2010 Resolutions Review – Support Third-Party Tools

It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged – that’s due to lots of changes over the past few months (more on that later).  I’ve used these LabVIEW New Year’s Resolutions as a way to keep us honest and focused – when you publish a set of initiatives that we all agree are important, you can’t run away from them (and you can use them to combat the “idea of the week” which the LabVIEW team is hit with on occasion).  So here goes for 2010 reviews…

One of last year’s resolutions was Better Support for LabVIEW Add-ons, which was so important we carried it over from 2009.   So what did NI do to address this in the past 12 months?  Well, we did a lot actually:

1.  LabVIEW R&D released VI Scripting and the Third-party Licensing and Activation Toolkit, two important APIs for developing Add-ons. 
2. NI’s Web team completely redesigned the LabVIEW Tools Network, an online marketplace allows Add-on developers to share eval versions of their software with end-users.
3. NI collaborated closely with LabVIEW architects  at JKI to support a concept they have been brewing for about 10 years: VI Package Manager (VIPM).

For the rest of this post, I’ll go into the specifics on VI Package Manager, for those who may unfamiliar with it.  First of all, it’s a pretty impressive piece of enterprise software that was developed 100% with LabVIEW. The professional versions offer clever solutions for LabVIEW developers to handle large team-based development, code reuse, and configuration management (important software engineering concepts in LabVIEW). The free version is called VIPM Community Edition, and it’s the reason we count this towards our resolution of Better Support for LabVIEW Add-ons.  VIPM Community Edition makes building LabVIEW Add-on much easier for developers, as well as installing an Add-on much easier for LabVIEW users.  

Here’s how it works: 

You can download VIPM Community Edition for free, which allows you to build and distribute your own Add-ons.  A VI Package is a single file that contains your add-on. Think of it as a “smart zip file” with your VIs, palettes, classes, and more, that VIPM can install automatically. This makes sharing LabVIEW code a trivial task. What else can VIPM do?

• Install a package into LabVIEW seamlessly, so you don’t need to know where to put individual files.
• Handle multiple LabVIEW and OS versions with the same package, so there’s no need to rebuild.
• Automatically compile your G code into the version of LabVIEW you are installing the package into.
• Notify you when a package contains dependencies, give you the option to install them as well.
• Direct you to a package’s Examples and Help after installation.
• Provide a powerful interface for package building (shown below, new for VIPM 2010):

 

 Who’s using VIPM

VIPM is used heavily by the LabVIEW developers on the ni.com community and LAVA, and is also used by internal groups at NI such as the Systems Engineering department.  To give you a relative comparison, we pulled some FTP download numbers to see at how many new users are downloading VIPM. We compared VIPM Community Edition vs. other drivers, modules, and toolkits from NI.   VIPM was actually downloaded more than any other driver, module, or toolkit, with 28% more downloads than the next highest download, GPIB 488.2. 

 “Grain of Salt” acknowledgment:  NI application software such as LabVIEW, Electronics Workbench Multisim, etc. were not included in the comparison (only modules, toolkits, and driver software were considered).  Also, many customers install NI application and driver software from DVDs which do not show up in these numbers.

What’s next for VI Package Manager

How will VIPM evolve to support Add-ons in the future?  I’m sure the developers at JKI and the LabVIEW Partner team at NI would love to hear your feedback.  For example, on the Idea Exchange is a post reflecting some feedback we’ve heard for managing IDNET instrument drivers with VIPM.  Feel free to share your ideas on the Idea Exchange, or email labviewpartnerprogram@ni.com.

I’ll try to hit the rest of our 2010 resolutions in the next few weeks. 

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