Appropriateness of Ignition, Vision and Perspective

If you have prior experience with conventional HMIs and branded SCADA (Rockwell, Siemens, Aveva, etc.), you will get up to speed fastest if you develop in Vision.

If you have specific things you want available on mobile, buy both Vision and Perspective licenses (I recommend this to all my clients) and do those tasks separately.

Perspective does require more code than Vision, for a few reasons:

  • The historian and databases produce datasets that usually need transformation into web-friendly JSON. ("Usually" meaning "any time you want per-row styling", and sometimes more often than that.)

  • Perspective strictly isolates components in its views from components in other views, including nested or repeated views (the equivalent of Vision templates), requiring message passing architectures with code on both ends. Vision has no such restrictions.

  • Aside from datasets, there is an "impedance mismatch" between strictly-typed java objects, and loosely-typed JSON/javascript objects, which can require developer intervention to get the right results, particularly for date/time data types.

You might find the various pros and cons discussed in this topic helpful:

Other topics linked within that one may be helpful, too.

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