Activities and components

Hi everyone,

I have a question about the activities and components in Orocos.

According to Orocos user manual, an activity is simply said a C++ class like a component. What is then the relationship between an activity in Orocos and an Orocos component?

Do you use - an activity in a component to perform a certain task OR - the running state of a component is an activity itself?

I want to have two closely related but separate processes that preferably run on two different threads. Do I need to make two separate component for the two processes or do I need to use activities? Two components, because for safety reasons I don't want one to be dependent on the state of the other process (e.g. in case of failure or error). For the sake of brevity & since I am looking for a general high-level solution, I am not giving too much detail here...

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards, Keivan Zavari