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Open Standards Planned For Next NASA Telescope
BobB writes "A NASA infrared space telescope called the 'James Web Space Telescope' is scheduled to be launched in 2013. The plan is that it will be built using open standards-based software designed to prevent problems caused when software programs developed by various agencies are incompatible with each other, as has been the case with the Hubble telescope. From the article: 'Though open standards has become common in the business sector, Matthews says this is the first time NASA has used the IBM Rational system. "This is a fairly major shift in approach for NASA," he says. "They traditionally have been very conservative in their adoption of new technologies and new tools, but I think they've found that conservative approach just doesn't hold up when you start to reach a [certain] size and complexity."'"
I was all set to make a "Universe-Wide-Web" joke then I checked the spelling.
Fixing this typo is a job for your friendly neighborhood slashdot-editor-man.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The decision to buy IBM's product is being spinned by this article as if it's some kind of win for open standards, but there isn't anything significantly open going on here. As far as I can tell, they've adopted Rational Rose for diagramming/design and Clearcase for version control. Both of these products are closed source applications, and both store their data in closed, priority formats. There's nothing open about either of them. The best you could say is that NASA is using an open modelling language (UML), but of course that exists entirely independantly of the IBM product - I can use UML with a pencil and the back of an envelope.
If NASA really wanted to do something for openness (and delivering American taxpayers value for money), they'd be using Subversion, not ClearCase.
Both Rational and ClearCase are examples of the worst in their category of software. I've used many types of version control software, but ClearCase was the worst of all by far. This software was not purchased because NASA was particularly interested in open standards. Rational and ClearCase usually only get purchased because some manager had a very successful golf game with an IBM rep or still reasons that "nobody ever got fired for purchasing IBM".
I definitely have to agree about Rose. I can't speak to XDE (or whatever they call it now), but RealTime sucks goat balls, at least if you're developing in C++. First, if you want to use the STL, you have to add it to the model yourself (granted, that's a problem with pretty much every model-driven development tool... you'd think it'd occur to someone that they should include models for standard libraries). Unfortunately, their code analysis tool sucks, so if you try to use that to reverse engineer the libraries you're using, it'll take more time than just adding the classes by hand.
Second, it doesn't properly understand templates... if you want to declare a template function, you need to define an empty macro to use as the return for the function, and then put the entire template declaration into the name field, otherwise it won't generate the correct code. If you want to create a class that inherits from an instantiation of a template, you have to first create an instantiated class (essentially a typedef naming the parameters to the template), unless the new class itself is a template, in which case you can do the inheritance directly. It's also terrible for doing round-trip engineering, since it only allows you to make changes in specific marked places in the code, so if you discover you need a new attribute or whatever, you can't just add it and have it show up in the model on the next round trip... you have to round trip it, and then add it in the model and regenerate the code.
All that said, it does have some nice things, too... the RealTime Services Library is (mostly) well designed, though some of the design decisions they made seem rather arbitrary (e.g.: you can dynamically resize the replication of a port, but you can't dynamically resize the replication of a capsule role).
The "Open" standards that are implied in this message are those developed by the CCSDS and OMG.
... there are some very interesting standards especially one called XTCE, which is the used for describing spacecraft data systems.
Go to the website http://www.ccsds.org/
Because "live feeds" from the Hubble would look like digital noise. It's NOT a web cam. The ground controllers send up very specific commands for the satellite to do very specific things. It acquires the data and transmits it back, then the data has to be analyzed carefully. Much of it isn't even imagery - just numbers. I have no idea exactly what format the data comes down in, but it's not going to be a .jpg.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!