For those of us not at ICC, what are the new features of the recently released RC of 7.9?
Can’t find anything on the main webpage and the changelog is empty.
[quote=“accyroy”]For those of us not at ICC, what are the new features of the recently released RC of 7.9?
Can’t find anything on the main webpage and the changelog is empty.[/quote]
From what I have seen there is no ‘WoW’ upfront. Most changes are behind the scenes, specifically better diagnostic tools. The much anticipated scripting debugging tool with watchpoints may have to wait for version 8.0 or beyond.
There will be no V7.10, but a V8.0 that will exclusively use Java 8 on the client and gateway sides. As explained by Carl and Colby, the version of Jython with Java 8 will allow a debugging tool to be developed that will live in the designer. The scripting playground console will be where the hypothetical debugging tool will live, which makes sense. With the playground, the script can be developed and debugged in the designer, then deployed once verified.
Biggest hype this year is MQTT, which i never heard of until this week.
We’ll get something more complete put together, but some of the highlights:
- Gateway UI has been updated with new styling/appearance
- Completely new gateway status section with significantly better diagnostics, tracking, logging, etc.
- New logging system (including log viewer) that adds subsystem and ‘context-specific’ logging
- Distributed Services that utilize our Gateway Network, allowing new architectures and dramatic performance improvements. Includes things such as highly performant Remote Tags, Remote Historians, Remote Alarm Providers, and more planned.
- True multi-monitor support for vision clients (single login/session, multiple windows).
- Global Templates
- Security Zones – allow finer grained controls (by IP, gateway name, etc) than user roles alone
- OPC Array support for reading/writing
- ARM HF (v7, v8 ) support
And I others I am sure I am missing.
Indeed, lots of the work this release were to underlying systems and in preparation of the plans we have for 8.0. If you have ever had to trouble shoot or asses performance in anything in Ignition, this release is going to make your life much, much easier.
We’re working on documentation and usage guides for 7.9 to make available with the release.
One new feature that will please report users a lot are the new expressions for dates. Basically, all the new system.date.* functions that were added in 7.8 are now available as expressions in 7.9. Not really new functionality, but way more convenience.