It started with an idea on FOSDEM. It went on as a long mail (click link for full text and discussion) on the Orocos-dev mailing list.

Here's the summary:

• RTT interoperates badly with other software, for example, any external process needs to go through a convoluted CORBA layer. There are also no tools that could ease the job (except the ctaskbrowser), for example some small shell commands that can query/change a component.

• RTT has remaining usability issues. Sylvain already identified the short commings of data/buffer ports and proposed a solution. But any user wrestling with the Should I use an Event (syn/asyn)-Method-Command-DataPort'?' question only got the answer: Well, we got Events(syn/asyn)-Methods-Commands and DataPorts !'. It's not coherent. There are other frameworks doing a better job. We can do a far better job.

• RTT has issues with its current distribution implementation: programs can be constructed as such that they cause mem leaks at the remote side, Events never got into the CORBA interface (there is a reason for that), and our data ports over CORBA are equally weak as the C++ implementation.

• And then there are also the untaken opportunities to reduce RTT & component code size drastically and remove complex features.

The pages below analyse and propose new solutions. The pages are in chronological order, so later pages represent more recent views.