Here and there I see references to "that will change in 8.3", for example module reloading going away. Are there things you can tell us that for sure will be changed, or new for the module development world?
Some info at 50:50 in this keynote video from last September. https://icc.inductiveautomation.com/
Much more in the technical keynote, but not sure if that became available for public viewing beyond the online conference.
Specific technical details we know so far:
- Module reloading is no longer possible or supported on the gateway.
- The entire project system has been renamed and there's now a root 'resource collection' system which is specialized into projects and configuration.
- The entire configuration management system is going to be different, no longer relying on the internal DB, Wicket, SimpleORM, etc.
- Lots of dead code is going to be or has already been removed, so already-unsafe access to internal platform details may no longer work.
- RPC implementations inside modules are going to work completely differently - most visibly, the recommended pattern is going to avoid Java's built in serialization and allow you to provide your own encoding/decoding mechanism, with a first party protobuf implementation available and extensible.
At some point in the next ~months, there'll be a publicly available beta and SDK artifact downloads, and probably much more concrete details of what's changed and how to migrate forward. In addition, we're planning to provide updated SDK example repos and possibly docs as soon as we can.
Is there any chance "document" will be supported for custom property data types in Vision in v8.3?
Not currently in the cards. I do have a list of minor Vision improvements I'd like to get to, but probably not for 8.3.0.
Mind sharing that list? I'm curious what kind of improvements are being considered. P.S. would love to see binding transforms in Vision.
Psssst! See my transform() expression function. Works in any place expressions themselves work, without the overhead of actual transforms.
~Zero chance of transforms, I'll tell you that much. The whole architecture around bindings would have to change, which entails more risk than is worth it in Vision at this point.
I'm also not really at the point of sharing a list - mostly I have a loose collection of ideas. At some point once 8.3.0 is closer to finalized I'll put all those ideas together and we'll go through some internal and external stakeholder review to make sure they make sense to actually go through with.
An endorsement for the free Integration Toolkit module (and hey, I wouldn't complain if IA found a way to include it in 8.3). I'm still learning how to make the best use of these many functions and expressions, but it's been a huge help for efficiency in our projects and we use it all the time. Sorry, a little off-topic for 8.3 tidbids, but it's worth folks knowing some cool things can be done even without waiting for 8.3.
Whooo, hoooo! I'm delighted to see that you got to this after all:
I "justified" it with the case that you could get a document tag into a window pretty easily, and if you did the XML handling not being there lead to a catastrophic failure state. And if I was adding the XML handling, might as well add the rest...