Development and Migration Guidelines

By applying accepted program development principles when creating Vitesse programs, a number of benefits can be achieved. AVEVA takes a great effort to provide compatibility in the Vitesse area between different releases of the system. However, in some cases minor changes might have to be done, for example functions might become obsolete and be replaced by new functions.

To minimize the migration effort in such cases, we recommend that Vitesse developers encapsulate the functionality into their own functions. This can for example be done by creating Python modules that are later used by higher level application functions. If such a strategy is implemented, any changes to the Vitesse interfaces in coming releases can be applied to custom developed functions with little effort.

There are also other advantages to this approach. One possibility is that additional functionality can be added in one place. If the Vitesse developer for instance would like to put all messages given to the user by the message_confirm or message_noconfirm functions into a log file, this functionality could be easily added into the encapsulation module, and would immediately be in effect in all programs calling this module. Another possibility is to create higher lever functions that perform several tasks and has more functionality than is offered by a single Vitesse function.

By applying these and other commonly accepted program development principles, the Vitesse program development can be made more efficient, easily maintainable and robust. The information given in this text only provides a few tips, we highly recommend to also refer to commonly available literature on software development principles to get a further knowledge in this area and ensure an effective result.