Tools

Next to the drivers and the API, PLC4X ships a number of tools that solve recurring tasks around PLC communication.

Application building blocks

Libraries you add to your own application.

Tool Description

Event-Pump

Polls a set of tags on a schedule and hands every response to a listener. Replaces the Scraper of PLC4X 0.13 and earlier.

Connection Cache

Shares a limited number of PLC connections between multiple parts of an application.

Object PLC Mapping (OPM)

Maps PLC tags onto annotated POJOs, in the spirit of JPA.

Servers

Standalone applications that make PLCs reachable for other clients.

Tool Description

PLC4X Server

A relay server speaking the PLC4X proxy protocol, so clients using the plc4x driver can reach PLCs they have no direct network access to.

OPC UA Server

An OPC UA gateway that exposes the tags of arbitrary PLC4X connections as an OPC UA address space.

Development and analysis

Tool Description

PLC4X Browser

A terminal application for connecting to a PLC and browsing, reading, writing and subscribing to its tags.

PCAP Analyzer

Runs captured protocol traffic back through the PLC4X codecs and reports what fails to parse or reserialize.

Capture Replay

Replays recorded network traffic onto a network device, mainly to develop and test passive-mode drivers.

Testing without a PLC

The mock and simulated drivers, for unit tests and for trying out the API without hardware.