Software tools

Today, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. embedded projects handcrafted for a specific hardware platform), development never starts from the ground up, otherwise you would need years just to catch a glimpse of how the result should be.

Choosing a specific tool instead of another one is a crucial factor that, more often than not, directly affects the quality of the development. eNTiDi software uses specific tools that must fulfill a few mandatory requirements:

• open source license, just to avoid software locks completely;
• biggest community around, to decrease the chance to be left out from public distributions;
• developer friendly environment: tools are not end-user software and should be used exclusively by developers.

The operating system used is mainly GNU/Linux, either for development and for deployment. We tend to jump between different distro, depending on the place we are using it: Archlinux or Ubuntu for development, Debian or CentOS for deployment, Raspbian or UniPian if Raspberry PI is used. No problems in using other distros if they provide factual advantages.

The development over the course of many years consolidated the use of different group of tools (the so called software stack) each of one providing the foundation of a specific class of applications.

• Automatic drawing generation software is based upon the ADG library, possibly leveraging the SilverStripe framework when web deployment is requested.
• Industrial automation applications are typically based on the GTK stack. The fieldbus, if used, must be an open protocol: as of today, the preferred solutions are EtherCAT, CANopen or ModBUS.
• Web applications are developed on LEMP platforms leveraging the SilverStripe PHP framework and CMS.
• When the resulting software needs to run on Windows, we typically cross-build from GNU/Linux with MinGW.