I feel a bit newbish asking this because I'm a robotics trained
programmer than a university trained one, so no real experience with
networked programming apart from opening and closing the odd posix
socket, hopefully you won't hold it against me ;)

Why exactly did RoS build its own, fairly extensive communications
system? I love the fact that it

1) Abstracts data types in simple text files.
2) Mostly handles serialisation in a cross platform way.
3) Framework allows for compile time validation of callbacks (no void
pointers for data).
4) No bottleneck at the server.

However, was there nothing that suited ros requirements previously?
I'm guessing no since ros usually avoids reinvention of the wheel.
Just seems odd given that it appears to be such a fundamental
requirement for alot of projects.

So, to the point - we have another group (non-control, strictly
software) here who have a real need for upgrading their communications
systems. They'll also be connecting with our control boards. The above
requirements are ideally suited to what they want and ros
communications would seem to fit their need, except for the fact that
we can't realistically build the miminum for an roscore outside of
linux yet.

Are there currently any alternatives to ros for this? I've done a bit
of testing with google protobuffs, but only to do serialisation on
large data type dumps to files. You'd still need a framework on top of
this to provide the other requirements.

Also, would there be any disadvantages to using ros communications for
a purely networking project's need?

Cheers,
Daniel.

-- 
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Home: http://snorriheim.dnsdojo.com/
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