PrismTech

The OpenSplice Tester is a major leap forward in automated testing and debugging of DDS-based systems. The 100% Java based tool is designed with the systems integrator in mind and offers an intuitive set of features to aid his task, offering both ‘local’ operation (where the tool is running on a deployed DDS-system) as well as ‘remote’ operation (where the tool is connect over SOAP to a remotely deployed DDS-system).

The main features of the OpenSplice Tester are:

• Automated testing of DDS-based systems
  • Dynamic discovery of DDS entities
  • Domain-Specific scripting Language (DSL) for test scenario’s
  • Batch execution of regression tests
• Debugging of distributed DDS system
  • One-click definition of a monitoring-time-line
  • Analysis/comparison of topics/instances & samples
  • Virtual topic-attributes to dramatically ease analysis
  • System-browser of DDS entities (app’s/readers/writers)
  • Connectivity and QoS-conflict monitoring/detection
  • Statistics-monitoring of applications and services
• Integrated IDE
  • Syntax highlighting editor, script-executor and Sample Logger
  • One-click relations between script, logs and timeline
  • Optional integration of message-interfaces with DDS interactions

The OpenSplice Tester has the following characteristics:

• 100% Java based
• Remote-connection to target system (option)
• Integrated charting capability
• DDS-specific DSL alongside javascript, python or ruby

The OpenSplice Tester is complementary to the OpenSplice Tuner in that the Tuner facilitates ‘white-box’ application monitoring and tuning (you can look ‘inside’ an application and monitor its behaviour and/or even change its QoS parameters ‘on-the-fly’) whereas the OpenSplice Tester provides ‘black-box’ system testing & debugging of DDS based system (it ‘stimulates’ a DDS-system by injection of information and can react-on/validate/display/chart the system’s responses).

The OpenSplice Tuner is a powerful deployment tool within PrismTech’s OpenSplice DDS suite. This tool offers total control over a deployed OpenSplice based DDS-system from any local or remote platform that supports the Java language.

The 100% Java based OpenSplice Tuner tool greatly aids the design, implementation, test and maintenance of OpenSplice based distributed systems (the OpenSplice Tuner is available both as a ‘standalone’ Java-program as well as an Eclipse plug-in for the Productivity tool suite).

The OpenSplice Tuner's features target all lifecycle stages of distributed system development and can be summarized as:

• Design: During the design phase, once the information model is established (i.e. topics are defined and ‘registered’ in a runtime environment, which can be both a host-environment as well as a target-environment), the OpenSplice Tuner allows creation of publishers/writers and subscribers/readers on the fly to experiment and validate how this data should be treated by the middleware regarding persistence, durability, latency, etc.
• Implementation: During the implementation phase, where actual application-level processing and distribution of this information is developed, the OpenSplice Tuner allows injection of test input-data by creating publishers and writers ‘on the fly’ as well as validating the responses by creating subscribers and readers for any produced topics.
• Test: during the test phase, the total system can be monitored by inspection of data (by making ‘snapshots’ of writer- and reader-history caches) and behavior of readers & writers (statistics, like how long data has resided in the reader’s cache before it was read) as well as monitoring of the data-distribution behavior (memory-usage, transport-latencies).
• Maintenance: Maximum flexibility for planned and ‘ad-hoc’ maintenance is offered by allowing the 100% JAVA based OpenSplice Tuner tool (which can be executed on any JAVA enabled platform without the need of OpenSplice to be installed) to remotely connect via the web-based SOAP protocol to any ‘reachable’ OpenSplice system around the world (as long a HTTP-connection can be established with the OpenSplice computing-nodes of that system).  Using such a dynamic-connection, critical data may be logged and data-sets may be ‘injected’ into the system to be maintained (such as new settings which can be automatically ‘persisted’ using the QoS features as offered by the ‘persistence-profile supported by OpenSplice).

The OpenSplice Tuner is differentiated from other vendor's DDS tooling based by its dynamic capabilities to not only connect to any remote OpenSplice DDS based system at runtime, but also its capabilities to create, discover and (QoS) tune any DDS entities ‘on-the-fly’.

The 100% Java OpenSplice Configurator tool is THE reference tool for configuring OpenSplice DDS.

The OpenSplice Configurator includes a rich online guide for OpenSplice Configuration options as well as providing context-sensitive help and parameter validation.

The OpenSplice Configurator is distributed with the OpenSplice DDS Core distribution. It will distinguish between community and commercial versions and will indicate those features that are not included in the product’s community edition.

The OpenSplice Modeler is an integrated Eclipse-based modeling tool based on Data Distribution Service (DDS) domain specific model driven techniques. The OpenSplice Modeler  facilitates DDS-based system development by clearly distinguishing between the various ‘scopes’ and ‘lifecycle stages’ of the system supported by visual composition, configuration and round-trip engineering.

This purpose is realized by the following means:

• Guidance: the tools provide context-aware guidance regarding the overall DDS concept, patterns and best-practices.
• Well-defined hierarchical steps
  • information modeling (topic definitions in IDL, code-generation for topic QoS),
  • application design (Java and/or C++ code-generation for application frameworks and DDS entities such as publishers/writers, subscribers/readers) and
  • system deployment (information partitioning, network-configuration and durability configuration resulting in XML-based OpenSplice configuration data).

The following components and tools make up the MDD productivity tool suite:

• OpenSplice Information Modeler: graphical information-modeling tool for system-wide topic ‘type’ and ‘QoS’ modeling and related DDS code-generation for Topic-entities and typed readers and writers.
• OpenSplice Application Modeler: graphical application-modeling tool for application code-generation based on a DDS meta-model and related palette of DDS-entities and application frameworks (for listeners, waitsets, filters, queries)

The OpenSplice Modeler is available for all platforms supporting Java.

The OpenSplice MmStat “shared-Memory Management Statics” tool is a command line tool that can be utilized in very simple ways such as monitoring the used and available amount of shared memory (assuming the federated-architecture deployment option is used):

Alternatively it has elaborate ways to monitor memory utilization of all DDS-entities that are maintained in the shared memory segment and offers powerful ways to track down issues such as faulty applications continuously  allocating new topics, instances, samples, etc.

OpenSplice DDS is distributed with a wireshark ‘dissector’ for its RTNetworking network protocol. Together with the publicly available DDSI dissector this allows users to watch and trace any Data Distribution Service (DDS) related packet that goes on the wire from your OpenSplice DDS based system.

OpenSplice Wireshark thus allows users to inspect DDSI-RTPS and RTNetworking packets that are exchanged between nodes on your network.