How to seed community engagement?

[chrisdutz]

Hi all,

admittedly I'm a bit worried about our levels of community engagement here. It does seem as if we're gaining adoption quite a bit, but on the contribution side, it feels as if we're sort of drying up.

At first I intentionally stopped working on every incoming issue, on the one side, because I wanted the industry to at least support our work (as I described in my blog post in Feb. last year). But on the other side I wanted to give others the chance to contribute.

However it seems as if very little is happening.

There is enough activity in the project, as there are multiple folks working on various things, however there's almost no activity for addressing bugs and issues or doing fundamental project housekeeping.

It's also been quite some time since we invited anyone new as committer or PMC member, which is definitely not due to our high bar, as it is a problem with other projects.

What could we do to refule community activity?

You folks got any ideas or explanations to what the problem could be?

Chris

[ottlukas]

Hi ,

One idea would be to create some tutorial blogs or live coding sessions where we explain how to get started.
How PLC4X and Mspec is working - So these kind of things may help.
How to get started guide with more guiding then just here are the pre-requisites and here is Github,

So showing how to engage with PLC4X Developer Community besides stumbling over Github and looking into issues and discussions.

Just my five cents.

Lukas

[chrisdutz]

I think the tutorial-idea is a good one ... had that on my mind anyway and now it seems Timecho might even give me the time to do so ;-)

[doleron]

I found PLC4X recently, and this is my impression:

1. Who is the public? My guess is they are mostly students or researchers or both. This public often uses Python. Even though I prefer Java or C++ for my projects, I think that investing some time in evolving the Python port and documenting examples in Python may inflate the PLC4X user base drastically.
2. Pre-builds such as a Python pip wheel will make a 5-line code example run in less than 1 minute on the user machine. This is what the public nowadays is looking for.
3. The README.md is great and very useful, however, it could be more straight to the code and show what the user is looking for: code examples in Java and Python. IMHO, let the build instructions and integrations talk to the end.
4. People usually land here by googling "java s7-300" or "java Logix 5000" etc. Playing with meta tags may help to provide a better rank for search engines. "python S7-300" probably will work the most.
5. The Java "Hello World" example must run smoothly without any netty warnings. If a user tries the first example and gets a long stack trace without a quick solution on SO, they will give up.

[ottlukas]

First of all welcome to the PLC4X community.

We as a community are aware since at least 2020 to your point: 1 and 2. -> here you find the dicussions on confluence: Python Development

We have indeed already a pip account.

The challenge like in many communities is where to focus on. As our Java implementation is the most stable and most advanved one we have focused on that stack especially for the integration with the larger ASF Big Data and Integration projects such as Apache Kafka, Apache Nifi and Apache Camel. As this is already a huge advantage to have integrations into these ecosystems / projects.

For PLC4Py we hope to find some developers willing to invest some time to implement the S7 protocol (@vemmert :-P )and indeed publish on pip instead of having to do pip install . PLC4Py Getting Started

The longterm plans for the Java implementation to get rid of netty is a vision / dream of the community but due to lack of resources (no money, no developers having free capacity) some warning messages are existing.

Again welcome highly appriciated your feedback and contribution to the disussion and I hope that this helps you and others to get some more transparency whats going on and what has been disccussed to your points.

[doleron]

Hi @ottlukas

Thank you for the welcome!

Yes, I understand the points here.

PLC4X has an enormous potential to be a game changer.

Even though driver programming is not my concentration area, I will find a way to contrib to the project.

Best Regars, Luiz