The Benefits of Component Object-Based SCADA and Supervisory System Application Development - Sponsored Whitepaper

Component-based software architectures have been around for many years in the commercial computing world. Object-oriented development has also been in use for some time. Both are only now starting to make their way into the process control and SCADA software communities.

In fact, the only product available today from the major automation software vendors that combines both is the Industrial Application Server from Wonderware, a business unit of Invensys Systems, Inc.

The following definitions will frequently appear throughout this white paper.

· Object-Oriented Programming -- Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming language model organized around "objects" rather than "actions" and data rather than logic. Historically, a program has been viewed as a logical procedure that takes input data, processes it, and produces output data. The programming challenge was seen as how to write the logic, not how to define the data. In contrast, object-oriented programming takes the view that what we really care about are the objects we want to manipulate rather than the logic required to manipulate them.

· Component – In object-oriented programming and distributed-object technology, a component is a re-usable program building block that can be combined with other components in the same or other computers in a distributed network to form an application. Components can be deployed on different servers within a network and can communicate with each other to perform services. Examples include: o A single button in a graphical user interface, o A small interest calculator and