Welcome to the RTI Community and congratulations for joining our distinguished customers who have selected Connext®, based on the DDS standard, as the connectivity framework for their smart machines and real-world systems!
As you become familiar with Connext and use it to connect your distributed system, you will learn to apply the functionality and tools that enable you to achieve optimal performance and productivity at scale. Your success is our success! And we are excited to provide you with the integrated solution to take your own products to market at a rapid rate. Your selection of Connext brings with it a simplified approach to integration and troubleshooting aimed at accelerating your development effort. At any time in your development and rollout process, our expert Support and Services Teams are here to help you as well.
Connext is based on the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard and provides a large variety of additional, optional functionality unique to RTI. This Overview is designed to introduce you to the main components of Connext DDS and be the launch pad for you to dive in and learn more!
Connext consists of three primary components:
- Libraries, APIs, and Adapters: Resources for building DDS-based applications. These include communication libraries that simplify distributed application development with high-level APIs for publish-subscribe, request-reply and point-to-point queues
- Infrastructure Services: Services designed for integrating and scaling systems. These are pre-built applications that ease integration of existing applications and devices, perform functions in your distributed system and enable scaling of your system.
- Developer Tools: These powerful tools accelerate system integration, testing, debugging and optimizing systems.
Feature Summaries
Libraries and APIs:
Included within our Libraries and APIs for building DDS-based applications is a rich set of functionality to integrate DDS-based connectivity into applications. This allows applications to communicate in a distributed system using Publish/Subscribe or Request/Reply patterns and highly configurable Quality of Service. Our Libraries and APIs enable applications to support over 100 platforms and 12 transports, connecting them all transparently.
Infrastructure Services:
- Routing: A routing service for integrating and scaling DDS-based applications across DDS domains, LANs, and WANs, including firewall traversal. Routing Service can be used to construct large-scale systems using a hierarchical, or layered databus architecture. It provides an adapter software development kit (SDK) to bridge DDS systems with non-DDS systems
- Persistence: Saves data from Connext publishing applications to memory or permanent storage such as MySQL, so it can be delivered to subscribing applications that join the system at a later time - even if the publishing application has already terminated.
- Recording/Replay: Enables reliable recording of large amounts of real-time data without having prior knowledge of the data-types or topics in the system, and replay of the recorded data to replicate the original data flow. Provides adapter API to support plugging in databases and storage. Available as a standalone application or a library.
- Cloud Discovery Service: Deploys Connext applications in dynamic environments where UDP/IP multicast is not available or NAT Transversal across WANs is needed and the location is unknown or changes over time.
- Other services offer database and web integration.
Developer Tools:
- Admin Console: A graphical application to visualize and debug your system at a high level, and to visualize the data in your system.
- Monitor: A debugging tool to understand the low-level behavior of your system, such as data loss, and protocol performance.
- System Designer: Allows you to graphically design and configure Connext systems. You can use it as a user interface to XML-Based Application Creation, a technology that allows you to specify all the aspects of a DDS system in XML format.
- A variety of additional Developer Tools are available.
Now you are ready to get started! The best resource to visit next is our Getting Started Guide.