Re: [Orocos-Dev] Orocos 'Overview' document updated

On Tue, 7 Mar 2006, Peter Soetens wrote:

> In the course of the release next week, the non-technical overview
> documentation has been updated with figures illustrating my previous
> 'Roadmap' mail and a high level example of an 'Orocos Component'.
>
> HTML version:
> <http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~psoetens/orocos/doc/orocos-overview.html>
>
Some remarks (the most important ones being the ones that suggest to remove
stuff :-):
- I think this document is too robot-centered, reflecting the status of two
   year ago. The project now has more mature content, for more than "just"
   robot applications.
- The introduction of the section "3. Orocos Project Software Overview"
   is old, to say the least.
- I do not understand the meaning of the addition "(CORBA[v0.24.0])" in
   3.1.1.
- "can be used independent of Orocos" -> "can be used independentLY of
   Orocos"
- "Persistent configuration" for the Properties: does this also mean that
   the state of a controlle can be stored persistently?
- It might be useful to stress that the "realtime" in the "Realtime
   Toolkit" stands for high determinism and thread-safety, and not in the
   first place as a mandatory requirement to use an RTOS if one wants to use
   Orocos.
- "There are five distinct ways in which an Orocos component can be
   interfaced: through its properties, events, methods, commands and data
   flow ports." I would add here some sentence that explain that this level
   of API has a lot of advantages for (realtime) control, because it offers
   the services that all controlers want to use sooner or later, while
   allowing to hide the nasty thread-safety implementation details behind the
   interface.
- "Commands": I would add the clarification that a command cannot, in
   general, be completely executed instantaneously, so the caller should not
   block and wait for its completion. But the TaskContext offers all
   functionalities to let the caller know about the progress in the execution
   of the command.
- Figure 3 is not really about "implementation", is it?
- Figure 4 doesn't match very well with the three layers that you speak of
   in the beginning of the document: RTT, Components, Application (Templates).
   This figure fits better in a developers-centered documentation, and not
   in this overview document, I think.
- I would _start_ with the application templates, because, as you say
   yourself, this is also where the "normal user" will want to start working
   with Orocos.
- Section 4 "Vision" now reads like "blahblah"... I would throw it out, or
   replace it by something more updated and condensed. (I know I wrote most
   of this blahblah, but you should not save my feelings :-)
- Also the history and bibliography are not appropriate for an overview
   document, I think.

Herman
--
   K.U.Leuven, Mechanical Eng.,  Mechatronics & Robotics Research Group
     <http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~bruyninc> Tel: +32 16 322480

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