (up by 30) GitHub Stars: 62 (up by 10) Last release: 2019-03-13: PLC4X (incubating) 0.3.1 (Last release from the incubator) # Last election of Committers/PMCs: 2019-02-04: Tim Mitsch (PPMC and committer) # PMC and Committer diversity: no issues # Project branding or naming issues: none # Legal issues or questions: none # Infrastructure issues or strategic needs: none
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems it to be in the best interests of the Foundation and consistent with the Foundation's purpose to establish a Project Management Committee charged with the creation and maintenance of open-source software, for distribution at no charge to the public, related to a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a Project Management Committee (PMC), to be known as the "Apache PLC4X Project", be and hereby is established pursuant to Bylaws of the Foundation; and be it further RESOLVED, that the Apache PLC4X Project be and hereby is responsible for the creation and maintenance of software related to a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API; and be it further RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Apache PLC4X" be and hereby is created, the person holding such office to serve at the direction of the Board of Directors as the chair of the Apache PLC4X Project, and to have primary responsibility for management of the projects within the scope of responsibility of the Apache PLC4X Project; and be it further RESOLVED, that the persons listed immediately below be and hereby are appointed to serve as the initial members of the Apache PLC4X Project: * Christofer Dutz <cdutz@apache.org> * Julian Feinauer <jfeinauer@apache.org> * Justin Mclean <jmclean@apache.org> * Tim Mitsch <tmitsch@apache.org> * Sebastian Rühl <sruehl@apache.org> * Markus Sommer <msommer@apache.org> NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Christofer Dutz be appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache PLC4X, to serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a successor is appointed; and be it further RESOLVED, that the Apache PLC4X Project be and hereby is tasked with the migration and rationalization of the Apache Incubator PLC4X podling; and be it further RESOLVED, that all responsibilities pertaining to the Apache Incubator PLC4X podling encumbered upon the Apache Incubator PMC are hereafter discharged. Special Order 7C, Establish the Apache PLC4X Project, was approved by Unanimous Vote of the directors present.
PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.
PLC4X has been incubating since 2017-12-18.
Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:
1.Vote on graduation on IPMC general list
Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?
Not at the moment.
How has the community developed since the last report?
Previously added PPMC/Committers have setup and the onboarding process
has been pretty successful. One new name has showed up on the list
demonstrating willingness to help with the website and documentation.
Now in total 3 people have demonstrated the ability to perform releases.
We are currently tying up some loose ends and preparing everything to
start the graduation vote in the next few weeks. All of this has been
consuming quite some time.
We have had a meetup in Nürtingen on 15th of February which a great part
of the active PPMC and committers attended. Beyond that on 21th of
February
Christofer had a talk on PLC4X at EURegJug in Aachen, on 8th of March in
Solingen.
Numbers:
- Releases:
- 0.3.0 RC2: 05.02.2019 (RM: Julian Feinauer)
- 0.3.1 RC1: 13.03.2019 (RM: Julian Feinauer, but Tim Mitsch actually
did it)
- Mailing-list Subscriptions: 43 (up by 1)
- Twitter followers: 132 (up by 18)
- GitHub stars: 52 (up by 10)
How has the project developed since the last report?
Christofer is working hard on implementing a first POC for a tooling to
generate drivers from DFDL and SCXML specifications, which will greatly
simplify driver implementation as well as make it possible to generate
drivers for multiple target languages, such as C++.
No new POCs have been performed this period however another company has
shifted to using PLC4X as main integration platform in their analytics
software. Also a consortium of 3 companies and the ISW from Stuttgart
University received a positive response to a project proposal that was
supported for the funding program "KMU Innovativ" at BMBF German ministry
of education and research. PLC4X will play an important role in the
project for communication with industrial controllers and will be
integrated by the industrial partner pragmatic minds GmbH which is
represented in the (P)PMC by Julian Feinauer.
How would you assess the podling's maturity?
Please feel free to add your own commentary.
[ ] Initial setup
[ ] Working towards first release
[ ] Community building
[X] Nearing graduation
[ ] Other:
Date of last release:
2019-03-13 0.3.1 RC1
When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?
2019-02-04 Tim Mitsch (PPMC and committer)
Have your mentors been helpful and responsive or are things falling
through the cracks? In the latter case, please list any open issues
that need to be addressed.
They have been very helpful. Especially regarding questions about
graduating, Justin has been particularly helpful in pointing out
some missing things.
Signed-off-by:
[X](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
Comments:
IPMC/Shepherd notes:
PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.
PLC4X has been incubating since 2017-12-18.
Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:
1. Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large
percentage of codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people from
other companies, but will have to continue these efforts for establishing
a healthy Apache community.
2. With PLC4X several people on the team are not very familiar with the
Apache Way. We have started and will continue our efforts on this
onboarding.
3. Make others in the PPMC able to perform releases.
Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?
Not at the moment.
How has the community developed since the last report?
We have managed to get some more people to contribute. While we are still
waiting for the initial contribution (OPC-UA Server) of one person to be
submitted, we were just able to successfully integrate another first code
contribution into our build which seeds the C++ API module (Thanks to
Markus Sommer for this).
Github notes the number of contributors has gone up to 12 … so I think
we’re looking good as we are continuously getting more people on board,
hopefully soon also into committership and PPMC involvement.
In the last quarter of 2018 Christofer Dutz had several public talks on
PLC4X:
* 09.10.2018: “Between the towers” Meetup, Frankfurt
* 24.10.2018: “Oss Summit Europe” Conference, Edinburgh
* 13.11.2018: “3. Fachkonferenz - Big data in der Industire“ Conference,
Berlin
* 15.11.2018: „RheinJUG“ Meetup, Düsseldorf
* 06.12.2018: „IoTHessen“ Meetup, Frankfurt
From 22.11.2018-26.11.2018 we had our second official community event:
This time we meet at the codecentric finca on Mallorca for 4 days of
hacking, coding, discussions and community building.
All in all 3 PPMC members participated and one new person.
On 03.12.2018 we successfully released: Version 0.2.0 (RC1) and we’re
currently working on enabling new release-managers for the next release.
Our mailing list subscriptions went up another 4 to currently 42
subscribers.
Our Twitter followers increased by 57 (almost doubled) to 116 followers
(Mainly as a direct result of @Java tweeting about us).
On GitHub we now have 42 “Stars” (increase of 18) and 20 “Forks”
(increase of 6)
We have successfully performed two major POCs with customers from the
industry (Companies in the pharmaceutical and automotive sectors) and the
results where overwhelming.
We are expecting to see more adoption in 2019. Also are we trying to
convince companies to allow us to officially talk about what we did in
order to spread the word.
Also have we had first paid contracts where the companies were paying
members of the project to implement some general purpose features that
were missing as well as bug fixing and allowing those results to become
part of the open-source project (Which I think is pretty surprising as
the concept of Open-Source is quite new to these companies)
How would you assess the podling's maturity?
We have a mix of new participants and experienced Apache people involved.
So far, the new participants have shown great willingness and success in
adopting the Apache Way.
However, we still need to continue: the on-boarding increasing the
diversity of the team.
Also we are currently trying to enable other team members to take over
vital roles (Like being a release manager) so we no longer have areas
with personal singularities.
Please feel free to add your own commentary.
[ ] Initial setup
[ ] Working towards first release
[X] Community building
[ ] Nearing graduation
[ ] Other:
Date of last release:
2018-12-03
When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?
Have your mentors been helpful and responsive or are things falling
through the cracks? In the latter case, please list any open issues
that need to be addressed.
Signed-off-by:
[ ](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
Comments:
IPMC/Shepherd notes:
PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.
Most important issues to address while moving towards graduation:
Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large
percentage of codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people
from other companies, but will have to continue these efforts for
establishing a healthy Apache community.
Onboarding of new committers: With PLC4X several people on the team are
not very familiar with the Apache Way. We have started and will continue
our efforts on this onboarding.
Any Issues the Incubator PMC or ASF Board might wish/need to be aware of:
Not at the moment.
How has the community developed since the last report?
While the community activity had been quite low since the beginning of
the project, things changed in August.
Then we noticed not only new names appearing on the list, but the number
of emails on the list grew by 400%-500%.
Also did we get several pull requests from about 5 new names,
contributing to multiple areas.
Two of them got added to the Committers and PPMC groups.
The others were one-shot contributions without any further communications.
In September Christofer Dutz had two talks on PLC4X at two conferences:
* Solutions Hamburg 2018
* ApacheCon NA 2018
An article on PLC4X by Christofer Dutz was published in the German Tech
Magazine: iX
(Link to the article:
https://www.heise.de/select/ix/2018/8/1533352444905693)
Also, just before ApacheCon we also had our first PLC4X Meetup where
several current contributors as well as very interested new people were
present.
Also did we successfully vote in our first two new committers and PPMC
members.
* Julian Feinauer (pragmatic industries)
* Andrey Skorikov (codecentric)
Finally just before finishing this report we also finished our first
release:
Version 0.1.0
Our mailing list subscriptions went up another 9 to currently 38
subscribers.
Our Twitter followers increased by 18 to 59 followers.
On GitHub we now have 24 “Stars” and 14 “Forks”
Business interest has increased dramatically as more and more companies
are signalling their willingness to try out PLC4X and some are currently
even in the transition phase of porting their products to PLC4X.
How does the podling rate their own maturity?
We have a mix of new participants and experienced Apache people involved.
So far, the new participants have shown great willingness and success in
adopting the Apache Way.
However, we still need to continue: the on-boarding increasing the
diversity of the team.
After our first official release, we will now fine-tune this release
process and try to educate other people on the team to also be able to do
releases.
Have your mentors been helpful and responsive or are things falling
through the cracks? In the latter case, please list any open issues
that need to be addressed.
Yes. All of our mentors have been responsive and have helped.
Signed-off-by:
[ ](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
Comments:
IPMC/Shepherd notes:
PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.
PLC4X has been incubating since 2017-12-18.
Most important issues to address while moving towards graduation:
Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:
1. Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large
percentage of codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people from
other companies, but will have to continue these efforts for establishing a
healthy Apache community.
2. Onboarding of new committers: With PLC4X several people on the team are
not very familiar with the Apache Way. We have started and will continue our
efforts on this onboarding.
3. Make our first release
Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?
Not at the moment.
How has the community developed since the last report?
Christofer has invested most of his time in May and June spreading the word
about PLC4X.
There have been several conference talks on PLC4X:
* Building IoT 2018 in Cologne: Christofer Dutz – Industrial IoT und Edge
Computing mit Apache PLC4X und Apache Edgent
* @Vanced Network Meetup in Solingen: Christofer Dutz – Open-Source in der
Industrie mit Apache PLC4X
* Apache Roadshow EU in Berlin: Christofer Dutz - Revolutionizing the
Production Industry with Apache PLC4X
A blog post in a major corporate tech-blog has been published with the
content of the JavaSPEKTRUM article on Apache Edgent and Apache PLC4X:
https://blog.codecentric.de/2018/06/edge-computing-industrial-iot-apache-edge
nt-apache-plc4x/
As a direct result on a talk in Berlin about mentoring new committers,
we have started creating “low-hanging-fruit” tagged issues and have
started promoting them. As a result we have 2 potential contributors
interested in tackling these. Hopefully this will result in continued
activity from their side.
We have reached out to a developer offering Modbus, EthernetIP and
OPC-UA drivers on his Github page to get him to join our efforts.
The dev-list subscriptions has gone up by 7 (now 29) from the last
report.
We now have a Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ApachePlc4x as
another channel of communicating interesting PLC4X facts. After
tweeting a lot about our project, the number of followers to that has
drastically increased to 41
How has the project developed since the last report?
We have setup a VPN for the CI server and other committers to be able
to communicate with real PLCs, however this feature has not proven to
improve the involvement of other committers so far.
We have recently found a set of git repos with Apache licensed code
for accessing Modbus, Ethernet/IP and UPC-UA devices. We have reached
out to the original developer to maybe get him on board with our team.
How would you assess the podling's maturity?
We have a mix of new participants and experienced Apache people
involved. So far, the new participants have shown great willingness
and success in adopting the Apache Way. However, we still need to
continue: the on-boarding increasing the diversity of the team Also,
will we need to decide and establish all the processes involved in
releasing software at Apache
Please feel free to add your own commentary.
[ ] Initial setup
[X] Working towards first release
[ ] Community building
[ ] Nearing graduation
[ ] Other:
Date of last release:
N/A
When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?
N/A
Signed-off-by:
[ ](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
Comments:
IPMC/Shepherd notes:
PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.
Most important issues to address while moving towards graduation:
Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large percentage of
codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people from other companies,
but will have to continue these efforts for establishing a healthy Apache
community. Onboarding of new committers: With PLC4X several people on the team
are not very familiar with the Apache Way. We have started and will continue
our efforts on this onboarding. Make our first release
Any Issues the Incubator PMC or ASF Board might wish/need to be aware of:
In contrast to previous reports some of the concerns regarding availability
and usability of specifications have been resolved. Especially for using the
Modbus and the OPC-UA specifications Christofer was able to get official
permissions from the corresponding foundations to use the specifications.
These permission Emails have been filed in the private list for documentation.
One of the external foundations (Profinet) doesn’t have a free membership. In
general, the CEO of the European branch of the Profinet Foundation has
signaled that it should be possible for the ASF to become a member and have an
outside company pay the membership fees, but we have to discuss the details
(With them as well as the ASF).
How has the community developed since the last report?
Christofer has invested most of his time in March spreading the word about
PLC4X. A first POC has been created for a company which is currently going
into production An article about Apache Edgent and Apache PLC4X has been
published as a cover-story in the German JavaSPEKTRUM magazines Industrial IoT
special edition (https://www.sigs-datacom.de/digital/javaspektrum/). One PLC4X
talk has been accepted to the Apache EU Roadshow 2018 in Berlin and one will
be at the Silpion Techcamp in Hamburg (https://techcamp.hamburg/) in the first
April week.
The dev-list subscriptions has gone up by one from February, we are hoping to
increase the number in the next few weeks (However quite some emails come in
from un-registered users that have to pass moderation).
We now have a Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ApachePlc4x as another
channel of communicating interesting PLC4X facts.
How has the project developed since the last report?
We have been working hard on making better use of the ASF build
infrastructure. Especially regarding setting up our project VM at
plc4x-vm.apache.org this effort will be continued. After receiving the
permission to use and implement the Modbus protocol, the Driver skeletons have
been setup, but no real implementation of the protocol itself has been done
yet. We are still hoping for volunteers to step up as interest in implementing
the Modbus protocol has been explicitly mentioned by community memebers. The
work on the RawSocket Netty transport which is a requirement to implement
protocols that are IP based, but are not TCP or UDP has continued and we are
currently working on some of the quirks on Linux based operating-systems. We
added Netty support for IO over serial ports and will be using this in the
Beckhoff module as a first protocol. We are still working on the S7 Protocol
fragmentation and hope to be able to finish this in April. Also we discussed
on the list about how the others would think of initiating a first release of
PLC4X.
How does the podling rate their own maturity?
We have a mix of new participants and experienced Apache people involved. So
far, the new participants have shown great willingness and success in adopting
the Apache Way. However, we still need to continue:
the on-boarding increasing the diversity of the team Also, will we need to
decide and establish all the processes involved in releasing software at
Apache
Signed-off-by:
[X](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
Comments:
[x](plc4x) Luciano Resende
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
Comments:
IPMC/Shepherd notes:
Drew Farris (shepherd): Three mentors active on the mailing list. Active
project.
PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.
PLC4X has been incubating since 2017-12-18.
Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:
1. Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large
percentage of codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people
from other companies, but will have to continue these efforts for
establishing a healthy Apache community.
2. Onboarding of new committers: With PLC4X several people on the team
are not very familiar with the Apache Way. We have started and will
continue our efforts on this onboarding.
3. Make our first release
Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?
In order to get access to some of the specifications the ASF will eventually
have to become Members of some external foundations: OPC, EtherCat, Modbus …
these memberships usually have a free level, that allows us to use the
specifications but doesn’t result in any regular costs. We will have to discuss
these details with the ASF and the other foundations.
One of the external foundations (Profinet) doesn’t have a free membership. In
general, the CEO of the European branch of the Profinet Foundation has signaled
that it should be possible for the ASF to become a member and have an outside
company pay the membership fees, but we have to discuss the details (With them
as well as the ASF).
How has the community developed since the last report?
Christofer has invested most of his time in February spreading the word about
PLC4X.
A first POC has been created for the company “Kampf Schneid- und Wickeltechnik
GmbH & Co. KG”
Two articles for IoT Special editions of German tech magazines have been
submitted. The “JavaSPEKTURM – IoT Sonderheft” is scheduled for sale end or
March, the “iX – IoT Sonderheft” is scheduled later.
The university of Stuttgart has shown great interest in joining our effort, as
they had just started a project with a similar goal. Chris will continue
on-boarding efforts in March.
At this year’s AALE Conference in Cologne, Chris has talked to a lot of people
from different German universities. We’re hoping to get at least a hand full of
them on board too.
We have continuing our onboarding of new Apache committers (extended emails
with a lot of explanations on why we are doing things the way we are)
In the next few months we are expecting to spread the word and hopefully grow
the community due to the tech magazine articles as well as several talks on
different conferences.
How has the project developed since the last report?
The work on the RawSocket Netty transport which is a requirement to implement
protocols that are IP based, but are not TCP or UDP has continued and we are
currently waiting for infra to setup a dedicated Jenkins VM for our project so
we can enable the RawSocket releated tests.
We have finished a first version of the Beckhoff ADS driver, and are looking
forward to first tests with this.
The functionality of the S7 driver has improved due to experience collected
with the Kampf POC.
Next we are aiming to implement Modbus and OPC-UA protocols.
How would you assess the podling's maturity?
Please feel free to add your own commentary.
We have a mix of new participants and experienced Apache people involved.
So far, the new participants have shown great willingness and success in
adopting the Apache Way.
However, we still need to continue:
the on-boarding
increasing the diversity of the team
Also, will we need to decide and establish all the processes involved in
releasing software at Apache
[X] Initial setup
[X] Working towards first release
[ ] Community building
[ ] Nearing graduation
[ ] Other:
Date of last release:
XXXX-XX-XX
When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?
Signed-off-by:
[ ](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
Comments:
[ ](plc4x) Luciano Resende
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.
PLC4X has been incubating since 2017-12-18.
Three most important issues to address in the move towards graduation:
1. Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large percentage of
codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people from other companies, but
will have to continue these efforts for establishing a healthy Apache community.
Onboarding of new committers: With PLC4X several people on the team are not
very familiar with the Apache Way. We have started and will continue our
efforts on this onboarding.
2. Making our first release.
Any issues that the Incubator PMC (IPMC) or ASF Board wish/need to be
aware of?
In order to get access to some of the specifications the ASF will eventually
have to become Members of some external foundations: OPC, EtherCat, Modbus …
these memberships usually have a free level, that allows us to use the
specifications but doesn’t result in any regular costs. We will have to discuss
these details with the ASF and the other foundations.
One of the external foundations (Profinet) doesn’t have a free membership. In
general, the CEO of the European branch of the Profinet Foundation has signaled
that it should be possible for the ASF to become a member and have an outside
company pay the membership fees, but we have to discuss the details (With them
as well as the ASF).
How has the community developed since the last report?
We have finished the process of getting setup at Apache.
The Podling Name Search has been resolved successfully
(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PODLINGNAMESEARCH-136)
In of January a list of about 40 different companies, which have indicated
interest in PLC4X in personal discussions have been directly contacted
regarding our project, some have subscribed to our mailing lists.
A small number of new people have been popping up on our mailing lists.
On 23rd of January Christofer Dutz had a talk PLC4X at the Nortec 2018
conference in Hamburg (Production industry conference)
(https://www.nortec-hamburg.de/).
We have continuing our onboarding of new Apache committers (extended emails
with a lot of explanations on why we are doing things the way we are)
Testing coverage has been improved over the initial code base.
With Beckhoff, we managed to get a first major PLC vendor to support us with
software as well as technical support. We hope on this having a signal-effect
on other vendors.
How has the project developed since the last report?
Test coverage and SonarQube reported issues have been addressed hereby greatly
increasing the quality of the initial POC code.
A lot of code and architecture reviews have been done which lead to great
improvements in the API itself.
We have started work on a RawSocket Netty transport which is a requirement to
implement protocols that are IP based, but are not TCP or UDP.
We have started work on implementing a driver for the Beckhoff ADS protocol.
(Beckhoff has been very helpful with providing Specs and Support for setting
up a test environment.)
How would you assess the podling's maturity?
Please feel free to add your own commentary.
[X] Initial setup
[X] Working towards first release
[X] Community building
[ ] Nearing graduation
[ ] Other:
Date of last release:
None yet
When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?
None elected beyond initial committers.
Signed-off-by:
[ ](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Luciano Resende
Comments:
[ ](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
Comments:
PLC4X is a set of libraries for communicating with industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) using a variety of protocols but with a shared API.
PLC4X has been incubating since 2017-12-18.
Most important issues to address while moving towards graduation:
* Building the community: The PPMC and committer group has a large
percentage of codecentric employees, we have been recruiting people from
other companies, but will have to continue these efforts for
establishing a healthy Apache community.
* Onboarding of new committers: With PLC4X several people on the team are
not very familiar with the Apache Way. We have started and will continue
our efforts on this onboarding.
* Podling name search: We have invested a lot of time on the name search
prior to starting to work on the project, but we still need the official
OK that we’re allowed to keep the Name of Apache PLC4X.
* Make our first release
Any Issues the Incubator PMC or ASF Board might wish/need to be aware of:
* In order to get access to some of the specifications the ASF will
eventually have to become Members of some external foundations: OPC,
EtherCat, Modbus … these memberships usually have a free level, that
allows us to use the specifications but doesn’t result in any regular
costs. We will have to discuss these details with the ASF and the other
foundations.
* One of the external foundations (Profinet) doesn’t have a free
membership. In general, the CEO of the European branch of the Profinet
Foundation has signaled that it should be possible for the ASF to become
a member and have an outside company pay the membership fees, but we
have to discuss the details (With them as well as the ASF).
How has the community developed since the last report?
* We have been accepted into the Apache Incubator just a week before
Christmas, we are still in the process of setting up
* Prior to joining the Apache Incubator however, we have managed to
recruit people from other Apache projects and are working on getting
other people familiar with the protocols and the industry involved.
After the Christmas break we are planning on contacting a big group of
people that have claimed to be wanting to be involved (A list of about
20 Companies, but we can’t tell how many will be using and how many
would also be willing to contribute)
* We have started the onboarding of new committers and will be continuing
to do this (extended emails with a lot of explanations on why we are
doing things the way we are)
* Project has bootstrapped quickly and we have mailing lists, website,
JIRA etc. all set up and running.
* Testing coverage has been improved over the initial code base
How has the project developed since the last report?
* There was no last report.
How does the podling rate their own maturity?
* We have a mix of new participants and experienced Apache people
involved.
* So far, the new participants have shown great willingness and success in
adopting the Apache Way.
* However, we still need to continue:
* the on-boarding
* increasing the diversity of the team
* Also, will we need to decide and establish all the processes involved in
releasing software at Apache
Date of last release:
N/A
When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?
N/A
Signed-off-by:
[X](plc4x) Greg Trasuk
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Justin Mclean
Comments:
[x](plc4x) Luciano Resende
Comments:
[X](plc4x) Stefan Bodewig
Comments: