This broad-based research provides the first independent quantification of the reduction in integration time, cost and risk you can expect from RTI Data Distribution Service. Findings include:

• Up to 45% Lower Total Cost of Development: The average cost of application development was substantial for projects using internally developed “Roll-Your-Own” (RYO) middleware ($1.61M) and most commercial solutions ($1.34M); however, projects using RTI middleware enjoyed much lower costs ($0.89M).
• Up to 47% Lower Cost Overrun: The average cost overrun was similar for projects using RYO (11.3%) and most commercial middleware (10.1%). Projects using RTI finished closest to expected cost (6.0%).
• Lower Testing Costs: In projects where the cost of testing was less than 30 percent of the total development cost, RYO (72.5%) showed an advantage over commercial (65.5%) middleware. Projects using RTI’s commercial middleware, however, had testing costs less than 30 percent of the total development cost 84.6% of the time.
• Greater Probability of Meeting Design Requirements: Final design outcomes using commercial middleware in general, and RTI in particular, were much closer to pre-design expectations than RYO developments for performance, functionality, features and schedule.

Visit EMF’s web site to download the full report for free:  Choosing between Commercial and ‘Roll Your Own’ Embedded Communication Integration Middleware.

With the maturity and broad adoption of DDS, we are seeing a couple of trends.

• DDS is being used in larger and more geographically disperse systems
• Customers are moving to second-generation DDS based systems
• Users are integrating multiple systems that already deploy DDS as their underlying integration bus

To support these efforts, RTI recently introduced RTI Routing Service. RTI Routing Service provides a flexible solution for scaling DDS systems and for integrating disparate DDS applications. This includes:

• Applications that cannot directly communicate because they run on different networks (LAN and WAN), use different transport protocols (e.g., shared memory, IPv4 and IPv6), or are members of different security domains
• Applications that natively use different DDS data types, such as new and legacy applications, individual systems within a System of Systems, and applications that support different Communities of Interest (COI)

To learn how RTI Routing Service significantly reduces the costs of real-time system integration, upgrades and of implementing Cross-Domain Solutions (CDS), visit RTI’s web site or watch this video demonstration.

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.

But that’s not the subject of this post.

What you may not have noticed is that RTI Message Service is also the easiest JMS implementation to set up and administer. In fact, it requires almost no administration at all.

There are no servers or daemons you need to manage, and there are no servers or daemons that can crash and bring down your system. Just put our libraries on your classpath, set up your JNDI repository, and you’re ready to go.

That JNDI repository, by the way, is just an XML file. Edit it with any tool you want, put it wherever you want. Just point your “provider URL” to it and you’re good to go. You don’t need a separate naming service running anywhere.

It’s even easy to evaluate. Click the link, give it a shot, and let me know what you think.