Leading the support team at Real-Time Innovations, I get to experience first hand how our customers are using our middleware. The type of questions range from simple how-to questions to more involved inquiries on recommended ways of implementing a particular communication pattern. And of course there is the occasional defect. In my maiden blog post I wanted to highlight existing resources to get answers to some of these questions.
Obviously there is RT… uh … the documentation. The doc directory as well as the documents section of the RTI Customer Portal (http://www.rti.com/support) includes both the API (in html and pdf) as well as a comprehensive user manual. The nice thing about the RTI Customer portal is that it also allows you to search the API: by version and by language binding. If you colleague advises you to modify the max_heartbeat_retries to tune the reliability protocol, you can quickly figure out that in C++ you need to modify the DDS_RtpsReliableWriterProtocol_t structure.
In the recent release of RTI Data Distribution Service, the Getting Started Guide has been revamped to make the introductory experience more pleasant. The Getting Started Guide not only walks you through a basic example, but quickly introduces you to some common design patterns: how to configure the middleware for reliable messaging, how to achieve high throughput for streaming data and lastly how to send data over unreliable network connections.
Secondly, a great resource for frequently asked questions is our solutions database. Both the public knowledge base (https://www.rti.com/kb/index.html), as well as our more comprehensive solutions section of the RTI Customer Portal, include various code examples (in C, C++, Java) on important DDS concepts: keys, how to use QoS profiles, built-in and custom content filters, typecodes, etc. You can also find answers to questions such as “What’s the maximum message size supported by RTI Data Distribution Service”, and operating specific tips on how to tune your platform for better performance.
Take a look and let us know what is missing. We continuously add more items to this list. Contact us at support@rti.com.
