Hi PLC4X developers, I'm working for a manufacturer of packaging machines in northern Germany using Beckhoff PLCs only. In order to gather data for a condition monitoring solution from our fast running machines (our fastest PLCs have cycle times of 1ms) we are looking for a library enabling us to access the PLC remotely as fast as possible (via ADS) from a Java runtime running wihtin a (Docker) container. PLC4X looks like a perfect match for us! It has a nice API supporting different PLC protocols (Rockwell EtherNet/IP might be required by our product as well in the future) , supports OSGi to be used in our Karaf based backend and is a fully java implementation to be used in a Linux environment.
During the last days we did some tests to check the support of elemental data types mandatory for our first product and found some limitations, e.g.: - writing variables seems not to work at all. As far as I understoud a field encoder seems not be implemented at all - reading of arrays and structure is not implemented yet - reading of multiple variables via one single request results in timeouts - read floating values results in incorrect values This is ok as the version number of PLC4X and "limited" documentation do indicate the early state of the whole library. What we would like to know: Is PLC4x ready for production use and does somebody still work on the ADS support (the related Jira issues are updated months ago)? Since we are very interested in PLC4X and I'm personally interested in OpenSource development, I would even like to help with contributions. Kind regrads, Jens Vagts
