FBDK 8.2 Release

Today's release of FBDK 8.2 contains two new features:

1. Support for Simple EC States, ECCs, and FBTypes. This experimental feature, which has been proposed for inclusion in the Third Edition of IEC 61499-1, replaces the previously proposed "Transient EC States".
2. Multi-line comments to enable you to generate HTML documentation with more extensive "Hover help" in figures.

FBDK 8.1 Release

FBDK 8.1 is available for download or auto-update.

See the What's New page for details.

Expanded "Hover Help"

The FBDK is now capable of including "Hover Help" for internal variables, LD rungs, Service sequences and primitives in generated HTML documents in addition to its previous capabilities. See the expanded examples at the FBNavigator home page and the updated instructions at
https://www.holobloc.com/doc/fbdk3/howtodoc.htm.

FBDK 8.0 Release

Release 8.0 of the FBDK/FBRT is now available at https://www.holobloc.com/fbdk8/ (the numbering is to emphasize that it requires JDK 8 or higher).
Please be sure to read https://www.holobloc.com/fbdk8/whatsnew.htm for a description of several new and useful features (and one important caveat).

Network Setup for FBDK+FBRT

A new set of guidelines is available for setting up network and firewall parameters for ease of launching distributed systems and remote devices with the FBDK and FBRT: https://www.holobloc.com/doc/fbdk3/networking.htm.

FBDK 3.3 Release

In addition to clickable documentation links, the FBDK now generates hoverable pop-up documentation (derived from comments in the XML document) for graphical elements in the PNG diagrams produced using the "Save as HTML" function. For a user-oriented overview, see the FBNavigator home page, and for instructions on producing the HTML documentation, see  https://www.holobloc.com/doc/fbdk3/howtodoc.htm.

If you are already using FBDK 3.2, this update will auto-load at startup; otherwise, you can follow the instructions at  https://www.holobloc.com/fbdk3/index.htm.

Security Upgrade and FBDK 3.2 release

The holobloc.com website has been upgraded to use the HTTPS (secure HTTP) protocol for all served documents.

This has required an extensive update to the FBDK to convert its use of HTTP to HTTPS for auto updates, help pages, etc.

For details, see https://www.holobloc.com/security.htm.

For additional details of new features in FBDK 3.2 see https://www.holobloc.com/fbdk3/whatsnew.htm

FBDK 3.0 Release

FBDK 3.0 is now available at http://www.holobloc.com/fbdk3/. New features include:

1. The FBDK and FBRT now support the following experimental features:
   • Transient EC States
   • Compact encoding of management commands and responses
2. Validation tools are provided for ECCs and FB Types to guide development and prevent compilation of incorrect or incomplete elements.
3. The progress bar has been relocated to the upper right corner of the Library Navigator and its operation has been properly synchronized to the running background process.

FBDK 2.6 Version 20170408

If you have used the FBDK recently, you may have noticed an unannounced auto-upgrade to Release 2.6 version 20170314. Further testing revealed a few glitches, which have now been fixed. Changes from the 2.5 release include:

1. Look and Feel (LAF) has been set to the Java "Metal" default, to ensure uniform window appearance and sizing across platforms.
2. An experimental, more efficient encoding of device management commands and responses is available by specifying the fbmgt2 protocol in the MGR_ID parameter of the remote device. See the mgt2 and mach folders of the FBNavigator for details and examples.
3. The System and Device launchers have been re-implemented to support multiple management protocols. In particular, the System launcher now starts each device as soon as it is created and initialized, instead of waiting to launch the devices in reverse order. This mainly affects the delays required to start simulation and diagnostic clocks in the system configurations of the mach folder. 

Documentation in the FBNavigator is being updated to reflect these changes; updating should be complete in a week or so.

E_CYCLE Test Statistics

Here are some E_CYCLE performance statistics collected on various platforms using JUnit 3. For more details see www.holobloc.com/doc/fb/rt/events/E_CYCLETest.htm.

Dynamic Updating of E_CYCLE period

There has been some discussion within the IEC 61499 Maintenance Team of the appropriate behavior of E_CYCLE blocks when doing programmatic updates of the cycle period (DT input) while the block is running. The events/E_CYCLE documentation on the FBNavigator site explains how this is done in the FBDK, and a new test/E_CYCLE_DEMO system configuration is included in today's FBDK self-update with documentation on the FBNavigator site showing you how to use an E_DELAY block to obtain the correct STOP/START event sequencing for this purpose.

Mapping Update

The Mapping dialog and associated documentation have been updated.
For details see http://www.holobloc.com/doc/fbdk2/maphelp.htm.
This information is also linked to the "Mapping" section of the System help.

STRING Functions

Today's FBDK2 auto-update contains IEC 61499 "Simple (REQ/CNF) FB" implementations of all the standard character string functions defined in IEC 61499, including implementations for both WSTRING (16-bit character strings) and STRING (8-bit character strings) types. WSTRING is implemented as a container for the Java String class, whose instances are immutable, and STRING is implemented as a wrapper for a mutable array of bytes. This gives the latter the following practical advantages:

• Significantly less object creation and garbage collection overhead
• Smaller (approaching 50%) payload sizes for PUBLISH/SUBSCRIBE and CLIENT/SERVER packets, with correspondingly smaller encode/decode times.

The tradeoff, of course, is that STRINGs can only represent 256 characters - usually the "C0 Controls and Basic Latin" (0000-007F) and "C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement" (0080-00FF) defined in ISO/IEC 10646. For a richer, multilingual character set, WSTRING with its attendant overhead costs must be used.

Documentation for these FB types can be found in the strings folder of the FBNavigator.

Accessing online documentation

Documentation for the library elements in the strings folder of the FBNavigator is now complete.
You can now access this documentation directly in the new doc tab of the FBDK if you are on-line when you open a library element for editing. Here's an example:

FBDK 2.5 and a new Design Pattern

The FBDK 2.5 release is now available.
If you already have the 2.4 release installed, it will automatically update if you are online the next time you start it up.
This release contains the framework for the new Time-Stamped Messaging Design Pattern, as well as additional support for saving documentation in PNG and HTML5 formats.

FBNavigator Update (3)

All of the documentation in the events folder of the FBNavigator has been updated to HTML5 using the updated "Save As HTML" feature in the FBDK. Next steps - update the corresponding FBDK documentation, then make sure the doc generation for System configurations is working properly.

FBDK 2.4 Release

Release 2.4 of the FBDK is now available at http://www.holobloc.com/fbdk2/.

If you are already using a recent (2.2+) release, it will self-update to 2.4 if you are online when you start it up.

This release consists mainly of support for removal of Java applet dependencies in the FBNavigator in the light of Oracle's recent announcement, as previously documented in this blog.

For more details, and links to updated documentation as it is developed, you can follow this blog.

FBNavigator Update (2)

As a second phase of migrating  the FBNavigator away from dependencies on the Java applet architecture, the documentation pages themselves will be converted to the use of static images rather than interactive View and Test applets. For examples of this style, see the E_CTUD, E_CYCLE and FB_LABEL pages.

In order to continue to provide the full experience of online documentation combined with viewing, testing (and even editing) IEC 61499 library elements, the online documentation described above is now accessible directly from the FBDK Editor under a new doc tab. Additionally, the Editor's Save as HTML function now produces a skeleton documentation page in the new format, and the Save As PNG function saves any desired View of the library element and its components with a unique hierearchical file name to facilitate its reuse in the new static web page format.

Documentation of these and other new features is not yet complete; links to the new documentation pages will be provided in this blog as they are completed.

FBNavigator update

With the announcements by Mozilla and Oracle, and the discontinuance of NPAPI support in the Chrome browser, the handwriting is on the wall for the Java plug-in, which for years has enabled the FBNavigator to provide a rich interactive on-line experience.

As a first step toward managing this transition, the navigation tree on the left side of the FBNavigator page has been converted to a "pure HTML+CSS" implementation. This makes use of a small Java application that generates the required HTML files from the FBDK's map.ini file.

Using FBDK with Eclipse

A skeleton Eclipse project has been created, which will enable you to run the FBDK as an external tool with the Eclipse IDE for Java.
For details see http://www.holobloc.com/doc/fbdk2/howtoeclipse.htm.