Back in March, JKI had the distinct pleasure of sending a handful of our people to the annual National Instruments Certified LabVIEW Architect (CLA) Summit in Austin, TX. It was great seeing so many of the top LabVIEW developers from around the world and learning from them about this year's theme: Delivering Professional Software.
Our CEO, Jim Kring, gave a talk at the Summit called "Connecting LabVIEW to Everything Else." Jim discussed the business value of providing application programming interfaces (APIs) to all (or nearly all) components of software systems created using LabVIEW. Jim demonstrated how API designs allow JKI to develop embedded instruments that can be controlled with a touchscreen, or via SCPI commands, or even from external Python code running on remote network machines (via TCP/IP). Treating APIs as a first-class citizen in the software design process ensures the software remains open and modular, and allows text-based and other external programming environments to control the system remotely – powerful stuff! For the grand finale, Jim showed how these same APIs made it easy to control the system from an iPad tablet using the LabVIEW Data Dashboard.
If you missed the Summit, you can catch up on what you missed by watching the video of Jim's talk below. You can also follow along with the slides below that.
Are you spinning your wheels trying to make your applications work with other non-LabVIEW systems? Do you want the Python guys at your company to love you? We can help. Give us a call and tell us the problem you need to solve.
(The video is an hour long. If you don't have time to watch it all, scroll down for links to the highlights.)
http://youtu.be/2hPJFPxvTG8
Direct Links to Video Highlights
2:00 – You are an API Designer
6:30 – Business Value of APIs
10:30 – Instrument APIs using SCPI
15:05 – Embedding LabVIEW Becoming More Practical
16:06 – Demo: LabVIEW-powered instrument with SCPI API
23:54 – SCPI API Implementation in LabVIEW (Outline & Demo)
31:20 – API Technologies
36:05 – Language Bindings, External vs. Internal APIs
42:26 – Demo: Calling into LabVIEW from Python
51:00 – APIs and Systems (Discussion)
57:50 – Touch / iPad interfaces to LabVIEW instruments (Overview)
58:50 – Demo: iPad interface to instrument
