[ros-users] roscpp with transport plugins

[Cedric Pradalier]

Hi all,

Following the interest on making ROS transport layer more modular, and
as a conceptual experiment, I've tried making a version of roscpp with
transport plugins.
This is obviously C++ only and I did not find any road-block. To test
it, I've created a transport plugin implementing shared memory.

So what works?
- TCP and UDP transport work as before
- A transport plugin manager has been added, and offers functions to
register new transport plugin
- Transport hints can now refer to modules in the transport plugin manager
- Place that were explicitly referring to UDPROS and TCPROS now use
the transport plugin manager to find which transport to use.
- A shared memory transport has been added. This is not in roscpp to
experiment with dynamic loading...

When writing a new plugin, one just need to create one descriptor
class, and inherit from the PublisherLink and SubscriberLink classes
for the details.
To the contrary to my previous message_transport package, the
transports do not need to be type specific.

What's not working?
- So far the transports (apart from UDP and TCP) need to be registered
explicitly in any node after ros::init. I will probably use the
pluginlib framework to make listing the transports easier. I'm not
sure if dynamic loading directly from ros::init would be possible.
- In the shared memory plugin, the shared memory object needs to be
created and destroyed by an independent node (for persistence). This
could possibly be integrated into a generic transport manager node...

The conclusion is that, at least in C++, there is no particular
problem to make the transport layer more open.
I'm happy to send the diff for review if there is an interest. This is
not production code, but I don't think what I changed has the
potential to be disruptive. It's mostly reorganising some bits and
pieces into functions and classes.

I would guess that the same comment would apply to python, but I'll
let this one to someone else.

Cheers
-- 
Cedric Pradalier