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API: Made several bits of information available via the API allowing tools to provide more content assist when dealing with PLC4X connections.

S7: The S7 driver now supports reading of STRING and WSTRING data-types without providing a maximum length.

Build: Worked on making PLC4X provide reproducible builds.

Added "Ping" functionality to: ADS, EIP, KNX, Mock, Modbus and Simulated drivers.

The OPC-UA Java driver now support certificate-based authentication and encryption.

Java 8 is no longer officially supported and Java 11 is the new base-line.

Renamed the PlcDriverManager method listDrivers to getProtocolCodes

Renamed the PlcDriverMetadata method canDiscover to isDiscoverySupported

Renamed the PlcConnectionMetadata methods canRead, canWrite canSubscribe and canBrowse to isReadSupported, isWriteSupported, isSubscribeSupported and isBrowseSupported

The configuration syntax for configuring transport-related config options in the connection-string was updated to be now prefixed with the transport name the option belongs to.

S7: Several bugs and issues regarding supporting various duration, date and time data-types.

S7: Implemented the missing 64bit (L-) types.

KNX: Fixed an issue with decoding 16 bit floating point numbers.

NiFi-Integration: The NiFi integration module was greatly improved.

Core: Fixed several leaks of open threads.

Implemented a PLC4X-Server and PLC4X-Driver that allows using the server as a proxy for communicating with PLCs.

The Modbus driver is now also available in the variants: "modbus-rtu" and "modbus-ascii" (Both using Serial communication, which however can be tunneled through a "tcp" and "udp" transport)

The KNX driver in Java now supports reading "knxproj" files exported from the new ETS version 6.

The name of the Modbus TCP driver was changed from "modbus" to "modbus-tcp".

Removed the Apache Edgent (incubating) integration and examples related, as Edgent is abandoned and there were CVEs reported, which will not be fixed.

We have replaced the BitString types with BYTE, WORD, DWORD, and LWORD which generally match their unsigned integer counterparts. So we are no longer returning lists of boolean values for any of these types.

The OPC UA driver has been replaced with a native driver. Previously Eclipse Milo was being used.

Permit customized package names for code generation

Added an initial draft of a Discover and Browse API to PLC4J

PLC4Go now supports many more drivers

PLC4Go received a huge internal refactoring and cleanup

Major cleanup of PLC4C

S7 Driver now supports event and alarm handling on some S7 models

The KNXnet/IP Driver now supports writing of values.

The Modbus driver now supports more common notations of Modbus addresses using a pure-numeric notation.

The ADS, KNX, Modbus, S7 and simulated drivers have been updated to support the IEC 61131-3 data-types.

We are now including PLC4Go as PLC4X implementation in the programming language Go(lang)

Integration with the Milo OPC UA Server is now available.

Kafka Connect workers have been updated source and sink connectors are now included.

The syntax of the S7 addresses changed slightly allowing to provide a string length. Without this, a STRING datatype will read 254 characters, by adding the size in round brackets to the type name will use the specified number.

Examples:

Read one String which is max 10 chars long:
%DB2:30:STRING(10)

Read an array of 3 Strings where each is max 10 chars long:
%DB2:30:STRING(10)[3]

The PLCValue types have been refactored to align with the types defined in IEC 61131-3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61131-3) directly using the older Java types (PlcBoolean) is no longer possible.

PLC4X-132 [S7] Communication to S7 PLC dies in some situations

PLC4X-206 When writing short values exceptions are thrown while preparing the write request.

PLC4X-207 No registered handler found for message TPKTPacket[], using default decode method - Communication with S7 and Modbus device hangs

PLC4X-209 [S7] When writing INT and DINT values the Write operation fails with an internal error

PLC4X-210 [KNX] When running a KNX Tunneling Subscription for a longer time there are packets that kill the connection

PLC4X-211 PlcValues seem to always return "true" on the isXYZ" checks.

PLC4X-212 When writing multiple values in one request the item status is not correctly set

PLC4X-213 [Modbus] The Modbus driver doesn’t handle error responses gracefully

PLC4X-214 [Modbus] Holding register addresses have an offset of 1 (Not reading the correct address)

PLC4X-215 Drivers using the BaseOptimizer (SingleFieldOptimizer) don’t handle error responses gracefully

PLC4X-218 [Scraper] After stopping the scraper still the statistics are logged and the application doesn’t terminate

PLC4X-239 Read DTL (Date and Time)

PLC4X-240 Protocol error in reading string

PLC4X-246 S7 driver hangs on read

PLC4X-245 [Modbus] Apache NiFi processor throws java.io.IOException after a while

PLC4X-255 Kafka Connector Source Task doesn’t block within poll() resulting in high CPU usage.

PLC4X-261 Pooled connection manager returns a connection that isn’t connected in some situations.

PLC4X-272 When splitting up large requests, too big sub-requests are generated (S7)

PLC4X-256 ReadBuffer truncate last byte of even small payloads

PLC4X-262 Error in reading Array

PLC4X-270 Ads driver does not accept double-digit array indexes

Drivers now support structured types using PlcValues

The EIP (EtherNet/IP) driver no longer requires an external library and is implemented fully in the PLC4X project

The Modbus driver no longer requires an external library and is implemented fully in the PLC4X project

The new S7 Driver supports writing multiple entries in one request (The API allowed this from the beginning now not every item is wrapped in a single request. It should bring significant performance gains when writing multiple vlaues)

S7 Driver now supports String datatypes.

OSGi : Implementation of Drivers/Transports as OSGi services to be able to use them in an OSGi container.

New Firmata protocol driver

Due to the refactoring of the driver core there might be issues running drivers built against older core versions.

This version doesn’t provide a Beckhoff AMS/ADS driver as this driver is still being ported to the new mspec format.

All drivers connection strings now follow the same pattern: {protocol-code:(transport-code:)?//{transport-config}(?{params})? Please check the drivers documentation on our website: https://plc4x.apache.org/users/protocols/s7.html

The karaf-feature modules are removed as the drivers now all provide both a feature.xml as well as a kar bundled archive

PLC4X-174 UDP Transport does not accept ports containing 0

PLC4X-134 S7 is terminating the connection during handshake

PLC4X-192 Support for conversion of complex connection string parameters

PLC4X-168 A shorter S7 Field Syntax is Introduced. This release contains no further features and mostly stabilization.

Moved the C++, C# and Python drivers into the sandbox

Fixed Promise Chain for InternalPlcWriteRequest

PLC4X-45 Add float support to Modbus Protocol

PLC4X-164 Fix wrong NOT FOUND exception in OPC UA Driver

PLC4X-166 Fixed Download Page

PLC4X-163 Fixed Netty ByteBuf Leaks for S7 Driver

PLC4X-158 Added Warning if no Pooled Driver is used for Scraper

Implemented a new Apache Kafka Connect integration module

Implemented a new Apache NiFi integration module

Implemented a new Logstash integration module

Implemented a driver for the AB-ETH protocol

Implemented Apache Karaf features for S7 OSGI drivers

PLC4X-121 Develop Code Generation to allow Generated Drivers in multiple Languages

PLC4X-104 S7 Driver Datatype TIME_OF_DAY causes ArrayOutOfBoundException

PLC4X-134 S7 is terminating the connection during handshake

PLC4X-139 PLC4X leaks sockets in case of connection problems

PLC4X-141 String with real length of greater 127 throw an exception

PLC4X-144 When requesting invalid addresses, the DefaultS7MessageProcessor produces errors

The PlcConnection now supports a ping method to allow checking if an existing connection is still alive.

Support of the OPC-UA protocol with the opc-ua-driver.

Other Languages Support: — Added first versions of a C# .Net PLC4X API (plc4net) — Added first versions of a Python PLC4X API (plc4py)

Added an Interop server which allows to relay requests from other languages to a Java Server

ElasticSearch example was updated to use ElasticSearch 7.0.1, this might cause problems with older Kibana versions.

No new features

No incompatible changes.

The S7 driver didn’t correctly handle "fill-bytes" in multi-item read-responses and multi-item write-requests

Fixed NPE when reading odd-length array of one-byte base types

Renamed flags "F" to Siemens Standard "M" (Marker)

Fixed a bug in the DefaultS7MessageProcessor which didn’t correctly merge together split up items

Object PLC Mapping (OPM) now has a Alias Registry to allow variable substitution at runtime and write support

New module plc-scraper for applications that have to scrape a lot of sps fields with high frequency

New integration apache-karaf to enable plc4j in a karaf runtime environment

The 'plc4j-core' module has been merged into 'plc4j-api'. So there is no 'plc4j-core' module anymore. Just remove that dependency.

The driver artifact names have changed so if you were using a plc4j-protocol-{name} you now need to change this to plc4j-driver-{name}

Fixing dependency to the wrap url-handler

When receiving responses with more than 512 byte, the IsoOnTcp protocol doesn’t work

When the last item in a request is a DINT, the DefaultS7MessageProcessor dies

Write operations seem to fail

Fixed a Bug where S7 was not able to read arrays.

Changed API: instead of passing request object to read({read-request}), write({write-request}) or subscribe({subscribe-request}) methods now the execute() method is called on the request itself

New Connection Pool component

New OPM (Object PLC Mapping) component (JPA for PLCs)

Bug fixes