Hi, my two cents regarding this discussion come from experiences with another "industry-standard" middleware, that was somewhat ... complex internally and thus typically was hidden under layers of convenience code: the abominable CORBA. (I ended up writing my own middleware after CORBA nearly killed a project) I have to admit I know nothing about DDS, so forgive me if I unjustly critizise it. But reading in some of the ongoing discussions that its complexity can easily be handled by some abstraction layer .. that rang an alarm bell. If something is too complex to use for the intended target audience of developers, and thus has to be hidden behind another layer (which, trust me, inevitably leads to the most hilarious bugs you can possibly imagine) then it is probably the wrong technology for that application area. (But there are certainly other appliction areas where this middleware is the perfect choice). So my personal choice is always a clear and simple solution targeted at a specific application area (with specific requirements, problems, and development procedures and cycles) rather than a solves-all-and-everyones-problems solution developled by large committees. cheers, Michael p.s. For those interested in the CORBA story read the enlightening article by Michi Henning https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1142044 who as one of the authors of "Advanced CORBA Programming with C++" is probably one of the only two persons on the planet, who actually understood CORBA (the other person being Steve Vinoski, the other author of the book). -- Dr. Michael Zillich ACIN Institute of Automation and Control Vienna University of Technology (DVR-Number 0005886) Gusshausstr 27-29/E376, 1040 Vienna, Austria zillich@acin.tuwien.ac.at http://users.acin.tuwien.ac.at/mzillich Tel: +43 1 58801 376648 Fax: +43 1 58801 37698 _______________________________________________ ros-users mailing list ros-users@lists.ros.org http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users