4. OpenMI Java and OpenMI .net synchronization

The OpenMI 1.4 standard is released both for .net and Java. However, with respect to the supporting tools, documentation and application there are differences:

• Documentation
  All available documents (e.g. the document A to E series) and the wiki getting started pages are written with the C# implementation in mind. Consequently, all UML's and code examples are targeting the C# implementation. The principles remain the same for the Java and the .Net implementation so the provided documentation can be used both for Java and C# developers, but with some inconveniences for the Java developers.

• GUI configuration editor
  A OpenMI configuration editor is only available for OpenMI .Net compliant components.

• SDK
  SDK are available both in Java and C#. However, it is not fully clear if everything is the same in the two implementations.

• Distribution
  The OATC which is an official subcommittee under the OpenMI Association is releasing the C# source code and applications, whereas the Java SDK is provided by Alterra. The C# SDK can be downloaded directly from www.sf.net as a zip file, whereas the Java SDK only can be accessed through SVN on source forge. Rob has written a wiki page, which describes how to get the Java SDK and how to get started with developing OpenMI in Java.

Over the recent years there have been many discussions about to which extend a Java implementation of GUI and SDK should be provided by the OA (or OATC). The meeting concluded that ideally we should support Java and C# equally, which means that the OATC should provide the Java SDK and a Java based configuration editor also. However, since we do not currently have the resources to both develop the OpenMI version 2 and to extend our tasks with respect to Java development, we realize that for version 1.4.* the OATC can only work with the C# versions. We appreciate the work done by Alterra in providing Java implementations.

For version 2 we will try to find resources to support both Java and .Net equally with respect to the Standard, configuration editor, SDK and documentation